I read a Nerd Fitness article and there is good stuff.
I imagine you took you 1st January’s resolutions to have a better body. Do you always to that ?
88 % of people fail to reach their fitness resolutions for a year ! Yes, studies prove it. But there are 12 % who succeed. Let’s see.
Momentum
I’ll use the game « Super Mario Bros » to explain. When we start the game, we’re small, we don’t have armor (or powers). If we run on an enemy, we lose a life and we start at the beginning of the stage. We restart, we restart and we restart.
And if on our way we find a mushroom, we change, we become bigger and stronger. We can be hit by an enemy one time without restart the stage. If we can continue without being hit, we can fin a Fire Flower. We can attack our enemies at a distance and we must be hit three times to restart the stage.
Healthy eating habits
Everything is difficult when we start something new. We need to be careful because we’re attacking from everywhere. The Matrix use parties, birtdays or advertisements to prevent you from having a healthy diet.
Each times we don’t resist to these attacks (temptations), we feel we have failed and restart to the beginning. The truth is that every day is a success. If in the day you eat one healthy meal, it’s a success !
By giving our maximum to eat a healthy meal a day, we build our strength, then you’ll eat 2 healthy meals a day and we’ll become stronger and so on. Little by little we build a healthy eating habits and we’ll find the Fire Flower to attack enemies like in « Super Mario Bros ».
Short Time Diet
The problem I have with these « diets » is that is a temporary food change to achieve a result adn then return to old habits.
For 6 months people struggle to lose weight and then gain even more weight than before. I see my friends do this and I can tell you that every 2 years, everybody notices that they gained a lot of fat. It’s weird.
Diets are like invincible star in « Super Mario Bros », it’s a power that lasts 10 seconds. We can go very far in the stage without being hit by enemies. The problem is when we take the invincible star when we’re small and after we have to fight the Boss. The Boss hit us one time and we restart the stage.
We have more change to beat the Boss when we cross the stage slowly by accumulating coins and power up that we can find rather than invincible star.
To change your diet, it’s the same principle, it’s the transition to a new lifestyle. It’s not temporary, it’s a lifestyle to be healthy all the days of the year all the life.
Education
To can change food habits effictively, educating on food is very important. Sugar in processed food is very addictive. When we stop to eat processed foods, we my be lacking as an addict, having a crisis and eating a large amount of it. It’s for this reason we call it « junk food », foods for junkies.
Sugar has the same chemical reaction than cocaine in our brain. Read this article .
Like a junkie we say :
-
« Just one it’s not bad »
-
« Why I need to lose weight, it’s no use »
-
« I stop to eat it tomorrow »
Slowly but surely
I took several months before getting used to a healthy diet. Each month, I had food goal. It’s was like eat a healthy meal during the day, drink green tea, buy only 2 cookies packs during the week, drink a little bottle of water. From month to month, it became easier without having a hug desire for sugar. And if I a desire for sugar (because it still happen), I eat a teaspoon of honey (mmmmh, honey is so good).
I think it took me 9 months to have a complete healty diet. Now, I always adjust my food with smartphone’s application MyFitnessPal and it’s fun because adjust my food is like do an update with an application, it’s cool.
Execution
The first time we play « Super Mario Bros », we don’t have weapon and armor. We know if we’re hit one time, we restart the stage and a enemy come to us. We press all buttons on the controller to understand how to make move Mario. Serously at this precise moment we don’t think, we execute.
To start we a healthy diet is the same thing.
Perfect meal ?
Forget that, eat pasta or rice with vegetable with meat, tuna or eggs.
Perfect breakfast ?
Forget that, eat oatmeal or a plate of pasta or rice with vegetable with meat, tuna or eggs (it’s really my beakfast, I’m not joking)
Let’s do both things at the same time : education and execution.
What is your worst diet you tested ?
-Steph
P.S. Do you want a free training program ? Click here