Progress Over Perfection: The Correct Mindset for Sustainable Fitness
Ever missed a planned workout and feel like a failure after? Or ate a unplanned ‘cheat meal’ only to feel utterly guilty for the rest of the day? Maybe even looked at instagram models and compare yourself with them, believing that you’re not doing enough?
Well, you’re not alone. In fact, many people view training and nutrition in this manner. They think that everything has to be perfect in order to be successful in losing weight or gaining muscle. But the truth is quite the opposite. Expecting things to go flawless can actually get in the way of accomplishing your goals. It can take the joy away from working out. It can make dieting so painful. It can make the whole fitness journey extremely stressful. More importantly, it can make you feel guilty when you’ve actually done absolutely nothing wrong.
Fortunately, there is a much better way to think of fitness. That is choosing progress over perfection. Instead of leaving you guilt-ridden, progress can inspire, excite, and sustain the way you eat and train. You’ll feel happier because there is more to celebrate and enjoy. And in this article, we will look at some ways to focus on progress instead of perfection.
5 Ways to Make Weight Loss Less Stressful
Losing weight , like any other goal that you choose to work towards, can be stressful. On the surface, weight loss can be as simple as “Calories in, Calories out” and “Exercise more, Eat less”. But because of stress, it can be much more complicated than that.
A little stress can be good - it motivates you, pushes you, and keeps you on your toes. But if you are too stressed out, you lose your healthy habits, you sleep less, you skip workouts, and you eat highly palatable food for comfort. Your energy gets depleted which could have been used for self-control. Hormones are also induced which tells your body to store body fat. This creates a downward spiral that makes weight loss harder than it already is. In fact, stress has shown to have strong links with obesity.
If you’re experiencing the above symptoms due to stress, you should know that weight loss isn't meant to be like that. Here are some ways you can make weight loss less stressful and more manageable.
6 Small Lifestyle Habits to Lose Weight without Trying too Hard
Many times, losing weight can feel daunting. It seems like making huge changes in your life like meal prepping and spending hours in the gym is the only way to achieve your goals. Fortunately, that is not how sustainable weight loss works. Making such a drastic change can help you lose weight fast, but it will not be lasting. What we should aim to achieve here is to lose weight and keep it off.
And how do we achieve that? Through making small changes to your existing lifestyle! As you incorporate minor adjustments day by day, you’ll soon begin to see how they can add up to something very significant. The more these adjustments are repeated, the stronger and more automatic the habit will be, and you’ll be more likely to stick to them.
We have seen how powerful a habit can be in my previous article. Now we will specifically look at small habits we can make to achieve sustainable weight loss. Let’s dive right in.
How to Stop the Unhealthy Diet Mentality of “All-or-Nothing”
Picture this: You’ve been extremely strict with your diet and eating ‘healthy’ all week by cycling the same types of food from Monday to Friday - Steamed chicken breast, brown rice, boiled eggs, and broccoli. You go all out tracking your food, chasing every grain of rice that falls off the food scale. You stay away from all kinds of snacks and desserts across the weekdays, just to follow the guidelines you have set for yourself.
And then comes the weekend. By then, you’ve been so sick of eating the same foods over and over again, and enough of being overly stressed about your food restrictions. Your willpower snaps, and you give yourself the license in indulge in whatever you want. You stuff yourself with desserts and drinks, eating way beyond what you usually do. The worst thing is that you feel terribly guilty after, hating yourself for the lack of control, and promise yourself you would restrict yourself for the whole week as a form of punishment.
Does that sound like you? If it is, it can be very tiring, right? Well, the good news is, this vicious cycle of restrict, indulge and guilt should not be the way you diet! In fact, the biggest reason why people fail their diet plans is because they are too restrictive, as seen in this study.
In this article, we will look at some of the common unhealthy “All-or-Nothing” mentalities and how to curb them. Let’s dive in.
Evidence-Based Guide to Fitness Habits
Have you ever looked at a fit person and wondered how he or she stayed this lean all year round? How would it be possible for that person to eat healthy all the time, and show up to the gym 5 times a week without fail?
Chances are, you probably know someone like that. And you might think to yourself that he or she is just an extremely motivated individual, hard-wired to enjoy the tortures of life.
Well, the good (or bad) news is that it is nearly impossible to sustain such motivation for long periods of time. The fact is that this ‘madly driven’ person you wish you could be, would actually find it very hard to continuously endure such pains too.
