One of the biggest hurdles that clients face when it comes to finding consistency is, “What do I do when I’m not 100% in control of the food I’m going to eat? What if I’m not cooking it? What if I can’t use my scale? What if I’m at a restaurant, work dinner, baby shower, picnic, etc.” There are a TON of what if’s- these ‘what ifs’ can often become bottlenecks to finding consistency.
Below, we’ll talk through some strategies you can employ to find consistency even when you’re not 100% in control of the food you’re eating. Before we dive into that, I think it's important to discuss two things: understanding your goals and personal nutrition journey and the role of perfectionism and mindset in achieving those goals.
Understanding your Goals & Personal Nutrition Journey
Hiring a nutrition coach is an important step toward achieving whatever goal you have set for yourself. Having a personal ally to guide you and hold you accountable can be the difference between success and failure. At M2, we generally work with people who fall into one of three camps: performance, health, or fat loss.
Fueling for health and performance allows for much more freedom. These are both abundance-based pursuits, where the ultimate goal is for you to feel fueled and satisfied throughout the day so you can be your best, regardless if that's for overall health or athletic performance.
Fueling for weight loss is different. Fueling for weight loss requires a level of hunger and often feeling unsatisfied. It requires more of a restrictive mindset as a means to an end to reach your goals. Setting and achieving weight loss goals requires that you prioritize that goal over other aspects of life, at least for the SHORT TERM.
If you are someone who comes to us with a significant amount of weight to lose, minimal diet history, and poor eating habits, weight loss can actually be pretty easy to achieve, relatively speaking. It can take time to implement healthy practices like working out, getting a good amount of non-exercise activity, sleeping 8 hours per night, and choosing high-quality micronutrient dense foods. This pursuit generally produces positive results quickly.
When it comes to the idea of short term sacrifice for long term health and happiness, we often get people who come from a history of long term restriction or restrict-binge-guilt cycles. More often than not, these same people are relatively healthy, with weight loss goals that are rooted in aesthetic desires, not health needs.
We are not here to judge your why behind weight loss. We are here to let you know that if you’ve been on the restriction or binge-restrict train for some time, the BEST thing you can do is to work towards a nutritional approach to weight maintenance first.
How many of you have actually spent time tracking your intake at full maintenance? It can be liberating, not to mention necessary to get results from a cut. Getting off the restriction train can feel hard and scary. After all, hiring a nutrition coach so you can lose fat and being told that you need to eat more and not less can be confusing and upsetting. So, the question is, why do we make you do this in the first place.
Our bodies are not meant to live in a caloric deficit over time, especially when we’re subjecting those bodies to high-intensity fitness or other stressful situations day in and day out. Our bodies can’t discern between an actual threat (like a bear attack) and a chosen stress (like high-intensity exercise compounded by poor sleep and a stressful job). Stress is stress. If this sounds like you, go ahead and check these blogs out here, here, and here.
I mention this because when I go into the strategy below, it's important to understand how to use these strategies. If you constantly find yourself on the emotional roller coaster of being ‘on’ and ‘off’ your plan, that's a strong indication that you should spend some time living at maintenance while also taking a deep dive into the inner narrative driving this behavior.
It is my experience that logging ‘fun foods’ can really de-mystify the whole good food/bad food notion as people learn that they can fit things like pizza, wine, and ice cream into their macros. Knowing and practicing this over time can make these foods less triggering, ultimately allowing you to find more balance.
Once you have spent time thriving at calorie maintenance, then you are 100% more capable of making sacrifices for the short term because, for you, the restriction is not your norm. You understand that once you achieve your goal, you can revisit that fun food or drink. For the short term, you’re on a mission, and everything you put in your body is in an effort to bring you closer to the goal you set for yourself.
Logging Food
One thing you must understand is that ALL the food we log is an estimate. Even when you are weighing and measuring everything you eat, it is still just an estimate. The macronutrient content of food varies depending on how ripe the food is, how nutrient-dense the soil it was grown in was, the grass it grazed on, etc. The certified values we find in apps like MyFitnessPal, Lose It, or Cronometer are themselves just estimates. You and I could both consume 100g of pineapple, and for each of that 100g, the caloric content could be different.
You might be thinking, “why should I even bother then?! If it’s all an estimate anyway, how will I be able to reach my goals?” That’s a really great question and one that so many of us struggle with when it comes to finding consistency. You should bother because those small fluctuations, overtime, work themselves out. Also, when you are consistent, your coach is able to make adjustments to your program based on your consistency.
For example, a common question we get is how to measure cooked vs. raw food.
My answer is always, it honestly doesn’t matter, as long as what you do is consistent. If you use the same entry, you weigh/estimate the same way, then that overtime can be modified as needed to achieve your goals. Basically, you are your own macro-tracking system. Finding consistency with your system is where accuracy is achieved. I’ve been using an entry for chicken in MFP for about five years with no designation of cooked or raw. I just assume it’s cooked, and I weigh my chicken cooked. I haven’t withered away or become extremely obese from this. That is the system that I use consistently.
