If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
We’ve all heard that phrase since childhood. Usually, it came along with scraped knees after falling off a bike. Or accidentally coloring outside the lines despite our best artistic efforts. Or by swinging the bat and striking out again, and again, and again.
If all it took to derail our progress was one – or dozens, maybe hundreds – of mistakes and missteps, we would never learn and grow and eventually, succeed.
We can never know success without first enduring the failures.
Knowing this, why is it that every time a diet “fails,” or we don’t quite see the progress on the scale, we give up?
Nutrition will always be a lot less straightforward than lifting weights: in the gym, we lift bars and plates, and if it feels easy, so we grab heavier weights. Or we squeeze out more reps than last time. Or we do more work in the same 60 minutes.
In other words, it’s always more: more weight; more reps; more work, and you get stronger.
For fat loss or weight management, the answer is less: fewer total calories consumed during the day will lead to weight or fat loss.
If you’re in the gym regularly you’re aware of how much weight you’re lifting each session. Or hopefully tracking your progress in an app or good ol’ pen and paper.
But is your food being tracked? Are your dietary choices in line with your goals? If you’re not tracking but instead “feeling things out” you will become frustrated. In fact, did you know that people regularly underestimate their calorie intake by 20-50%?
In other words, despite our best efforts to “eat better” or “eat clean,” we end up with undesirable results on the scale.
And I think that’s a good thing.
If you’re lifting weights, going for walks, and watching what you eat most of the time and your weight isn’t changing that is good information to know and to use. It means that all of your efforts in the gym and in the kitchen are keeping your bodyweight exactly where it wants to be.
Which means there is something there we can re-work and refine.
So, you lift weights a few times a week and you walk every day. It’s hard to scale up that activity level since that’s already a lot. If we can’t do more exercise, then we should look to our nutrition habits and see what we can do there.
This is where a nutrition diary or a food scale is an incredibly helpful tool: it will force you to be more honest and precise with your nutrition habits. It’s like our whiteboards at the gym: we can’t know where to make changes and improvements if we don’t have a baseline.
If after tracking your nutrition and keeping an eye on things doesn’t pan out like you hoped, don’t panic! Again – this is useful information. Take what we’ve learned over the past couple weeks with our habits and start making adjustments.
Even the act of tracking nutrition will often open your eyes to how easy it is to overeat even the simplest things.
It surprises you.
So, get to work and start tracking, planning, or recording your dietary choices. See where you are or where you end up. If after a few weeks you don’t see the scale moving the way you’d like, go back to your playbook and see where some simple changes can start nudging you in the right direction.
Track. Eat. Measure. Adjust. Get things wrong so you can start getting things right.
Got questions? Shoot me an email response or a text and let’s work it out! I’m here to help, so use me as a resource!
Good luck and see you soon!