How to know whether you’re on the right track

A conversation that’s come up a lot recently with my clients is the question of ‘where should I be?’

We’ve heard that comparison is the thief of joy, but sometimes we want a point of comparison - either in hopes that it will spur us on or give us some point of reference for how to manage our expectations with what we’re going after.

We love a transformation story. Whether it’s about someone starting a successful business and making enough money to buy their family all nice cars, or whether it’s about someone losing a huge amount of weight and then going on to run ultra-marathons - hearing about someone’s ‘hard work paying off’ feels inspiring because it gives us hope that change is a possibility if we’re willing to put in the effort. 

There’s a video that’s going viral on YouTube where a group of fitness influencers were asked how they achieved their physiques without using anabolic steroids. All of the interviewees were drug tested in the video to ‘prove’ that they had natural physiques. However, the video was met with a huge amount of scepticism from the fitness community, because some of the athletes in the video had a lot of tell-tale signs that they probably did use steroids, and might have just taken some time off using them before shooting this particular video. 

In the video, hugely dramatic transformations were shown - very slim, young men in their late teens with minimal muscle, supposedly gaining upwards of 20 kilos of muscle within 1.5 years of lifting weights. Their claim was that they just ‘ate heaps of chicken and broccoli, and trained really hard’. 

Here’s the thing - whether or not these claims are true or not, because these kinds of very drastic transformations are the ones that gain so much visibility, it can directly skew our expectations of what is realistically possible for us to achieve. 

A teenage boy watching that specific video might not have many other sources of information to suggest that gaining 20 kilos of muscle in a year and a half of training would be nearly impossible to achieve naturally, and for him to find out the hard way that it isn’t - could be incredibly discouraging or make him think that he’s doing something wrong.

With weight loss, we can come across transformations of people who’ve lost huge amounts of weight and almost look like different people. Many of them might have used a GLP-1 type medication, or undergone weight-loss surgery, and they don’t always disclose that they have. Though these people certainly don’t need to, it’s the before-and-after pictures that end up going viral, which might not have that context, that can affect the expectations of other people who are on a weight loss journey coming across those images. 

When I sometimes tell people that their goal weight is likely too low, I can see how disappointed it can make them feel, especially if their goal weight is a weight that they used to sit comfortably at for years. Sometimes, we use our past self as a point of reference for where we think we should be now - and that’s because if we’re navigating a phase in our life that is different to how it used to be, we might struggle to build a set of expectations for what this current phase should look like for us.

I get clients who have ‘always managed to bounce back’ every time that they’ve gained weight, up until all of a sudden (kids, menopause, new job, injury, etc) happened - and now they’ve gained more weight than they have previously, and they’re at a sticking point. Their expectation is ‘Since I always bounce back, this shouldn’t be any different’. Except, things might be very different from how they used to be, and we might need to shift our expectations to work within that. 

I think we get hung up on the idea of what’s possible, instead of what’s realistic or sustainable.

I know that sounds boring - but here’s the thing,

Extreme change might be possible, but it might stretch your capacity of what you can put in and may significantly interfere with your quality of life and your overall well-being to get there. Do you really want to be spending 3 hours a day exercising and eating bland food every day just so that you can look the way that you think will make you happy? 

I know it’s not very David Goggins of me to discourage you from pushing yourself to your absolute limit in all ways, but I just don’t think that’s necessarily healthy for us either.

All of this is to say - 

You can’t really compare yourself to other people, because even if from the outside it looks like their starting point is similar to yours, it might actually be quite different behind the curtains.

Though it’s great to have goals, I don’t think we need to fixate on them as much as we sometimes do. Rather, it’s much better to focus on the process. Is what you’re doing helping you feel better on a day-to-day basis (however that looks like for you)? 

If that’s the case, you’re probably heading in the right direction and doing okay, and really - that’s the most important thing anyway.