One weird trick to get results
The secret formula for lasting weight loss, better strength, better health, isn’t something you buy, or some secret you can read in a book. The true secret formula for all of these things is a simple word that can’t be bought, reasoned with or cheated. You can’t go to the store and buy it or even get it online, the truth is you already have it, you just don’t know that you have it. You use this secret formula every single day on auto-pilot.
The secret formula is called “consistency”.
How does anyone ever get better at sports, playing the piano, making financial decisions or progress in their career without constantly showing up, doing the work and being present in the process? What separates people with great health and abilities from others? They showed up, put in the work and didn’t stop. They had relentless consistency on a certain task and just kept getting better and better. This approach can be applied to almost any area of our lives. If I wanted to become better at swimming, simply reading a book and going to the pool for a week or two wouldn”t get me that much better at swimming. I would improve a little, but then after a while, the skills and knowledge I had learned would start to fade away because it’s not something I would be using consistently. Nutrition is no different, we sometimes lack the skills to be good at nutrition because other things in our life take priority over it. If we actively spent time on improving our nutrition skills, whether it’s cooking, planning, weighing/measuring, tracking, experimenting than nutrition could become a skill you operate on auto-pilot that is part of your regular day that gets you to the desired health outcome.
In order to get started, pick one single thing that you know with 100% confidence that you could do every single day that would improve your nutrition skills. For example, you could choose to eat slowly (take 20 minutes to eat each meal), or log one or all of your meals eaten per day, or even eat 1 serving of vegetables per day. Keep track of every day that you do your task for 2 weeks, if you were successful, consider adding one more task and keep track of both for another 2 weeks.
Hold yourself accountable or better yet, hire a coach or enlist the help of someone who can act as your accountability partner. Having someone to support you and answer to can really increase your consistency. Their true strength comes by way of helping to keep you honest, not allowing you to take the easy way out and holding you to your word. We can often shortchange ourselves when it comes to tasks that we keep to ourselves because we let it and no one else is affected. We become a terrible accountability partner to ourselves because we often need to have something at risk to keep us motivated and on task. The things we could place at risk could be money, your word, fear of disappointment, or fear of failure.
One of the reasons my clients have become so successful is that I am always looking at their desired goals, their habits that will help them get there, and pointing out the things they do that won’t help them get to their goals to see how we can do better next time or change the goal to something more manageable for the client. This approach allows me to make suggestions at least daily, and clients know that their choices will come directly to me as soon as they log it. For
some clients, just knowing that I am watching helps keep them on track and working forwards their goals, that not having a watchful eye would allow them to slack and get them further away from their goals.
If you need an accountability or coach who is also a Registered Dietitian and can provide you with the most effective tasks for you to do to improve your nutrition sustainably, then reach out to me: shanti@performancedu.com
