Diet Consistency: The Key to Your Fitness Goals

You don’t have to live on a diet of boiled chicken, brown rice and broccoli to have weight loss success BUT, a certain amount of diet consistency is vital to reaching your body composition goals. Fat loss, muscle gain, endurance training…tell me your goal and I’ll show you why consistency matters.

You wake up Monday morning and you’re motivated to eat “clean” all week.

You don’t drink alcohol (byyyyye rose), you go to spin class 3 days this week and you actually hit 10,000 steps on Thursday.

You’re on fire.

And then Friday rolls around and you’re asking “willpower who?”.

At happy hour, one margarita leads to three which leads to a hangover Saturday morning. You skip spin for brunch and before you know it, it’s Sunday night and you’re regretting that leftover pizza you ate for breakfast. So you end up throwing out the junk food and vowing to start fresh tomorrow morning.

We’ve all been there.

But that kind of inconsistent lifestyle is a) confusing your body and b) not going to get you the results you want.

Time to flip the consistency switch…

(but first, a little bit about healthy brunching here).

I’m going to walk you through…

• Why your body thrives on consistency
• What diet consistency looks like (and what it doesn’t look like)
• Strategies to make it work
• Consistency in exercise: bonus fit points

If consistency sounds like the peaceful lake of eating habits to your storm-churned ocean, read on.

Your body on consistency

You are a creature of habit

You are complex. You breathe and digest, blink and grow nails, produce and think about what you’re doing next all while reading this blog, painting your fingernails and deciding what you want for lunch.

#multitaskingatitsfinest

HOW do you get it all done?

Habit.

The actions that you take over and over again, day after day, you do without having to consciously thinking about them. You can brush your teeth and start the coffee at the same time because both movements are habitual. You get hungry around noon because you habitually eat lunch at 12:30 and your body is used to that. If something is on your mind while you are eating, you might not notice that you’re halfway through the bag of chips because…habit.

Habit allows you to be complex. If you had to think about walking every time you needed to go somewhere, you’d have very little time left in your day to do…anything else.

Change is hard

Habits = security, normalcy, comfort. Even when we fully understand that breaking a habit could be beneficial to our health or happiness, change is hard.

Your body resists change because it is comfortable in homeostasis. Homeostasis is why, and how, your body regulates the proper temperature, metabolizes the food you eat, produces hormones, etc.

It takes more effort to change your routine (physically and mentally), and your body is so used to conserving effort (read: energy), to survive (thanks ancestors), that your body actually resists.

Gosh what a Debbie downer I am…

Diet Consistency…what’s that look like?

To be clear: consistency ≠ perfection

Now that I’ve convinced you that your body is going to resist you every step of the way (great trainer pep-talk, Julia)…

It turns out that getting healthier and hitting your fitness goals does not require you to be a perfect angel. Making changes does does not require you to flip your world upside down.

Yippee!

In fact, putting in any effort at all (over your norm), counts!

Moreover, focusing on putting effort into small, managable changes instead of flip-your-world-upside-down changes, is the best long-term strategy for health!

Diet Consistency…what that means for YOU

The key to your fitness goals? 

Committing to healthier eating changes that you are confident you can be consistent with.

The changes that you make and the amount of consistency that you commit to are entirely related to YOU.

If you currently eat zero vegetables in a day, adding just 1 or 2 vegetables will make a difference!

If you can’t imagine a dinner time when you sit down with your family to mindfully eat a home cooked, whole foods-oriented meal…don’t start there.

Start with something you KNOW you can nail (maybe a whole-foods oriented meal delivered to your door step…or a home cooked meal that was batch cooked 3 days ago).

The Diet Consistency Game Plan

Think of healthy eating as a spectrum. Instead of “good” and “bad” food, there is only “healthier” foods and “less healthy” foods.

What’s that look like, Julia?

I’ll give you an example:

Lila is a mom of 2 girls, both under 12. She works part-time for the library, which (for better or worse), is located in the heart of town, and surrounded by numerous restaurants. Lila packs lunch for her girls in the morning, cleans up and lets the dog out, all while getting ready to be at the library by 8:30 am. She can’t even imagine having time to eat breakfast or pack lunch for herself so her typical lunch involves…

• A buffalo chicken wrap, a bag of chips (she hasn’t eaten since last night!), and a diet Coke. She eats at her desk while answering e-mails.

