The 6 Reasons Your Health Resolutions Will Fail
It is almost the end of the January in the new year. Right about now is when all those great life changing health resolutions made on the 1st of January usually come screeching to halt and we return to those negative habits of ours we tried to eliminate. Now if you think you are the only one that cannot stick to your resolution, do not worry – you are definitely not alone. I am not ashamed to admit but more than my fair share of resolutions have met an early demise. In fact one of the reasons that I managed to sit through university psychology lectures all those years ago is because of failed resolutions & goals. So this month I have decided to share what I have learned from formal education, my work changing clients’ lifestyles and of course my own personal experience.
This will provide you with six great guidelines to give yourself the best possible chance of making sure your health resolutions do not sink faster than the Titanic.
1) You Do Not Reverse Engineer
For me, I always prefer to use the term reverse engineering than goal setting. Reverse engineering is basically what athletes do when they say to themselves ‘I want to be wearing the Gold Medal around my neck at the next Olympics – how do I get there from where I am now?’ From this moment, they determine milestones along a timeline that will ensure they are on the right track to get where they NEED to be. Even if they do not reach a particular milestone, it still provides valuable feedback as to what went wrong in their training or preparation and it indicates what they need to do to come back up to speed. Now what I suggest is that you learn from the elite. Chose where you want to be by a certain date, make it specific and write it down. Then plot four to six points on the timeline that will indicate your progress. Do not make the points to far apart or you will lose focus and drift.
2) You Jump In The Deep End
Lets examine this from a body composition point of view. You want a smoking hot body and you wanted it yesterday. Now one of the things I am known for is lightning quick results with clients and although an initial fat blitzkrieg can be very useful, I will always seek changes on the continuum rather than aim for perfection immediately. In most cases, those who have the greatest success are those who stay on the program, make small incremental changes and maintain their progress in the long run. By ‘jumping in the deep end’ and overdoing it, you will probably have great initial results but after 3 weeks (maybe 4 if you are a maniac), chances are you’ve hit the wall and progress stops. In fact, this will be sounding really familiar to a lot of us right about now. So aim to improve one aspect of your health every two to three weeks and gradually build on that. Believe me, it will add up.
3) You Do Not Record
To assess what you are doing you have to record what you do. If you do not, you will never learn from it and you will be lucky to get where you want to go in life, business, health or whatever. The best athletes all keep training diaries and log important aspects of their games. I actually used to live with a professional rugby union lock forward that still to this day records EVERY lineout thrown in his games so he can analyze what works and what does not. He is going on 50 Super 12/14 games at the moment so it is fair to say, that we can learn from his success. Let us relate this back to body composition changes. If you keep a food diary it is a fact that you will drop fat quicker or gain muscle faster than if you do not. For instance, the recent Kaiser Permanente study showed that the simple act of keeping food diary stimulated TWICE as much weight loss compared to those that did not. Just by recording what they ate! Why? Not only does recording what you are doing give you a greater understanding of what is going right and wrong, it also makes you more accountable.
4) You Do Not Have Guidance
Most resolutions fail because of a lack of guidance, not just a lack of motivation. It is pretty frustrating watching your effort turn into zero results. This makes it so important to go to the best. You might have to pay a little extra but you get superior results in less time. This also decreases the opportunity cost by opening up more time for other important tasks. This is one of the reasons why I have decided to initiate an individualized online coaching system. I will let you in on this more as it is developed but the results so far have been very encouraging. One of the trial clients is a former NZ Open Mens’ Touch player who is playing professional rugby union in Europe and he ‘shredded’ 8kg in the first two weeks of coaching. If this sounds like the sort of results you are after, have a look at our Satellite Coaching program.
5) You Slash Your Tires
The French Canadian strength coach Christain Thibedeau calls this ‘The Flat Tire Phenomenon’. Your diet has been going great for the last two weeks. You have done everything right but you are starting to get cravings. Finally you say ‘what the heck?’ and nail a couple of freshly gazed donuts from Donut King. Unfortunately however you do not stop there. After all, you have just blown your diet so you might as well do your best impression of Fatty McCheesecake for the rest of the day and try and start the next day back on track. For this ‘Flat Tire Phenomenon’ to make sense to everyone, this is akin to getting a flat tire while driving, pulling over and then deciding to slash the rest of them. Pretty dumb eh? Look everyone will have setbacks or ‘flat tires’ along the way. The key is to make sure you do not slash your ties & to get back on track as soon as possible without letting these setbacks derail everything you have worked for over the last weeks.
6) You Do Not Stick With It
This is what we know about forming habits and behaviors. It basically takes at least 21 days of performing a behavior in a row for it to be engrained in our neural pathways and become habit. It also takes the same amount of time to extinguish negative or unhealthy habits. So if you are trying to drop body fat by eating well, you are going to have to sustain the new eating behaviors for at least 21 days. Sure it will be hard, your friends will wonder what you are doing and you will have cravings. But hey if it was easy, everyone would be fitness models wouldn’t they? So my advice here is to go get some support & coaching then suck it up and go the distance.