People often want to know what gets results. It’s this: Patience & Consistency. And yeh, of course some good old fashioned hard work while you build the foundations for EFFORTLESS. Yes, effortless.
My first ever “12 Week Challenge” coach told me the patience & consistency thing back in 2002 and I’ve never forgotten. (Hey Sue!)
Rewind almost 20 years and this was when I was a PT Coordinator in a large health club chain in Perth, and about to embark on prep for a figure competition**.
While personally & professionally I DO NOT operate in the style of a 3/6/12 Week Challenge approach anymore (think short-game, can only just make it through each day, unsustainable)...the ‘patience and consistency’ riff is still one of the most helpful and truthful things I've ever heard. It's just as applicable to a sustainable approach as it is to an aggressive approach and I tell my clients all the time.
Most of us want results yesterday. AND we’re only prepared to do something for 5 minutes to get them!
Enter patience & consistency. Two incredibly simple but supremely difficult virtues to master!!
Patience - it’s gonna take longer than a week.
Consistency - don’t give the latest restrictive diet trend a crack for a few days, blowout for a few days, repeat, and then decide ‘it’ didn’t work for you!
Health, and feeling good in your own skin, is LONG GAME. We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day.
All the more reason that what we do must be sustainable and essentially something you’d be comfortable to do and enjoy for the rest of you life. Otherwise you’re “on a diet” - that’s a short term thing and usually never works long term. Some people are ALWAYS “on a diet”. Used to be me.
There’s a big difference between “your diet” and being “on a diet”.
And by the way anyone can knuckle down and follow a balls-to-the-wall program for however many weeks. That’s the easy part!
It doesn’t mean the nutrition & lifestyle changes you make will be easy at first. It probably WILL feel like sacrifice, it probably WILL mean some days are a struggle, it DEFINITELY WILL mean some days are a write off! Again, you’re not a robot, you’re human.
Patience and consistency doesn’t mean perfection. Be kind to yourself.
** I never did that comp by the way, and I am actually supremely grateful. Even though it took a nervous breakdown and a lot of healing to uncover it, my drive to get on stage was driven purely by self-esteem issues, depression, a skewed body image, and a disordered relationship with food.
While I have the ultimate respect for the discipline, commitment, and motivation it takes people to hit that stage (and my story is definitely not everyone’s story), thankfully I learned that for ME it was nothing about health (physically or mentally) and that my happiness was not going to be found on the other side of a freakishly low body fat percentage in a bikini.
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