I get Arnold Schwarzenegger's newsletter about staying healthy and trying to motivate myself to be healthy.

I loved this one about Oatmeal.

"It’s Not The Oatmeal

How much do you focus on adding superfoods to your diet? What about counting the hours you fast? Do you choose your workouts by obsessing over the “best” exercises?

The best plans are not a one-size-fits-all model that easily falls apart under the stress and pressure of your typical day.

They say the devil is in the details. But, in fitness and nutrition, sometimes the smallest details act like the devil. They trick you into stressing about minor decisions that don’t lead to major results.

Influencers have debated whether oatmeal is bad for you for the past month. Yes, oatmeal. Some claim it’s “peasant food” and toxic. Others claim it’s healthy. For the record, it’s your choice whether or not you choose to eat oatmeal. But research strongly suggests you’re not putting your body in danger if you do.

Every month, another hot take on food or nutrition causes you to worry. And next month, it’ll be something new. That’s the real poison — information that pushes you to extremes, creates confusion, and causes you to buy in to behaviors that leave you worse off than you started.

If you want to change for the better, you can’t stress every decision. That’s psychological warfare that is one of the least healthy things you can do for your body.

Instead, you need to focus on habits and routines. And if you’re going to build an unbreakable habit, it helps to shift your self-perspective and create a deeper why. When there’s purpose behind your action, it’s much harder to fall apart.

And, when you create these new habits, take the time to ask yourself, what do I want my life to look like?

Do you want to judge yourself for everything you eat? Or do you want a good idea of what’s good to eat, and then you can choose which foods will serve you best?

Fiber is good. Oatmeal is a great option for fiber. If you don’t want to eat the oatmeal, by all means, pick another food. But don’t stress about oatmeal. It’s not the problem. Plans that are driven by fear and negativity create a dangerous feedback loop that make it feel nearly impossible to build healthier behaviors. If you want to leave the vicious cycle, I recommend you play a completely different game.

Too many people follow the plans of others without considering how it will affect their lives.

Because before you build a foundation, you need to make sure the blueprint looks like the house you want to live in.

If you’ve learned anything by reading this newsletter, we hope you realize many things work. You can eat carbs or cut them out. You can train for hours or do shorter, intense workouts. You can eat an animal- or a plant-based diet. There are some significant missteps (like not prioritizing sleep), but there are so many healthy behaviors that you don’t need to feel forced into actions that don’t feel right for you.

Many plans fail not because they are wrong but because you didn’t consider the most important variable: you.

When you start with what you want your life to look like, focus on healthy behaviors, such as sleep, movement, connection, self-compassion, and nutrition. Put your effort into building habits around them, and that’s when life changes for the better."