She wants to make a change – Lila knows she needs to eat healthier to set an example for her girls, and she’d like to lose a bit of weight that she’s noticed in the mirror lately.

But flipping her world upside down to go Keto (her best friend is losing weight on the Keto diet), or committing to packing lunch every morning (who’s got time for that)…Lila commits to what she KNOWS she can commit to doing consistently: eating a healthier lunch during the work week. So lunch becomes…

• A grilled chicken wrap with extra veggies and buffalo sauce, an apple and a small bag of chips, and an iced tea.

Lila feels great. She’s motivated by the success she’s seen simply by making small, healthier choices so in a couple of weeks, she pushes a bit more. Now she orders…

• A buffalo grilled chicken salad with extra veggies, an apple and a small bag of popcorn, and a seltzer water.

Within a couple of weeks, Lila has made huge progress to her lunch meal, and she feels motivated that she can, indeed, succeed with this whole diet thing!

Action Time!

Make it work for YOU in real life.

Knowledge is power

No food is off limits, but understanding which foods are more nutritionally valuable to your body can go a long way in affecting the choices you make.

Protein: Prioritize lean, fresh, minimally processed foods. For example:

Eat more: chicken, turkey, eggs, fish

Eat some: tofu, Canadian bacon, deli meat

Eat less: fried meats, high fat ground meats, processed meats and soy

Carbs: Prioritize lean, fresh, minimally processed foods and lots of color. For example:

Eat more: whole grains, fresh fruit, and potatoes

Eat some: white breads and processed grains, flavored yogurt, dried fruit

Eat less: juice, soda, pastries, French fries, chips, cookies

Fats: Prioritize minimally processed foods from a variety of healthy sources. For example:

Eat more: avocado, nuts, seeds, olive oil, coconut

Eat some: canola oil, cream, flavored nut butters

Eat less: margarine, processed cheese, hydrogenated oils

Hopefully you can see how easily these changes can be made SUBTLY, without disrupting your daily routine.

Track it

How do you know if you are being consistent? You track it!

This isn’t counting calories.

This isn’t keeping a food journal.

This definitely isn’t weighing out portion sizes.

This IS creating a chart in a notebook, or calendar, or google doc, and marking off each day or meal that you count as a WIN.

Here’s what I do…

I make space in my Passion Planner to track the habits that I’m focusing on for the week. I’m obsessed with my Passion Planner and it’s with me 24/7 – so it’s the perfect place to track diet consistency habits.

(p.s. get 10% any Passion Planner order $14.99+ by clicking the pic below – HIGHLY recommended)!

Make it fit YOUR world

Where you start, and where you want to end up, is entirely up to you.

You might already eat fairly healthy, but your fitness goals are powerful enough and important enough in your life that you know you need to make changes. 

or…

You might be 100% new to this diet game and really just want to feel better every day, and you know you need to make changes.

Diet consistency: decide what you can do CONSISTENTLY, and start there. Nail that habit before moving on to the next.

Patience, grasshopper.

*BONUS* Fitness + Exercise Consistency

What is beautiful about everything you just learned: consistency, commitment, small changes, tracking…is that it works in so many ways.

What fitness consistency means for yOU

Once again, the key word in that phrase is YOU. You determine where you start and where you want to end up.

(psst…that’s called Goals).

Once you nail that, you break those goals down into the small, actionable steps that you can 100% commit to and stay consistent with.

Your Fitness Consistency Game Plan

Let’s use a different example…how about Lauren?

Lauren wants to run a half marathon. She’s never run more than a 5k but she’s determined that 13.1 is her next goal.

This is not the first time Lauren has committed to a half marathon. But THIS time is different because THIS time, Lauren is going to take smaller, consistent steps that she knows she can commit to 100%.

So first she signs up for a 5k. She ramps up her training to 3 times a week, a frequency that she is sure she can commit to.

She tracks her wins.

After that, once she is comfortable in the 5k/three times a week space, Lauren signs up for a 10k and increases her training frequency by 1 day.

She tracks her wins.

You see where I’m going with this…

YOUR TURN

There is magic to this concept of diet consistency. Without a doubt, EVERYONE can succeed at being healthier, fitter and more motivated simply by committing to 100% doable goals, staying consistent and tracking their wins.