The plan required your best day, every day. I didn't get many of those either.
How did the last attempt end, by the way? If you started strong for about a week and a half, then one bad day knocked the whole thing over and you quietly stopped, and then felt guilty about stopping, I want you to notice something: the plan required your best day, every day. You don't get many of those. I know because I didn't either.
I became a mom at 19. Later I ran a dayhome so I could be home with my own kids, and it was so much harder than I expected. I was home, technically, but I was so drained by everyone else's kids that I wasn't really there for mine. I'd lie on the couch with them to watch movies and make it look intentional.
I thought that was just what this stage of life cost. Who has the time and energy to figure out nutrition on top of everything else?... At least that was what I thought back then.
Wanting a way out, I went back to school for nutrition and got my certificate from the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition in 2011. What I learned about the gut fascinated me, so we put it into practice at home. A few embarrassingly small changes, done consistently. And I had energy again. I could think clearly. I didn't know it yet, but I was also managing ADHD that wouldn't be diagnosed for another ten years, and I just knew I felt better than I had in years.
Fifteen years later those small habits are still the foundation of how I live, and I have strayed from them plenty. Every time I do, I feel it, and every time, the way back is small and boring and kind. That's why I don't teach perfection. I've never lived it. What I teach is the version that survived real life: mine, and now yours.
These days I read 51 books a year and drag my teenagers on hikes after a full day of work. That's what the energy is for. Yours will be for something else entirely, and that's the whole point.