Not "Lose Weight" But "Chew 30 Times": How I Broke My Own Health Goal Into Unbreakable Habits
I stopped chasing a number on the weighing scale and started chasing five small, boring processes instead. Here is exactly how I broke down my own health goal — the same way I now teach leaders to break down theirs.
For years I told myself I would "lose weight" the way most people do — as a vague, heavy intention that sat on my shoulders every morning and evaporated by evening. It never worked, because a number on a weighing scale is not something you can act on at 7 AM on a Tuesday. What finally worked was breaking that one impossible goal into five small, almost boring processes I could complete before breakfast. This is that breakdown, exactly as I use it — and exactly as I now teach it to the leaders I train.
In short- "Lose weight" is an outcome goal you cannot control daily — I replaced it with "attain good health" through fixed, controllable processes.
- My five processes: chew every bite 30 times, three glasses of warm water on waking, a thermos of warm water through the day, Surya Namaskar and Pranayama at a 7 AM alarm.
- This is the same "Don't Break the Chain" strategy Jerry Seinfeld gave a young comedian — mark the X every day, and let the chain itself become the goal.
- When the chain breaks, don't panic — the fix is to build a longer chain (five days for one missed day) to restore your own Power of Integrity.
- This is a Productivity Quotient (PQ) technique on the Winning Kite — it is how EQ insight and RQ relationships actually turn into sustained results.
Where this sits on your Winning Kite
Consistency is a Productivity technique — the PQ, or bottom side, of the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). You can have brilliant self-awareness on the EQ side and warm relationships on the RQ side, but without PQ — the discipline to keep doing the work, day after unglamorous day — none of it becomes a result. A kite doesn't rise because one side is strong. It rises because all sides pull together, in balance. My own health goal became the clearest personal proof of that principle I have.
The Goal I Kept Failing At
In Stars at India Inc., in the chapter on Technique #6, The Art of Consistency, I tell a story about a friend who told me he was inspired — by my YouTube channel, my entrepreneurial journey, my books — to finally start his own business "next month." I didn't argue with him then. But I remember thinking that postponing the start to next month might quietly kill the dream before it began. He should, at minimum, take the first step of goal setting that same month.
Six months later we met again. He admitted he still hadn't started — work and family commitments had swallowed the plan whole. That conversation is what brought Jerry Seinfeld's story back to my mind, and it is also, if I am honest, a mirror of my own repeated failure to "lose weight."
Jerry Seinfeld is a comedian, writer, director, producer and actor who has built decades of successful television and film work by continuously taking on new projects — in one extraordinary year he earned $57 million. But set the money aside. The real question worth asking is: how did Jerry sustain that quality and consistency for so long? It began with a piece of advice he gave to a young comedian.
Jerry Seinfeld's Calendar and the "Don't Break the Chain" Strategy
A young comedian sharing the stage with Jerry once asked him the secret to success in comedy. Jerry asked whether the young man wrote jokes every day. The comedian admitted he only wrote when inspiration struck. Jerry's reply was simple: to write good jokes, you must be willing to write many bad ones — and to do that, you must write daily, not when you feel like it.
His advice: put up a calendar showing all 365 days of the year on your desk. Every day you spend two hours writing jokes — regardless of whether they're any good — mark a big X on that day. After a few days of consistent work, the X's connect into a chain. Within a fortnight the chain grows longer. Whether or not paid work shows up, Jerry said, your only job is to keep that chain unbroken. The chain is the discipline. It represents the hard work, and eventually, the outcome.
This is the "Don't Break the Chain" strategy. People who excel in any field — sport, business, comedy, training — carry a huge "volume of work" behind them that nobody sees. They have experimented and repeated so much that they've built an intuition for what works and what doesn't. Mastery isn't a gift of talent. It is the residue of volume.
Mastery like this doesn't arrive overnight. It demands sustained effort over a long runway. The trick is not to wait for inspiration but to build a routine and simply commit to it — the experience and intuition accumulate as a side-effect of showing up, not as a precondition for it.
Why We Break Our Own Chains
In the book I lay out five reasons consistency fails, and I have caught myself in every one of them at different points in my life:
- Lack of clear goals — when the target is fuzzy, it's hard to know what "showing up" even means.
- Procrastination — putting the task off drains momentum, and momentum is hard to rebuild.
- Fear of failure — the fear of not hitting the outcome makes us avoid starting at all.
- Perfectionism — chasing a flawless result becomes so overwhelming that we do nothing instead.
- Lack of motivation — without a strong enough "why," we drift into complacency.
I saw this play out inside my own office. Several colleagues kept proposing that we publish a blog post or a YouTube short every single day. But every time the team sat down to brainstorm, they'd get stuck waiting for the "perfect" video idea — the perfectionism trap, exactly as described above. One day we simply decided: prioritise quantity over quality, drop the scripting obsession, and commit to producing one video or blog post daily, no matter how rough. That single shift — from outcome to process — is what actually got the content machine moving. It is the same shift that finally got my own health goal moving.
Breaking My Own Goal Into Processes: "Attain Good Health," Not "Lose Weight"
The "Don't Break the Chain" strategy is fundamentally a process-focused approach — you take the desired result and deconstruct it into achievable, controllable process goals. If your aim is to learn animation, you don't chase "become an animator"; you commit to ten minutes of core-concept study daily, followed by twenty minutes applying it to a project, alternating days with deeper material. If your goal is to clear an exam and anxiety is holding you back, you build separate processes for concentration, mental steadiness, and emotional stability.
