Diet Motivation – What to do when things go wrong

When you first start out on a new healthy lifestyle or diet you’re a bag of energy and motivation. But it’s often not long before things either slowly slip back to how they were, or come screeching to a very sudden and depressing halt. Why is that? And more importantly, how can we capture that early strength and motivation to ensure that we never fail again? It is possible, so lets find out how…

There has to be a reason for why we slip up and struggle when we make changes to our lives, and in this article I will give you some actions and suggestions that can help you get straight back in the saddle and feel stronger and more motivated than ever. But before we get to the tips, it is important to understand why we often give in to the pressure and lose our motivation.

How & Why We Lose Motivation and Give Up Our Diet

When we lose sight of our objectives and fall off the diet-wagon it is often in one of two circumstances:

1. Either – we slowly slip back into old habits (‘why not have a coffee, after all it is just one coffee’/ ‘well it is the weekend, just one glass of wine can’t hurt’)
2. OR – things just come to a crashing halt (often alcohol fuelled!) in which you have a massive blow-out and wake up the next day with bits of chocolate stuck to your face, crisps on your clothes and a belly-ache from hell.

So why does this happen?

It would take me all year to dive into all of the psychological reasons that people do not stick to their objectives, but I believe that when it comes to health and fitness changes/goals there are a few key reasons for failure which crop up time and time again and will have been experienced by most of you at least once:

• The Pressure Cooker: or the ‘cycle of (dis)comfort’. I first heard this scenario being described on an Anthony Robbins CD a few years ago and it really resonated with me. The ‘pressure cooker’ works like this –
  1. Your body/fitness gradually deteriorates without you really noticing, or it happens so slowly that you do not notice it getting worse and worse
  2. Then – BANG – something happens that shocks you into action. Maybe you went to try on a pair of trousers and realised that you were suddenly three sizes bigger, or perhaps you had to run to catch a bus and realised you couldn’t get 10 metres down the road without wheezing.
  3. This provides enough of a jolt to make you decide there and then: THINGS ARE GOING TO CHANGE AROUND HERE…RIGHT NOW!
  4. So you go on a diet, join the gym, start running etc etc etc and things start to improve.
  5. You drop a dress/trouser size, people complement you on how great you look and you feel much happier
  6. Now that the pressure has been released from the cooker, your determination starts to wane and you fall into a routine, rather than waking up every day with the determination you had on day one.
  7. As the pressure disappears you start to say ‘yes’ more than ‘no’ to things you know you shouldn’t, you find an excuse to miss the gym today and old habits start to creep back in
  8. Without you realising, the pressure is building up in the cooker again as your old bad habits start to outweigh your new habits and your weight loss/fitness stagnates and starts slipping backwards again
  9. And all of a sudden – BANG – something happens that shocks you into action and the pressure cooker starts again!

  The pressure cooker affects so many of us and largely explains why so many of us experience the yo-yo of weight loss, weight gain, weight loss, weight gain…

• Not Really Wanting It: the second biggest reason why we so often fail to follow through on our lifestyle changes is because we do not have enough of a reason. We think we should be more healthy but we don’t know really why we should do it, or worse still – we think we should but do not really want to. This obviously leads to a lack of motivation and drive and is a big contributor to why so many positive lifestyle changes go flying out of the window the moment the going gets tough. This is particularly pertinent to people who are trying to give up smoking – many of them think they should, but do not actually want to.
• The Sudden Crash: This is when a sudden halt/bad day/random crash sends your new lifestyle into an immediate downward spiral. Often accompanied by a few too many drinks, the sudden crash robs your desire and motivation and leads to a ‘what’s the point’ moment. From here many people then just kinda think that it isn’t worth carrying on because you’ve gone and wasted all of your prior hard work. Typically, it then takes another big motivator to come along and get you to start all over again.
• You Don’t See Results: so you get your ass down to the gym every day for a week/month, eat nowt but seeds and salads but you still don’t see the desired results. And so what happens? You lose motivation and slip back to your old habits. The cause of this demotivation is often because you are measuring the wrong thing or looking for the wrong result – but we will get back to this.
• Too Little, Too Late – this source of demotivation is when you give yourself a ludicrous task – such as ‘I gotta lose x pounds before my wedding/holiday/interview’ etc – which creates enormous pressure. While pressure is good, and important, it can also be your biggest enemy if it is not managed. So in this scenario the motivation wanes when you do see results, but they are too slow. When you set insurmountable goals you really are doing yourself absolutely no good at all.

