I gained 3kg travelling, and the weight was never the problem
The all-or-nothing trap that ruins summer, and the 30-second fix.
I have a running joke with my husband that I’m my own little ecosystem, tough on the outside but really fragile on the inside, so my entire job is to disturb it as little as possible.
And for the past few years it was soooo easy. I lived in Singapore, a 3-minute walk from literally the best gym, with trainers who built my programme so I never had to think, just show up.
Same bed, same breakfast, same daily habits, my whole little life arranged around keeping the system purring on auto-pilot.
Then we packed it up, and I’ve spent the past 6 months dragging my little fragile ecosystem around the world.
And obviously it’s been an absolute blast of adventure and discovery. But with a new country every few weeks, a different bed and pillow every time (and a fresh fight with the light and the aircon in every new place), it’s taken real effort to adapt.
New food everywhere, all of it delicious, but nobody doing the thinking but me.
It IS work, more than it ever was back home in Singapore with my own place and my own bed.
And it’s safe to say, my little fragile ecosystem has NOT been thrilled.
Here’s the bit I’m slightly mortified to admit…
Somewhere between Uruguay, Brazil and Colombia, I put on 3kg. And I hated it.
The 3kg wasnt really the problem. It’s the story underneath, where my brain goes: This is it. The slip. You’re sliding back to the worst version of yourself.
So here’s what I actually put down on this trip, and it wasn’t the 3kg (those came off the moment I got a bit more intentional with food).
It was the catastrophe story. The one where a few relaxed months on the road somehow means I’m one tortilla away from being a trainwreck again.
I’m an elder millennial. I came of age when skinny was the entire personality of the early 2000s, and that wiring is so fucking DEEP. So let me be clear about what this is NOT: a “get summer-ready” piece.
I have a body. It’s already ready. It’s summer. The audacity of an entire industry telling us otherwise every single year.
There are 2 ways people do summer:
Full “fuck it, it’s the holiday,” vanish for 8 weeks, start again in September with a heavy heart.
Turn the holiday into a joyless military operation.
The real skill sits in between, and it’s quieter than either: not abandoning yourself the second life gets loud.
Now, most of you aren’t living out of a suitcase. But summer is everyone’s version of the road: heat, houseguests, kids off school, holidays, the lot. The routine that held all year suddenly has to survive all of it.
After six months on the road, what actually survived wasn’t some perfect routine.
It was three embarrassingly basic things:
• Moving most days (with a backup plan for the days the original plan fell apart)
• Eating enough protein without turning it into a part-time job
• Walking as much as humanly possible
That’s it.
No challenge. No transformation. No “summer body” project.
Just enough structure to stop a disruption becoming a disappearance.
And that’s the bit I think we get wrong. People assume healthy routines collapse because they weren’t disciplined enough. Most of the time they collapse because they expected them to survive unchanged.
Summer isn’t a test of consistency.
It’s a test of adaptation.
Here's what I see over and over again. Summer wrecks routines for a really boring reason, and it isn’t weak willpower.
Disruption is simply when habits are most likely to wobble, the most fragile part of the whole thing. What turns a normal wobble into a write-off is one sneaky pattern, all-or-nothing thinking.
One tortilla becomes “well, I’ve blown it,” becomes the whole basket, becomes a write-off week. The slip is never the real damage. The story you tell yourself after it is.
This is one of the ideas that eventually became part of my MAKE SPACE™ framework, and it’s the one almost nobody reaches for: subtract before you add.
When summer knocks you sideways, every instinct says add. More discipline, a stricter plan, a clean-slate Monday to claw it all back.
But your life probably already has a lot going on, is probably already full. The thing dragging on you isn’t a missing habit, it’s the all-or-nothing rule you’re hauling around, the one that says if it isn’t the whole thing it doesn’t count.
That rule is the heaviest thing in the bag. Put it down first.
In practice it’s tiny. Next time you catch yourself doing the all-or-nothing maths (one tortilla, whole week ruined), recount. Not “I fell off,” but “I moved 4 days out of 7, on holiday, in 35 degrees.”
Same week, truer story. That recount is the subtraction: you’re not adding effort, you’re dropping a standard that was never real.
JOIN ME LIVE! I’m running 3 free workshops in June!
☀️ Thursday 11 June: The Bare Minimum Habit Plan for People Who Actually Want a Summer. You’ll leave with one summer non-negotiable and a lazy backup version of it for the days everything goes sideways.
☀️ Thursday 18 June: The Rest Workshop for People Who Are Bad at Doing Nothing. You’ll leave knowing the difference between actual rest and numbing, plus one way to switch off you don’t have to earn first.
☀️ Thursday 25 June: The Phone Boundaries Workshop for People Who Hate Digital Detoxes. You’ll leave with 2 or 3 friction tweaks that quietly cut your screen time, no detox, no willpower.
45-minute workshop from 12:15pm ET (5:15pm BST), then I’ll stay on for Q&A.
Totally free.
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After 6 months of a new country every few weeks, I’m finally slowing down!
One week here in Mérida, then a whole month in CDMX to soak up the World Cup atmosphere (🇫🇷allez les bleus!), then slow travel around Mexico before Peru and the Inca Trail, Bolivia, Chile.
Staying put for a bit means I can actually be somewhere at the same time as you, live, for a few weeks running. I have been looking forward to this more than I can say.
So that’s what June is: 3 Thursdays, 3 of the things summer reliably wrecks. The plan that falls apart (11 June), the rest you can’t seem to actually take (18 June), and the phone that quietly eats the whole holiday (25 June). Each one is 45 minutes, one real tool, no homework. We start on the 11th with the building part: designing the one summer non-negotiable that fits your actual life, not your fantasy one, and what it shrinks to on a rough day. Come build yours with me.
Some people will get everything they need from the workshops. A few of you will realise you'd rather have someone in your corner while you rebuild the whole thing. So I'm opening 3 or 4 founding coaching spots for June only, at $987. More info coming next week (or just reply to this and I’ll tell you how it works).
The ecosystem, for the record, is doing great. A bit wobbled, well looked after, currently kept alive by interpretive dance to newly discovered Brazilian disco in a flat in Mexico. Which is sort of the whole point.
See you on the 11th.
With Love,
Noemie x
P.S. First up is the Bare Minimum Habit Plan, Thursday 11 June. The workshop I wish someone had handed me at the airport in December. Bring your summer, we’ll build you something that survives it ☀️💛
P.P.S. The newly discovered Brazilian disco in question, in case your own ecosystem needs reviving:
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. She writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for people who are done with hustle culture and wellness BS.