I often find myself using this analogy alot, im not sure where I got it, if I read it somewhere in the past and stole it, or if I just made it up myself – but it seems to get the point across to people.
If you’ve got a weight loss, or body composition goal, your success will be determined on a daily basis from all the little choices you make.
Every day at the end of the day, you’re either going to have a day that was a step forward to your goals, or a step back. You want to be aiming at stepping forward as much and as consistently as possible.
I often see food diary’s and they’ll resemble something like this.
– Monday – good eating day (step forward)
– Tuesday – good eating day (step forward)
– Wednesday – bad day (step back)
– Thursday – good day (step forward)
– Friday – good day (step forward)
– Saturday – bad day (step back)
– Sunday – bad day (step back)
A lot of people will tend to magnify the good days, and rationalize the bad days ( ‘I was so perfect yesterday and the day before’), and when you do this you actually think you’re eating a lot better than you actually are.
In the above scenario, at a glance it doesn’t look so bad, and it may be a big improvement on how things used to be – but when you actually tally it up there was only one step forward in 1 whole week! This is still progress and will definitely add up over time, but things will take a lot longer.
Now picture you’re on a football oval, start at one end and take a couple of steps forward, then a step back, another step forward, 2 steps back etc etc
Its going to take a long time before you’ve actually covered enough ground to walk across the oval, in fact for a long time you’re really going to feel like you’re not getting anywhere at all.
And it’s the same with weight loss and fitness results- you need to have as many good days in a row as possible, and take as many ‘steps forward’ consecutively as you can before you can look up and look back to see how far you’ve come and the results you’ve achieved.
The more consistent you can be, without taking any steps back – the faster results will come.
So what does a step forward look like? What’s a good day?
It will look something like this:
– You’ve eaten a few good healthy meals – all with a serving of good quality protein, veggies, and good healthy fats/oils.
– You might have had some snacks throughout the day from things like nuts, seeds, fruits, veggies, protein shakes.
– You haven’t had any ‘junk food’, processed foods, soft drinks or too much alcohol
– You’ve drunk a couple of litres of water
– You’ve done 30-60 mins of high intensity exercise consisting of weight training and/or interval training (or you trained yesterday or you’re training tomorrow)
– Ideally you haven’t been completely sedentary all day, you’ve walked around a little, been active and used your body a little bit
If you can make it a habit to do these little things on a daily basis, you’ll get great results.
Remember there’s no quick fix, the results you get will be in direct proportion to the action you take and the little decisions you make every day that take you one extra step in the right direction.
So starting today – why don’t you see how many consecutive steps forward you can take in a row?…
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