So how does this person resist temptations and stick to the program all the time? The answer lies in changing habits.
In this article, I’ll be taking a scientific approach on how to build good habits for fitness and how to break bad ones. Let’s dive in.
Enduring Pain is the Road to Success
Everyone experiences pain in their lifetime, whether it’s the physical pain of accidentally knocking into something, mental pain of waking up early to get to work, or emotional pain when you lose someone you love. But what exactly is pain and how is it related to fitness?
Pain is basically a discomfort highly associated with effort. When your body is put through an environment that it is not used to, it will warrant attention to your brain through pain. This can be either psychological or physiological. As you push yourself beyond your body’s limit, your brain will try and protect you by saying, “Hey, this does not right, stop whatever you’re doing and take a break!”
However, when done right, pain is actually necessary for growth, both physical and mental. It is therefore important to make sense of and find purpose of the pain. How you handle pain can define how successful you are, not only in achieving your fitness goals, but your life goals as well.
In this article, I will be going through the types of pain you will experience during your fitness journey, the positives of pain, and tips to endure pain. Let’s dig in.
Surround Yourself with Right People
The people you surround yourself with will be the biggest influence on your (fitness) life.
According to research, the people you habitually associate yourself with can determine as much as 95% of your success or failure in life. We are actually way more affected by our environment than we think. In the words of motivational speaker Jim Rohn: You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. These people affect what sorts of conversations you participate in, what lifestyle you follow, and your attitude and behavior about certain issues. Eventually, you start to think, behave and make decisions like them.
Therefore, it is important to hang out with the right people for healthy personal growth.
Check out these tips / practical steps you can take to improve your social environment and better achieve your goals!
The 5 Biggest Fat Loss Mistakes
Here’s a situation I’m sure many of us faced before. You step on the scale, seeing the numbers increase daily, or look at your belly in the mirror, realizing it is forming layers and layers day after day. You tell yourself you have to do something about it, and make a resolution this year to lose weight.
You know you have to eat less and get some form of exercise on most days of the week. You follow quick fixes from the internet like crazy fad diets and bulletproof coffee. You feel good, but when you step on that scale again and look in the mirror, nothing has changed. You wonder what you’re doing wrong and by the second month, you throw in the towel and give up.
You’re not alone. In fact, a study showed that although 77% maintained their resolutions for 1 week, only 19% continued for 2 years. What makes that 19% succeed where millions have failed? They do a lot of the right things, of course. But we must first be able to recognize the mistakes we are making, correct them, and then we can be on our way to achieve our fitness goals.
Check out the 5 biggest and most common fat loss mistakes!
6 Tips on Staying Motivated
You know exercise and nutrition are good for you. It controls your weight, reduces risks of diseases, and improves your mental health and mood.
Doing it though, is another thing. In particular, overcoming the inertia to get started can be a huge first step.
But sticking to a workout and nutrition program is even harder. It takes deep, lasting, dedication, consistency and motivation. That’s why more than a third of the world’s population is overweight.
Furthermore, many think that exercise and nutrition have to be torturous, time-consuming and/or exhausting, therefore avoiding it.
Not having the right motivation coupled with the negative views of exercise and nutrition have caused millions of people to start a program only to quit halfway.
In this article, I’ll be sharing on some tips that can help you to stay motivated.
Do you Need to Give 100% to Achieve your Fitness Goals?
“All or nothing! Give your 100% in whatever you do! Reach for the skies!” These are some quotes that many people live by. You have to go all in if you want something. You have to push yourself to the hardest to get results. You have to aim for the highest if not there’s no point even trying. Or at least really close. Sometimes it isn’t distinct in the way that people verbalize it, but it is implicit in the way they discuss it.
It seems like that’s the hype now. And I can see why. I used to feel that way too. If I want to achieve something, in this case to build muscle and lose fat, I should make sure I am doing every single thing right. If I’m serious about my fitness results, I should clock the optimum number of workouts, eat the exact number of calories, protein, fat and carbs, wake up and sleep at the same time every day, and adhere to all the things I set myself out to do. And if I don’t, I’m just not maximizing what I can do and it’ll be a huge waste.
But is this really true? Do you need to give your 100% to achieve your fitness goals? If not, how much is enough? Read on to find out more!