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Most people either don’t pay enough attention their diets or they start a diet that’s not sustainable or realistic for them.
We’ve all heard the phrase “you can’t out-exercise a bad diet”- and I confess in the past I saw it as a challenge instead of sound advice. But it’s true. You need to eat the right kind and amount of food to get the results you desire. In fact, nutri-tion is so significant to body composition that you can maintain or lose weight by healthy eating alone! This is crucial for those busy seasons when time to exercise is a luxury.
LEARN HOW TO EAT RIGHT
It’s fair to guess many of you reading this have tried to lose weight before- whether with shakes, fad diets, purchased meal plans, fasts, detoxes, “clean eat-ing,” etc. Those can all be good, but they aren’t long-term and the weight comes back. What happens when the shakes become too expensive, you finish the meal plan but didn’t like the food enough to do it again, your detox made you irregular, and clean eating was just too confusing? It’s completely worth the time and effort to learn how to eat healthy so your health is in your own hands. It’s not that com-plicated, either.
1. Nutrition
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THE FIX ONE THING RULE
You can have the best eating plan in the world, but if it’s not realistic long-term, completely overwhelms you, or leaves you hungry it’s not worth the trouble.
I often encourage people to try the fix one thing method after they experi-ence failure with something that wasn’t manageable. It teaches you to value small, everyday decisions and under-stand that the journey is just as im-portant as the end result. Start with one habit at a time: people who overhaul their diets tend to crash and burn, and end up regaining the weight they lost. People who focus on creating one habit at time have an 80+% success rate. It’s worth a shot!
Identify a few things you think could be wrecking your diet, or sabotage you los-ing those last 5 pounds. Pick one, and figure out how to change it. Start small or big, just make sure it’s one habit at a time.
Here are a couple of nutritional hab-its that will help you reach your fitness goals:
Eat slowly and stop at 80% full.
Ditch alcohol, soda, and juices - avoid unnecessary calories. If quitting cold turkey scares you, start by cutting back and tracking how many you consume- continue to reduce that number.
Check for the amount of sugar in food and try to reduce your intake. Fill up on protein-packed foods and veggies first.
If you’re overwhelmed, tired of diet-ing, or don’t trust yourself to stick to something, check out The Fit Tutor’s Nutrition Course. It’s based on the Fix One Thing Rule and will help you create lifelong habits to lose and keep off the weight. It also comes with accountabili-ty and meal ideas.
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Non-strength training adults lose any-where from 3-5 pounds of muscle per decade after age 30! To make that even better, they lose one-quarter of a pound of muscle per YEAR after age 40. Since muscle mass is connected to our metab-olism, that is decreasing as well, which makes it even harder to lose fat. People tend to gain weight as they age, but it’s usually unhealthy fat instead of disease fighting muscle.
CARDIO VS. STRENGTH TRAINING
If we increase our muscle mass, we will increase our metabolism. This means we burn more calories when we do things like nap, shop online, or cook. If
you have been doing only cardio, some research shows there’s a chance you are some of your muscle as you lose fat. Lifting weights comes with the added bonus of increasing your metabolism directly after a workout- you burn more calories for 24 to up to 72 hours af-terwards! And that’s in addition to the overall increase.
Cardio has its place and is great for your heart, but if weight loss is your goal don’t rely on only cardio to get you there. Pair it with strength training, and add in some cardio intervals to help you burn more fat.
2You place too much emphasis on cardio
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Going all out will get you results, but if it’s not sustainable then you will crash and burn. If results are what you’re after, then consistency is key. For most people with busy schedules (and may-be not a burning passion to do burpees) consistency means squeezing work-outs in, even if they are only 10 minutes long. It means eating healthy on the go, even if it’s not salmon and broccoli. It means sticking with a workout routine, even if you can’t do all the reps and sets listed. It means portion control when your meal is entirely out of your hands.
And most importantly, it means starting again tomorrow when today was a train wreck.
Unless you have all the time and mo-tivation in the world, commit to giv-ing yourself grace when starting a new healthy habit or routine. Failing once doesn’t mean you’ve failed, and skip-ping or shortening a workout doesn’t mean you’re off the wagon. Commit to pressing on even though a sick kid left you with only 10 minute workouts, you forgot your gym clothes yet again, or a social week ruined your diet.
