You Were Never the One Repeating — Who Was Actually Doing the Same Thing Over and Over

Do a tally with me. You don't have to say it out loud, and you don't have to show anyone. Just count.

The tally

The low-fat years. The points years. The shakes and the cleanses. The plans with rules and the plans with windows and the plans with lists. The apps that buzzed at you and the journals that waited for you. The Monday start dates. The January firsts. The one your sister swore by. The one your doctor handed you on a photocopied sheet.

If your tally looks anything like mine did, it runs long. Decades long. And somewhere in those decades, somebody told you — or you told yourself, in that flat late-night voice — that you kept doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Yesterday we traced where that sentence really comes from. Today I want to ask whether it was ever an accurate description of you at all.

Look at what you actually did

Look at that tally again, honestly. You varied everything. The rules changed. The foods changed. The schedules, the teachers, the technology, the philosophies — low-fat swore fat was the enemy, then another plan swore fat was the answer, and you faithfully tried both. You adjusted variables like a scientist who never gets to publish. Whatever you were doing all those years, "the same thing over and over" was never it.

You are one of the most relentless experimenters I have ever met. I know, because I was one too.

The thing that did repeat

So what actually repeated? Because something did — you can feel that it did.

Here it is: the premise. Every single attempt on your tally, however different its surface, rested on the same three ideas underneath. Someone outside you draws the map. Restriction is the engine. And your body's signals are the suspect — the noise to override, the appetite to outwit, the tiredness to push through.

You didn't write that premise. You inherited it — and it's older than any of us.

1863

In 1863, a London undertaker named William Banting published a little pamphlet about his eating plan. It sold and sold; people wrote to him from around the world; for a while, his surname became a verb — people spoke of "banting" the way we'd say "dieting." It was, by any honest reckoning, the first celebrity diet.

And the premise inside that pamphlet — outside authority, restriction as engine, body as suspect — has been sold, under fresh names and fresh packaging, every single season since. A hundred and sixty years. One premise. New wallpaper every launch.

So let's ask the question plainly. You, varying everything except the premise you were handed — or the premise itself, repeating essentially unchanged since gaslight and horse-drawn carriages — who exactly was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

A word about the teachers, because it matters

Hear me clearly on this: I am not throwing stones at any teacher, any program, any structure. Structures held me up for years, and I'm grateful for every one of them. Some of you are being held by one right now — and I honor that, truly. Keep it. Keep your practitioner. Keep whatever is working. Everything I build is and… not instead.

The heat in this piece is for a premise. Never for people. Most of the people who handed us the premise were certain they were helping — they held their certainty exactly the way we held ours.

Why we kept going back

Which leaves the question underneath everything: if it kept unraveling, why did we keep returning?

Two researchers, Janet Polivy and Peter Herman, described something they called false hope syndrome, and when I first read their work I had to put it down and walk around the room. Here is the loop they mapped. The decision to start again — just the decision, before a single meal changes — lifts your mood. Hope is a feeling, and it feels wonderful; that's a real reward, delivered on day one. Then the early results arrive, and they're real too: fast, visible, encouraging. And when it unravels — because a premise that fights your body eventually loses to your body — the blame lands on you. Not the method. You didn't try hard enough. You lacked discipline. So you return: same premise, more force.

And there's one more mechanism, and it has teeth. A thing that rewards you sometimes grips harder than a thing that rewards you always — that's the slot machine's secret, and it's the strongest hook behavioral science knows. An approach that works gloriously for six weeks and then quits on you is a sometimes-reward, running on the strongest reinforcement schedule there is.

Put those together and look at what they mean: going back was never ignoring the evidence. Going back was responding to the evidence. Real early wins. Real hope. Blame filed in the wrong drawer. That's not insanity. That's a loop, working exactly as designed — on some of the most determined people alive.

Retiring the diagnosis

So let's retire it, once and for all. You were never insane. You were never even inconsistent. You were faithful — to a map that kept being handed to you, by people who were handed it themselves.

The tally isn't a rap sheet. It's a research record.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow, I'll show you what your body was doing through every one of those years of faithfulness. While everyone else was grading you, it was keeping records — meticulous ones, in a ledger you were never shown. There's real research in that one too, and it ends somewhere I think you'll want to stand.

You were never broken. You were biological.

With love and light,
Sonja

—Watch this piece on YouTube: [PASTE THIS POST'S VIDEO URL] · Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1tpJvkRhvPbnLy7tigfmZX · All episodes: https://www.transformwithsonja.com/podcasts/turn-down-the-noiseSources:

Polivy J & Herman CP, "If at First You Don't Succeed: False Hopes of Self-Change," American Psychologist, 2002 · Banting W, "Letter on Corpulence," 1863.If this season feels like a lot to carry, you don't have to carry it alone. Care that actually fits you: findEDhelp.com, alongside [email protected]. Offered with love, never a push.