How to stop falling off the wagon

Over the course of my own health and fitness journey, depending on whatever was my main source of information at the time, I’d usually have a clear set of rules in my head around what I needed to be doing in order to be ‘good’ (I really was that child that thrived on getting gold stars for everything wasn’t I).

Whether it was tracking macros, strictly avoiding certain ingredients, getting a minimum 10,000 steps a day or successfully only eating bananas for an entire day (don’t ask) - for a long time I had a very black and white idea of what being healthy meant in terms of specific ‘do’s’ and ‘don’t’s’.

However, I came to the realisation (which now forms the rationale behind my approach with clients), that when you are living by a set of rules, you assign morality to every single action that you take. Gym on saturday morning = good, drinks on saturday night = bad. Green smoothie for breakfast = good, grabbing a takeaway muffin and a coffee because you’re running late = bad. 

Every time that you do something that you’ve labelled as ‘bad’, you’re building a narrative about yourself that is likely to affect future behaviours. The more ‘bad’ actions that you take, the more likely you are to describe yourself in ways like ‘impulsive’, or ‘lazy’ or that you ‘lack willpower’. What used to happen to me, and what I’ve seen happen with clients over the years, is that obsessing over trying to be ‘good’ can lead to a drastic pendulum swing in the opposite direction once keeping up with all those rules becomes too difficult.

I’ve seen this described as the ‘f*ck-it mentality’, because that is exactly what happens! It all gets too much, it’s too overwhelming, you get tired of being hungry and saying ‘no’ all the time, and you’re also just straight-up tired. So you decide that life’s too short to be saying no to chocolate, and then a row of chocolate turns into a whole block, which turns into ordering pizza for dinner, which turns into skipping the gym, which eventually turns into feeling like you’re too far gone to ever get back into it. 

This is why I don’t believe in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods anymore. Food is just food! There are of course, more nutrient dense foods, and foods that might offer us a hit of pleasure and not (as much) nutrition, but that doesn’t make those foods inherently bad for us. It is helpful to understand the basics of what constitutes a healthy diet, but that does not mean that every single meal of every single day must meet that criterion. Recognising that there is still a benefit to enjoying an ice cream with a friend, or trying a new restaurant, or even grabbing an occasional pie for lunch, doesn’t mean that everything has been thrown out the window.

This is what’s allowed me to be ‘diet-free’ for over 6 years, without ever feeling like I’ve become out of control with my eating habits or that I need a ‘reset’. Earlier this year, when I was experiencing some pretty bad post-viral fatigue, I had to take 6 weeks off from exercising. The old me would have seen that as a massive failure, and likely would have turned to emotional eating because I was feeling so sorry for myself. Current me knows that taking those 6 weeks off from exercising was the right thing for me to do during that time. 

I think that maturing in your health and fitness journey is realising that perfection doesn’t exist, that any hard rules that you come across are arbitrary (and are red flags in a practitioner if I’m honest), and that obsession can often backfire. If you’re comfortable with slow progress, I always think the best way to transform your health is through gradual changes over time that make sense to you, that you don’t feel bound to, that allow for flexibility to accommodate whatever life throws at you. 

Take care,

Lx