I applied the exact same logic to my own health. I stopped setting the goal as "lose weight," because a number on a scale is an outcome I cannot directly control on any given day — it depends on water retention, sleep, dozens of variables outside my hands. Instead I reframed the goal as attain good health, and broke that down into five processes I could fully control, every single morning:
- Chew every bite of food 30 times. I set an alarm as a reminder to be mindful during lunch specifically, because that is the meal I rushed through most.
- Drink three glasses of warm water first thing in the morning. This became my first small victory of the day, won before I'd even left the bedroom.
- Fill a thermos with warm water for the day. A simple act of preparation that made the second process easy to sustain through the afternoon.
- Practise Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation) every morning.
- Practise Pranayama every morning, using an app alarm fixed for 7:00 AM so the process never depended on how I "felt" that day.
Once those processes were in motion, I made a deliberate decision to stop worrying about anything beyond them. Gather what information you need, do the work, and enjoy it — don't audit the scale daily. As these five processes turned into habits, they began forming chains alongside each other, reinforcing one another. That is the real mechanism: you break a goal down into its fundamental processes and progress by conquering them one at a time. New pathways and milestones keep revealing themselves as you go — you don't need to see the whole staircase, only the next step.
This is also where working on your craft daily — without waiting for inspiration or motivation — becomes non-negotiable, whether you're a professional chasing a promotion, a soldier, an academic, or a business owner. You cultivate communication, problem-solving, leadership and time-management the same way I cultivated health: not through a single burst of willpower, but through small processes repeated until they become identity.
What Happens When the Chain Breaks
It will break. Mine did, more than once — a travel week, a family function, a bout of flu. When we sustain something for several days, our word starts to carry weight — we experience what I call the Power of Integrity, an inner confidence that we will do what we say we'll do. When the chain breaks, that power weakens, and restarting can trigger real anxiety.
The fix is to decide the rule in advance, before you ever need it: if a break occurs, you compensate by building a chain for the next five days to cover a one-day gap. If the gap is more than a day, extend it further — the next day's chain plus five additional days to close the debt. For example, say you commit to a reading challenge from December 25th to 31st, 30 minutes daily. If you miss January 1st, restart on January 2nd, and by January 6th — your fifth consecutive day — treat it as also covering the missed January 1st. This deliberately harder condition reawakens your Power of Integrity. It programs your mind to understand: a broken chain is not a crisis. You will reclaim the power of your word.
Five Ways to Stay Consistent — At Work and In Your Own Habits
| Practice | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Set clear goals | Break the big goal into smaller, named, achievable tasks |
| Prioritise tasks | Identify and do the highest-impact process first, every day |
| Create a routine | Fix a time (my 7 AM alarm) so the process doesn't depend on mood |
| Develop self-discipline | Notice your specific distraction triggers and pre-plan around them |
| Monitor progress | Track the process (the X on the calendar), not only the outcome |
Add to this: find your real motivation, and surround yourself with people who reinforce the commitment rather than undermine it; and stay flexible — setbacks will come, and adapting the plan without abandoning it is what separates a pause from a quit.
The Leadership Lesson Behind the Weighing Scale
Psychologist Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset makes a related point worth borrowing here as colour, not as the centre of the idea: people who believe ability is built through effort over time engage far more readily with exactly this kind of unglamorous, repeated process work than people chasing a fixed outcome. My own experience with health simply gave me the clearest personal laboratory for a principle I already taught in the training room — that mastery is a volume-of-work problem, not a talent problem.
I now carry this breakdown into every workshop I run on corporate training and consistency. A sales professional who misses a target doesn't sulk — they analyse what went wrong, reset the process, and re-enter the field. That is not talent. That is consistency, in the same sense that chewing 30 times or waking at 7 AM is consistency. Whatever the goal — a fitness target, a sales number, a leadership habit — the discipline is identical: name the outcome, then hand yourself back a process you can fully control today.
When I work with leaders through the Signature Programs, I ask them to do this exercise live: take one goal they've been "meaning to start," and break it into three to five daily processes they can begin tomorrow morning. It is the same exercise I ran on myself, years before I ever put it in a book.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the 'Don't Break the Chain' strategy?
It is a consistency technique popularised by Jerry Seinfeld: mark an X on a calendar every day you do the work, no matter how small, and never let two X's fail to connect. The chain of X's becomes the goal itself — process over outcome, volume of work over inspiration.
How did Avinash Chate break down his weight-loss goal into processes?
He turned 'lose weight' into five small daily processes: chew every bite 30 times with a lunch alarm, drink three glasses of warm water on waking and keep a thermos of warm water through the day, and practise Surya Namaskar and Pranayama every morning at a fixed 7 AM alarm. He tracked the processes, not the number on the scale.
Why is 'attain good health' a better goal than 'lose weight'?
'Lose weight' is an outcome you cannot control day to day — it depends on water retention, sleep, hormones, dozens of variables. 'Attain good health' through fixed daily processes is something you fully control every single day, which is what keeps the chain unbroken and the motivation alive.
Where does consistency sit on the Winning Kite framework?
Consistency is a Productivity Quotient (PQ) technique — it sits on the bottom side of the Winning Kite, alongside goal-setting, delegation and decision-making. PQ is what converts your EQ and RQ strengths into sustained, visible output.
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By Avinash Chate — Maharashtra’s #1 Corporate Trainer & Motivational Speaker. .