All or nothing usually ends in quitting. So adopt consistency as your new norm.
You go all or nothing
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Most people live and die (or should I say start and quit) by the scale, but it can lead us astray when it comes to our fitness progress. I highly recommend weighing yourself at least once a week, but keep in mind these factors can af-fect the number you see:
Water weight: your hydration level can affect how much you weigh, but don’t allow yourself to get dehydrated just to see the number drop.Carbs: for each gram of carbohydrates you store, your body also stores 3 grams of water. You need carbs, but try to get them from fruits and veggies instead of pastas or breads.
Muscle: 1 pound of muscle is the same as 1 pound of fat, yes, but 1 pound of muscle looks much differently. If you’re lifting weights, which I suggest you do, you should gain muscle and lose fat, which could actually increase the num-ber on the scale.Sodium: Our brain is extremely con-cerned with our sodium to water ratio. If our sodium intake increases, it will hold onto more water, which will give an inaccurate number on the scale.That time of the month: There’s so much happening in your body it’s hard to get an accurate picture of your weight and health. Just avoid the scale (and overeating) during that time.
You rely too much on the scale
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Although the scale serves a purpose, there are many other factors to watch out for while evaluating the effectiveness of your program. Look at how your clothes fit, monitor your energy levels, your mood, how strong you feel, in-creasing the weight you lift or the intensity or distance of your workout - set goals along the way besides how many pounds you want to lose so you stay encouraged.
I highly recommend learning how to take your own body measurements to most accurately track your progress.
Full guide here
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5. You don’t seek account-abilityConsistency is key to your health and fitness goals. Countless studies show that having someone keep you account-able for completing a workout will in-crease your adherence, which will in-crease your results. Life is notorious for getting in the way of our quest for the perfect beach body. There will always be 100 reasons to skip your workout, and the #1 reason people quit on their goals is that there are no real consequences for their inaction.
Own your human nature. It’s OK to ad-mit you might not succeed doing this on your own. Find someone to bring along for the ride. Chances are, you’ve tried and failed at a health or fitness goal be-fore (haven’t we all!?). Think about why you didn’t succeed. Maybe you need to tweak your goals and set some that are slightly more realistic. Maybe you need to add in some sort of punishment or reward system for completing your workouts or sticking to your meal plan. Know yourself, know what motivates you, and enlist someone to keep you accountable.
WHO SHOULD YOU CHOOSE?
Choose someone who you trust. Some-one who you know won’t accept your lame excuses for skipping your work-out or running a train on a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Your accountability partner doesn’t have to be your workout part-ner, although that certainly helps. If you workout at home or can’t find a work-out buddy with the same schedule as you, you can use good ol’ technology to check in on each other and make sure you’ve done what you were supposed to do.
Set clear, written goals and expecta-tions so you both know your roles as well as boundaries. Usually, just having to check in with someone makes them stick to their workouts, but add in some friendly competition if you’d like. For example, set a goal for how many times you will workout this week and for how long. Both of you can work toward that goal. If someone skips a workout they owe the other person a coffee, or may-be 1 million dollars, depending on your budget. Make short-term and long-term goals to keep you motivated. Con-sequences aren’t always fun, but they work!
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A vision or dream of success is import-ant when starting our fitness journey, but sometimes we set our sites so far ahead that when we don’t reach our goals right away they seem impossible. When this happens it’s easy to get dis-couraged and quit.
Most people tend to set product goals. These are something to achieve and represents change in a measurable vari-able (like weight-loss, a certain amount of weight lifted, a consistent lower lev-el of bad cholesterol, etc). These are great goals to set (and you should use the SMART goal formula for them) but these can take a long while to achieve.
SET PROCESS GOALS, TOO
To keep you from getting discour-aged as you watch your scale patiently (*cough*) waiting for it to go down, you should set some process goals to keep you motivated along the way. A process goal focuses on something you accomplish. For those of you who like to make lists and cross things off, this type of goal setting will be your equiva-lent to heaven on earth!
Your process goals will vary depending on your level of fitness, but examples could be going on a 20 minute walk without stopping, drinking 8 glass-
You set only long term goals
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es of water daily, running for 10 minutes straight, doing a strength training workout 3 days a week, or trying one new healthy recipe a week. The list could range from food preparation, food logging, checking in with your account-ability partner, saying positive things over yourself as you get ready in the morning- the possibilities are endless!
