I recently received this note from a client:
I need to lose a lot of weight. I know I need to eat healthy and exercise. My problem is that I don’t like to cook and I’ll exercise consistently for about 1 month then I just stop. Same with eating healthy; I’m good for a few weeks, then I just stop. I need help!
This got me thinking…. how many of us can relate to this?
Whether it’s 10 pounds or 100 pounds, most of us want to lose some weight and when the journey begins, we are gung-ho… completely committed to make the changes. We clean out our kitchen of all the junk food….we sign up for a gym membership. For the first few weeks we do great and we start seeing the number on the scale drop. We think to ourselves, “I ‘ve got this! I finally figured it out and I’m sticking to it!”
Then a few more weeks go by and slowly our old habits and excuses start to slip in…. our lives get busy, so we eat out more and we just don’t have time to get to the gym…. It starts with just once a week… then twice a week… and before we know it, all of our plans and good intentions have gone completely out the window. We feel not only guilty for not keeping the promises we made to ourselves, but we also feel like a failure. Our self esteem goes out the window because we lost our willpower and we give up entirely. Sound familiar?
Well, I’m happy to tell you that you are NOT a failure!
You are only 1 meal (or snack) away from getting back on track with healthy eating…. only 1 workout away from getting back on track with exercise.
With this in mind, I’ve found 3 ways to make it easier to stay on track:
1. First and most importantly, accept imperfections. It took me a long time (and I mean loonnnngggg, as in years) to realize that I don’t need to eat perfectly 100% of the time and that I don’t need to exercise 7 days a week for 60 plus minutes. This was a BIG mindset shift for me and it takes tons of practice. To this day, I still need to remind myself that eating clean and healthy 80% of the time is good enough.
I’ve also come to the point where I’m ok with spending less than 7 hours a week exercising. In fact, these days I only log in about 4 hours total! A big change for me, but I’m ok with that. I’ve shifted my mindset, plus I educated myself about how to exercise efficiently.
2. Find simple healthy changes that you can actually maintain. The first change that I made was the commonly recommended advice to increase my water intake.
Another simple change that I made was to fill half of my dinner plate with non-starchy vegetables. This one took a lot of conscious effort and practice. Luckily I cook at home a lot, so this was pretty do-able for me. During the initial stages, my fall back veggie was always salad. When I first started increasing my veggies with salads, I didn’t limit my salad dressing. I was never a big salad dressing fan, but I did like some on my salad. Remembering that my goal was to increase the amount of vegetables that I was eating at dinner, I didn’t worry about any extra calories and fat that come with salad dressing. Over time, this changed, but in the beginning, I didn’t worry about it. Remember rule number 1… it’s ok to not be perfect 🙂
3. Automate. I’ve written about this recently and it goes along with the above 2 suggestions. I’ve automated my exercise- first thing in the morning before the rest of the house wakes up, I spend 30 minutes exercising at home. After 12 years, I gave up my gym membership and now I no longer have to account for travel time.
Exercising as soon as I wake up and not having to drive to the gym has made it so much easier to make sure I get this done before the day begins. Plus it eliminates any excuse that I could come up with if I exercised later in the day. I recognize that not everyone can exercise first thing in the morning, but this is how I was able to automate this aspect. No how you automate, you need to make it something that you will do; everyone is different.
What I eat for breakfast, lunch and snack is also automated. I eat the same thing 5-6 days a week. Yes, it gets a little boring, but I find ways to vary things a little bit like changing the flavor of my shakes, choosing a different protein bar, fruit or nuts. Just like my mindset shift, finding out what I should (and could) eat routinely, took a long time of trial and error but automating what I eat has made my life much easier to make healthy choices.
So there you have it. My 3 ways to make staying on track easier. Give them a try and let me know what you think!