You Were Never Supposed to Be Perfect.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:47:50 GMT

Health is a spectrum, not a finish line.

There is a number you have probably chased, we all have. A version of yourself that lives mostly in your head and partly on someone else's feed, due to these sweet ass algorithms which seem to dictate our lives. (Side bar: if you take social media off your phone, you will be happier. At the very least, turn off the notifications.) You have probably also missed it, then felt like the miss said something about who you are. You may wonder how all of these other people seem to do it, but you can't.

It does not. That is the first thing I want you to know. If you stop reading this right now, cool, just take that little bit with you.

We are going to spend the next three posts on a concept I focus on, with members and with myself. I call it weights and balances (it's real, Sue). Not just how much weight you can lift, though that counts. The bigger idea is that a good life, and a healthy life, is not built through perfection. It is built by tipping a scale in a positive direction. You want the good to outweigh the bad in a way that actually fits the life you have. I like to tell people, we want the gym to support your life, not the other way around. 13 years ago, I would have said something different. I would have wanted to see you six days a week, plus yoga Sundays with Dr. Kim.

This concept sounds simple. The rea son it is hard is that almost everything around us sells the opposite.

Health is a spectrum, and perfection is not on it

It is not an end result, and I have to remind myself of that all the time.

A researcher named Aaron Antonovsky spent his career on a question that sounds obvious but mostly gets ignored. Not what makes people sick, but what actually moves a person toward health. He landed on a model worth borrowing. Picture health as a line. One end is total ease, the other is total dis-ease, and every one of us sits somewhere on that line right now. We are always somewhere on it. Stress nudges us one way. Sleep, food, movement, and the people we love nudge us the other.

There is something this model leaves out, and the person way smarter than me who built it left it out on purpose. A finish line. There is no point on the spectrum labeled done, and there is no point labeled perfect. There is only the direction you are heading and the question of what is moving you forward an inch at a time. This reframes the project of you, because that is a lifelong individual project. You are not trying to arrive. You are trying to keep tilting toward ease and living your BEST life. Whatever that looks like to you.

We do not blame people. We build systems. If something is not working, the plan was wrong for your life, not the other way around.

Perfection is not a higher rung on that ladder. It is a different game, and it is one nobody wins, but our phones and algorithms like to make us think we can. When the target is perfect, every normal human week, not the 90 seconds of an influencer's life you scrolled past, reads as a failure. Miss two workouts, eat the thing, sleep badly for a stretch, and the all or nothing scoreboard says you blew it, so you might as well stop. That is not a willpower problem. That is a target problem.

You Were Never Supposed to Be Perfect

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:47:48 GMT

ardentoshkosh

You Were Never Supposed to Be Perfect.

Health is a spectrum, and perfection is not on it

You Were Never Supposed to Be Perfect

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