Consistency

I hate the feeling of unless things are perfect you’re failing. I think most of us know that consistency is more important that perfection. But it’s tallying the two notions up and finding the balance and feeling ok with that, that’s difficult.

I tend to beat myself up if I’ve not done everything I meant to in a week. I can have eaten in a calorie deficit but just not necessarily the meals I planned to and I can have trained more than most people, just not completing every session I meant to, and see that as a bad week. When in reality it’s helped me get closer to my goals regardless. The issue in my head is that I’m not meeting the standard I decided to set for myself, even though in reality I’m pretty consistent.

I think I’m pretty common on this.

Part of it comes from social media. On the one hand you see people talking about consistency but at an epic scale. Like, say you see someone super fit who trains on an epic scale every single day or runs every day and then presents this as consistency and shows you all the benefits from creating those habits. Now that’s both inspirational and a little bit disheartening. Because on the one hand you think look at them and if I was consistent like that it could be me. On the other hand, in reality how many people can be like a PT who works in a gym or an influencer who trains as a job? And when it’s someone who has a full time job and still manages to train like crazy, well that’s amazing but what have they had to give up to get it done? Prioritising getting a session in over sleep or seeing your friends isn’t admirable commitment, in my view it’s a bit worrying. Because consistency is getting things done and doing it regularly and week after week but not at the expense of everything else. It should help enrich your days not overtake them. Yes you need to find consistency to regularly make time for your health but also be ok with things changing, not happening, missing sessions or meals.

Of course there’s the other end of consistency, where you consistently do nothing and put getting started off. If you keep saying you’re going to implement a habit and then don’t so put it off for another week, well that won’t help you either. In these situations doing it and not being consistent at first is going to be better than taking an all or nothing approach. If you can then turn that into doing the habit more often than you don’t you will eventually find that consistency.

We need to remember too, that consistency can be lost and regained. Illness, injuries, life events can throw us off balance and it can be hard to regain that momentum again after sometimes. That’s not a failure on our parts, it ‘s pretty normal, and beating ourselves up about it probably does more harm than good.

Diet and exercise really is a lot about mindset and balance – not being all in one camp or all in another, not being all or nothing. Having goals but also being ok about where you are now, being able to celebrate what you can do or have done whilst also aiming to improve. Mentally that’s hard because you have different voices in your head competing and our brains tend to quite like black and white thinking and we’re less comfortable with the various shades of grey, so you have to find a way of not letting that make you feel bad. Fitness is in reality largely a mindset game.