“Rome wasn’t built in a day”. I’m sure everyone’s heard this phrase. Today I want to help you understand how building healthy lifestyles and Rome are alike. Basically, we often get caught in the day-to-day of our workouts or food choices without getting above it all to see the progress that is really happening.
Cut yourself some slack
What do I mean by cutting yourself some slack?
We hope to instill and teach our clients how to establish healthy lifestyles, not diets. Healthy lifestyles allow for wiggle room, ‘bad days’ and ebbs and flows of greater adherence to good food choices and exercise/activity. That’s ok! Diets are more stringent in their rules. Diets are laden with, “no’s”, “don’ts” and “can’ts”. Many hyper-focus on the daily missteps, failures and shortcomings. Rather, we adopt a grander view of the weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly successes in adopting healthy habits.
Healthy Lifestyles Require The Long Game
Alex Lickerman, M.D. says, “Long term weight gain or loss, it turns out, isn’t correlated to calorie intake on any one day but rather to calorie intake over a period of time, which essentially means if you overeat here or there on a few days only, it won’t actually affect your long-term ability to lose weight.” (1)
For this reason the key here is whether the choice (over-eating during Thanksgiving dinner for example) is something that is a one-time event or whether it’s a chronic, residual problem. If you stuff yourself and then step on the scale you’re not going to be happy with yourself and probably will begin the self-flagellations. Healthy habits aren’t built in a day and aren’t destroyed in a day either. Weight fluctuates greatly each day. Looking at your weight over a longer period will show you whether you are trending in the right direction.
Stop beating yourself up! Enjoy yourself. Do what you can to keep some healthy habits. For example, if you’re out at a dinner party-fill up with veggies first. Then eat the other less-healthy but SO delicious stuff afterwards. Whatever you decide, remember that if you “fall off the wagon” you can quickly and relatively easily get back on the wagon with little to no detriment. This is provided that you’re not spending the majority of the time on the ground and not in the wagon.
If you need some pointers on how to get more results from exercise, check out our FREE 30 minute webinar.
And remember, Happy Holidays!
References:
1. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/200910/5-steps-changing-any-behavior