HOW TO SET EFFECTIVE PROCESS GOALS
It’s important to set a time limit for these goals so you know if you have met them or not. I enjoy daily or week-ly goals, and some could be monthly. Keep your product goals in mind and think about what you need to do to lose ____ pounds or reach your new squat goal. Think of your process goals as steps to get to your product goal. Like 2 + 2 = 4, working out three times per week + stopping before full at 90% of meals = losing five pounds.
Don’t set yourself up for failure. You know yourself better than anyone else (well, probably..!) so you should know what goals are doable and what ones aren’t. That being said, you still want to push yourself just slightly beyond your limits. Attainable but challenging! If you set a really challenging goal for yourself, enlist someone to keep you accountable!
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Motivation is such an amazing thing, but sometimes it causes us to commit or try an intense exercise program or restrictive diet. We soon realize we are in over our heads and crash and burn, and our motivation has been replaced with discourage-ment.
If you haven’t been exercising it’s OK to start out with a beginner routine. If you’re eating junk, it’s OK to start with just one healthy food habit. Small changes will still get you results, but they will be results that stick around. You can start a program that takes hours of food prep or hours at the gym, but if your schedule isn’t conducive to these additions, you will end up regaining any weight you lost pretty quickly.
Once you commit to something your body, mind, and schedule can handle, work on improving, step by step. Add an extra 5 minutes or a new exercise to your workout routine once you get the hang of it, or increase the weight you’re lifting. Once you are consistent with your one healthy habit, add another one.
This isn’t sexy advice, I know, but it will get and keep you sexy in the long run. You will feel confident and proud that you changed you not only reached your weight loss goal and improved your health, but you also found a lifestyle to keep you looking and feeling this way.
You start out too hard
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Motivation is great and can help you get started, but it’s not usually reliable for the long haul. Prioritization, unlike motivation will help you stick with your healthy habits. We prioritize a lot of things; we go to work, we do the laun-dry, we pay bills- and we don’t wait until we feel like doing these things, we just do them because they’re important. For many of us, our health is one of the last things we think about when prior-itizing. Somehow we forget the direct impact fitness has on our quality of life.
Why do our fitness goals fall into our “luxury” or “hope to someday” catego-ries of life? Why don’t we think of the
advantages of squeezing in our work-outs and planning out healthy meals? There are countless immediate and long-term benefits of a healthy life. When you move your health and fitness goals out of the “luxury” category and up to the top of your to-do list, you’ll get them done. You might not have time for them, but who does? When they are priorities you make time.
PRIORITIZATION SHUTS DOWN EXCUS-ES THAT MOTIVATION MIGHT ALLOW
When we don’t prioritize our health, we rely on emotional external factors to help us reach our goals. When counting
You rely too much on feeling motivated
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on motivation, if life gets in the way of our exercise plans we can easily make excuses. It doesn’t sustain us. Crafting excuses that derail us from our dreams is natural human behavior. When we move our goals from hope to priority, those excuses no longer hold ground. Making sacrifices for this goal or habit is a decision that we have already made. And don’t think sacrifice is a dirty word- in this case it means looking and feeling better, not to mention a confidence boost.
Motivation is awesome, but decide now that you don’t need it to stick to your healthy eating.
You don’t need “feel like it” to workout. The good news is that prioritization leads to consistency, and consistency leads to re-sults, and those results will help you feel motivated.
Schedule your workouts and meal planning into your calendar, and enlist your accountability partner on those busy weeks.
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So what now?You probably noticed some recurring themes here, like staying consistent, don’t bite off more than you can chew, and to get accountability if you’ll need it. Some of these may have really spoken to you or reminded you of past successes or failures.
The Fit Tutor is an online workout program that specializes in quick, effective strength and cardio workouts for busy women. We help people get re-sults by including accountability and a habit-based nutrition course with their memberships. It’s great for any level of exerciser, at home or at the gym. It’s $11.99/mo, but it’s well worth the investment to avoid these mistakes, or to prevent another failed diet or exercise program! Try it out for Two Weeks Free today!
Thanks! Allison