It’s important not to get caught up in precision and accuracy. The idea of perfection as being the only way to reach your goals can be counterproductive. If that is the benchmark with which you hold yourself, you will never be satisfied because it is truly unachievable.
So how do we approach those situations when the food we eat is out of our control, and we don’t have our food scale with us? What can we do to best stay on track with our goals? There are a number of ways to approach this, and they vary slightly depending on your goal.
Fat Loss Vs. Performance and/or Health
Preserving your caloric deficit is your #1 goal when it comes to fat loss. Conversely, when fueling for performance and health, the priority is to make sure we’re eating enough.
Here are the top 4 strategies I recommend to my clients with suggestions particular to your individual goals.
#1. Pre-logging
Taking some time to scope out the menu or (when eating at a friend’s house) asking the host what will be serving is an easy way for you to build a plan in advance. I urge people not to get ‘in the weeds’ with this. Don’t worry about ‘hidden ingredients’ or cooking oils. Focus on finding something that will allow you to enjoy the night and also come out of it not feeling incredibly ravenous. Be as realistic as possible because you’re going to want to enjoy yourself while you’re there.
Creating a plan where you can both participate in the event and stay on track with your goals will help you feel the best that day and the day after. For example, you’re going to a birthday party at a restaurant. You’ve picked out two menu items you may possibly have. (always good to have a backup just in case). You pre-log one of them to the best of your ability. If you’re on a cut, maybe you’ll forgo dessert or alcohol altogether. If you fall into a performance category, you may decide to indulge some, in which case you should pre-plan those macros too.
You can then build the rest of your day knowing what your final meal will roughly look like. As an example, if that last meal is loaded with carbs, then you might need to pull back on carbs earlier in the day.
From there, go enjoy yourself, and the next day just get back to your normal routine. Be proud of yourself for making a plan. Be proud of yourself for maintaining the consistency of logging. Be proud that you didn’t throw in the towel. Those are ALL wins that will help you maintain your progress and consistency over time.
#2 Flexible Macros
We go into this in great detail in another blog post. When using a flexible macro approach, you can focus on two different strategies: total calories or protein + total calories. When you focus on total calories, your ultimate goal is to just reach that total number using any combination of protein, fat, and carb you choose. Wanna crush ice cream all day? Sure, just make sure it's within your calorie limit. The other is to respect your total calories but still prioritize your protein goals. So in this situation, you’ll hit protein and then flex your carbs/fats any way you choose to hit total calories.
This strategy allows more freedom and less planning. You can fly more by the seat of your pants while keeping tabs on your total calories for the day.
#3 Saving 25-30% of your macros for that meal
You’re not sure what you’ll be having and are unable to ask/find out. This is common as well. In this situation, you’ll again pre-plan your day up to the event, but you’ll carve out a generic amount of total calories for that meal instead of focusing on a certain set of macros. 25-30% of total daily calories should be appropriate for the main meal, as long as you eat mindfully. Don’t worry about accounting for specific macros or calories with this technique. You’ve done the work to create space to enjoy this meal mindfully.
Again, do the best that you can. Enjoy yourself. Get back to the grind the next day
#4. Not tracking at all
Some situations are better left untracked. When living at maintenance for either health or performance, it’s ok to take a meal or even a whole day off of tracking. Sometimes it’s even the right call when trying to cut weight. It will not greatly hinder your progress as long as it's a one-off event. Use the skills that you’ve learned from weighing and measuring your food to build a plate of food that is visually similar to what you might normally eat. Eat until you’re satisfied and enjoy yourself.
Alcohol
Drinking when in a deficit is a good way to sabotage your progress. In general, I am not a fan of logging multiple drinks. This is a sure-fire way to get super wasted and feel like absolute garbage. Drinking typically leads to your macros for the next day being off, as you’re willing to put anything and everything into your body to get rid of a hangover.
If you’re in a situation where you will be consuming more than one drink, you know this is not in line with your overall goals. However, you are also an adult and are more than capable of owning your decision.
Once again, the most important thing is to GET BACK TO YOUR ROUTINE as quickly as possible.
Perfectionism
I’ll finish with a word on perfectionism. Brene Brown is gospel to me when it comes to self-worth, vulnerability, shame, and perfectionism. It’s hard to work on your nutrition, body composition, or athletic performance without having some tussles with these topics.
Paraphrasing and quoting The Gifts of Imperfections, “Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame. It is a shield. At its core, perfectionism is about trying to earn approval and acceptance. It is a belief system: I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it.
No matter what our goals are, it is important that they are self-focused. Simply put, think about “How can I improve?” instead of “ What will others think.”
When it comes to your nutrition, being able to accept ‘good enough’’ on a daily basis can be the difference between your success and your failure. As Winston Churchill once said, “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”