Consistency
susandglenn2013
Posts: 1 Member
How do you guys stay consistent with healthy eating, exercise, and weight loss?
I feel like I will do great for a week or two, but then I go right back to my old ways. It's so frustrating! How do you guys stay on track consistently?
I feel like I will do great for a week or two, but then I go right back to my old ways. It's so frustrating! How do you guys stay on track consistently?
2
Answers
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Gradual changes is my answer. Don't aim for a high frequency, high intensity, long duration from the start, but build up slowly. (Habits take time)
I started out barely walking 3000 steps per day and not exercising and now I'm running 30km per week. It took me many months to go from couch potato to active!
It also helps to do something you enjoy! Don't force yourself to do exercise you don't like.8 -
Slow changes, and not trying to do everything at once. A moderate weightloss goal is easier to adhere to then a big one. My take on this is: I don't need to suffer. That means don't eat food I don't like, eat enough but still lose, only do exercise that I actually enjoy doing, and basically try to find things that I like.3
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I hear you! I struggle with this too and have really been working on it mentally.
First, how rigid are your “great” weeks? Are they sustainable? Or are they leaving you burned out and or extraordinarily deprived? Then I would look at what happens on the weeks that you go back to old ways. Do you have an off day and then get discouraged? Or might there be other reasons for getting off track (stress, something impacting your sleep). I’ve been trying to focus on answering those questions and it has really helped. I also found that the thing I could always go back to, even when diet felt out of control due to events, lack of time, vacation, etc, was exercise. Even getting a small amount of movement keeps me mentally from going too far off track.
Stay in it! It is normal to ebb and flow. I found that understanding the patterns was really helpful to finding a more realistic plan/approach.3 -
Think about how to make progress more easily, not how to make it faster. Healthy eating, exercise, weight loss? Maybe pick one as top priority, take the easiest route you can find to that. Worry about the rest later.
We don't have to revolutionize our entire lives all at once, be precisely perfect every single minute of every day without exception. Sure, some people like to revolutionize stuff that way, but it's optional, and for many of us, just makes it harder to reach any of the goals, let alone all of them.
Better than before: That works.
Pretty good on average: That works.
Eat food you enjoy, that adds up to fewer calories but that still keeps you reasonably full most of the time. (It may take some experimenting to figure out exactly which foods that is, on which timing, but that's OK.)
Find ways to move your body more that ideally are fun, but at least are tolerable, practical, and fit into your life well. Overdoing is counterproductive for weight loss (via fatigue) or for fitness improvement (via under-recovery, when recovery is where the magic happens). Movement can be daily life stuff, or intentional exercise. Just move more.
Maybe eventually gradually sample some new foods, things that help you achieve nutrition goals, and put the ones you enjoy into your routine rotation.
It's a life, and you can think about it being a happy one, rather than about some forced march to a destination. Neither weight management nor fitness improvement are projects with an end date, after which things go back to normal. (That's the recipe for yo-yo weight regains.)
If you ask me, the real prize is finding new routine habits that keep us at a healthy weight and reasonably fit forever. That depends on finding sustainable new routine habits that can run almost on autopilot when other parts of life get demanding . . . because they will. The routine days matter most, not that one day when we eat too much cake, or work out for 5 hours.
Too many people arrive here thinking they need to adopt some perfection-driven, restrictive eating routine in which they eat only "good", "healthy" or "diet" foods, and never again eat any fast food, junk food or treats. Many of them stack extreme, intense, punitive new exercise on top of that. But being fat or under-fit aren't sins we need to expiate via suffering. All that extreme nonsense is completely optional.
(A lot of people doing that disappear from MFP fast. I'd like to think it's because they succeed on their own, but the statistics suggest otherwise. Most of the people who stick around here and are in maintenance post-loss seem to have done something a lot more boring.)
Eat slightly fewer calories than you burn, and you'll lose weight. That's true whether you count the calories, or eat fewer of them in any other way.
Move more, and increase the duration, intensity, frequency or type of movement as that gets easier, and you'll make fitness progress.
Also, if something doesn't go according to plan, that's not failure. You've learned something about what doesn't work for you: Useful knowledge. Revise your tactics, and keep going. If there's a break in the action, get back into it as soon as humanly practical. Experiment, adjust.
Just keep going. Only giving up altogether is failure.
Make it simpler, make it easier. That can work.
Best wishes: The results are worth the effort.3 -
Podcast I listened to this morning (A Piece of Cake, highly recommend!) had a guest who said don’t try to go all-in at once. Aim to improve 1% per day, and by the end of the year you’ll have improved 365%.
Questionable math, but I approve the sentiment. Start by making small changes and add on.
They also noted, so what if you lose five but gain three. You’re still two ahead of the game, just keep at it. Those “twos” add up.1 -
I just planned small level ups every week, either exchanging a food with a better choice, maybe work on getting an extra hour of sleep, getting more water. Something like that. It isn't a race, but you are right that consistency matters. I lost at a gradual pace over 18 months, so those level ups really did help with staying focused. I hope this helps!3
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What is it that you do for a week or two that qualifies for "doing great" and then just stop doing that and then wonder why that happens? You must have some opinion on this, just asking because I'm a curious kind of person.1
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You gotta want it...
It's like anything else, until the desire to improve outweighs the comfort zone you wont be successful1 -
@susandglenn2013 I recently added a book to my reading list that might be helpful here too. It’s The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest. I learned about it on a podcast, and although I haven’t gotten to reading it yet one of the quotes really stuck with me: “your new life is going to cost you your old one”. I think that speaks so much to what you’re asking and applies so much to the challenges of behavioral change. Found that helpful and wanted to share 🙂2
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