Slow is fast.

I've been meaning to write this for a while now. I have some extra time right now, thanks to an injury, so now seems like a good time to do the thing.

This is a partial repost and elaboration of something I have said before, so if you've seen it -- I'm not plagiarizing myself.

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I'm a professional dog trainer and a dog sports competitor -- stick with me, I have a point.

One of the big principals in dog training is basically about laying a strong foundation, and only increasing the difficulty when you have success more than 80% of the time. Another basic principal that's pretty heavily relied upon is setting up for success, making it very easy for the dog to do the right thing and nearly impossible for the dog to get it wrong.

This applies to humans and weight loss (and a whole lot of life, actually).

We want results fast - in weight loss and dogs. We can see the end result we want in our head. Then we try to leap-frog over the path that leads us there and jump straight to the final result.

In dogs (for illustrative purposes), what this means is you take a dog who has an okay sit at 80% of the time, but decide you want him to learn a really good sit-stay. So you spend 10 minutes teaching the stay, and he sort of gets it so you decide you're taking him to the park now and asking for that sit/stay with kids running around and other dogs and bikes whizzing by. The dog sits, but fails to stay and you're frustrated. Not fair - the dog was always going to fail and you set it up to do so. Also? Now stay not only doesn't mean MUCH, the dog has lost what understanding of it he did have, and you get to start over.

In weight-loss that example looks more like someone who just started tracking their food deciding that they want to do a total lifestyle overhaul. They're going to go from sedentary to 10K or more steps a day and going to the gym four times a week. They're going to have a big deficit. They're never going to eat another cookie or fast food meal again. They're going to have perfectly measured macros. Maybe they succeed for a little bit at home, where they're in total control - but then life happens. They get injured. They have to go to a business dinner where there're a whole dessert table, because they spent the night in the ER and had to eat out of a vending machine, or the stove broke so it's take out or nothing - whatever.

Because the initial habits weren't formed, and solid (at that 80% number), extra stressors or complication throw the whole thing off, and they then failed. They failed because their expectations were to be 100% at everything, and they set themselves up for that failure by trying to do too much. They fail because their expectations were, as with the dog, unfair.

This is where the thread title comes into play:

You can take your time, building individual habits - one at a time and adding a new change only when you are consistently succeeding at the previous one.

Try starting with JUST logging your food. Figure out what your eating patterns and hunger patterns are. Find out the calorie content of things. Experiment with what's worth it or what's not. Add a 'ceiling ' to your calories at maintenance (because not gaining more is valuable too!). Figure out what substitutions you can make and what you can do to achieve a small deficit as painlessly as possible - the things you won't miss much. Reassess when that feels easy and see if you can increase either with a little more movement or reassessing your food diary for things you'd be okay letting go. Build on what you have, only when you have something solid there to build on. Yes, yes it WILL be slow - but it will STICK and it won't be painful .


Or you can spend your time - days, weeks, months, years - starting over and filling in the holes in your foundational behaviors, and being mad at yourself for failing to sustain something that wasn't sustainable, and wasn't fair to ask of yourself in the first place.