What To Do When You Have Slipped Up on Your Diet

We have all been there, we all slip up and we all feel like we have let ourselves down. From here we make a decision and that decision takes us one of two ways: either we give up, or we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and march on. If you have been here before and want to take the second route then read on…

W. Mitchell: It’s not what happens to you; it’s what you do about it that makes the difference.

These 8 suggestions can be taken and used as desired, but they work best when you use them all together. So without further adieu here are the eight steps to getting back into your healthy lifestyle with gusto and strength:

1. Don’t Beat Yourself Up:The single most important thing is not to beat yourself up, dwell on the negativity of the situation and give up on yourself. The first thing you have to is pick yourself up and dust yourself off. Now is not the time for wallowing in self-pity, blaming anyone or anything.

   There is absolutely no reason to give up, throw in the towel and condemn yourself to a life of unhealthy choices, excess weight and zero fitness you’ve still got everything to play for!

2. Mindset:

   You have to realise that these things happen, and it is from your mistakes and challenges that you learn the most about yourself. If you can switch to this mindset then you are half way there.

   Whenever I have let myself down with my lifestyle choices I try to think about the situation and the circumstances and then extract all of the positives I can from it.

   Zig Ziglar: It’s not the situation, but whether we react (negative) or respond (positive) to the situation that’s important.

3. Learn from Your Mistakes: Everything happens for a reason. You can never be 100% perfect – and nobody is. No matter what they say. We all have moments of weakness and we all have the opportunity to either make the same mistakes over and over or we can learn from our mistakes, improve ourselves and move on. Let’s face it, the success of a new lifestyle or diet is dependent upon our choices. The long chain of choices we make until you reach or goals or until your new ideal lifestyle becomes your habitual, natural lifestyle.

   If you do not chose to learn from your mistakes then it doesn’t matter how much motivation you have next time, if the same situation presents itself then you are likely to follow the same pattern of behaviour.

   For instance, if you have gone to a party, had a few too many drinks and then eaten waaaay to much then you can’t dwell on the negatives. You have to learn why you did what you did and then work out how you can change and grow to make sure that you make a more positive choice next time.

   What has this taught you about yourself?

   What could you learn from this that will help you to make a more positive decision in the future? What did you associate to those types of decisions and actions and could you change those associations (A mental connection or relation between thoughts, feelings, ideas, or sensations/A remembered or imagined feeling, emotion, idea, or sensation linked to a person, object, or idea) now to give them new meanings? Could you anchor a new meaning to this?

   The key idea here is that you have to understand why you made the decisions you made so that you can learn to make more positive choices in the future.

   Einstein
   Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

4. Assess, Rewrite and Reaffirm your Goals: If you were not doing this on a regular basis before then you should start doing it now. If you didn’t have a written set of specific, measurable short, medium and long-term goals then you definitely need to do that now. If you fall into this latter group I have put a list of great goal setting resources at the end of this post.

   So, presuming you did write a list of goals at the beginning of your journey, now is the time to revisit them and reacquaint yourself with them.

   • Do Your Goals Still Make Sense? You might have written your goals a couple of months ago now – so the first thing to check is whether they still make sense to you?
   • Were Your Goals Realistic? Did you set unrealistic goals to begin with which are now eating away at your motivation?

   The aim of this exercise is to make sure that your goals are spot on for where you want to be. Once you are satisfied that you are still aimed in the right direction it is time to give your motivation a massive boost.

   • Rewrite your list of goals
   • For each goal write five positive things that will happen when you achieve your goals
   • …and five negative outcomes if you do not achieve your goals
   • Now close your eyes and picture yourself in 1, 5, 10 and 20 years time having achieved all of your goals. What will your life be like? How will you feel? How great will you feel looking back on all of your achievements?

   There are hundreds of other goal and motivation techniques that you can also use to give yourself a boost (see resources at the end), but I have found those few simple techniques to be more than effective to get you moving in the right direction again.

   What you need to do from here on in is to make sure that you rewrite your basic goals every single day and night. Just this one simple action will make a world of difference.

   By writing your goals out every day you will find that there will be much more power behind the decisions that you make. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but there is a great power behind written goals.

5. Measure the Right Things: Did your motivation wane because you could not see any improvement? What were you measuring? Were you measuring anything? Without having the right metrics to measure it is impossible for us to either keep our motivation up or work out whether our approach is the right one.

   Without knowing the specific ins and outs of a particular goal/diet/lifestyle choice it is impossible to suggest what would be the best measurements to chose – but one thing is for certain, simply stepping onto the scales every couple of days (or even worse, several times a day) is not really enough.

   For myself, I was looking to gain muscle weight, lose a little fat weight, improve my fitness and make myself beach-ready. So the measurements I chose were these:

   Body fat %
   % of weight from muscle & non-muscle
   Overall weight
   Fitting of clothes
   Look in the mirror
   Complements from friends/colleagues
   Size of weights used in core exercises (bench press, shoulder press, preacher curl etc)
   Distance able to run under 150bpm (heart rate)
   Speed of 5k run
   Etc. etc.

   Note that this is a mix of very measurable to non-specific, psychological measures – however, by having such a wide range of measures it sets me up to be able to both assess whether my approach is working and also to know and enjoy the fact that I am moving in the right direction. There is nothing more motivating that hitting your targets and knowing beyond doubt that your are succeeding.

6. Think of a past success and model it: This is an incredibly powerful and motivating technique. Have you ever in your past had a time when you were successful in a similar situation to this? Even if it was just a small moment when you felt absolutely motivated, powerful, strong and in control – if you have done it once, then it can be replicated and you can do it again.

   Similarly to anchoring and associations discussed earlier, modelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modeling_%28NLP%29) involves replicating the patterns of a prior behaviour in order to replicate it as desired. In practice here is how it can help you to get back on track with your diet/lifestyle:

   Think of a time when you felt totally motivated and strong. Maybe it was a time when you were feeling on a high about your new healthy lifestyle (after the gym, a weigh-in, a compliment) or perhaps a time when you turned down unhealthy or naughty foods or drinks without even batting an eyelid and felt great about it.

   Picture this time and how you felt clearly in your mind and focus on the following:

   How you felt
   What your physiology was (how you walked, stood, gestured etc)
   What you said (the words themselves, your tone of voice etc)
   How you were breathing
   What you were thinking
   What you were focussing on
   -and anything else that characterised that moment

   If you can model all of these things exactly next time you face the same situation then you are much, much more likely to get your desired outcome.

7. Plan your Next 5 Days in Absolute Detail: Planning is an absolute must when you make any change in your life, and this is especially true for dieting. In my experience, you are most likely to slip up when you do not have the resources around you that you need to make healthy choices simple and hassle-free.

   So when you are starting again after a slip-up, planning is even more vital. The first few days of forming a new habit are crucial – so make sure you give yourself the best possible chance of success.

   1. Plan every meal and every snack for the next five days
   2. Make sure that you have got an abundance of every ingredient you need
   3. Plan your meals so that they flow in together. By this I mean if you can cook two days worth of soup or stew on a Sunday, then plan for this meal to last you over the course of say, a dinner and then a lunch or breakfast.
   4. Set yourself up so that it is as easy as possible. In other words, get things ready wash and prepare a massive salad every two days that you can just keep tucking into as and when you need to.
   5. Plan and prepare for social events and identifiable challenges that you can work around
   6. Plan what time you are going to get up, work out, eat each meal, go to sleep, literally everything that you can plan… plan.
8. Plan a treat or a cheat after those five days are up: this is another thing to plan, but a good one! In order to keep your motivation and stay focused you need to have rewards at each milestone so if you have not done this already, then make the end of your five day challenge a reward time. This could be simply a treat such as a new shirt, a pair of shoes, or a new CD or it could be something more unique such as a day at a health spa or a massage.

   Alternatively, you could even schedule yourself in a treat/cheat meal with friends on the 6th day – but choosing that as a reward very much depends upon you as an individual because for some people this can be a temptation too far which starts this whole circle all over again!

   Whatever you decide, definitely chose something that you can look forward to and feel good about – because rewarding your successes is one of the most important things you can do to keep yourself going.

Changing your lifestyle for the better is difficult, and it does provide you with heaps of challenges – but the great thing is that it does get easier. As habits form and results start to come, you will find that everything comes a lot more naturally. And don’t forget – we learn and grow the most in the face of adversity, so welcome the challenge and look forward to coming out on top!

Resources & Further Reading

No giant post would be complete without more reading to do – so here are some of my favourite sites, articles, forum threads and blog posts on this subject:

Starting a new lifestyle & it’s challenges
Setting Goals – this is a great guide
Swish Pattern introduction and how-to!
NLP Anchoring – what it is and how to use it
Diets & Dieting tools tips and advice
Some more good motivation tools
Making Decisions and sticking to them!
Reliable weight loss information , so that you can better achieve your diet, health and fitness goals.
Energise Health Resources
(more to follow…)