When the going gets tough…
15th June 2010
Sticking to your game plan for a healthier you becomes much easier if you have strategies in place to help you stay on the straight and narrow when the going gets tough. We asked Wallabies Coach and Thompson’s Brand Ambassador Robbie Deans for his advice on staying motivated and disciplined for the long haul.
‘It’s often said that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail’ said Robbie, ‘so my advice is to recognise that you’ll have days when eating well or exercising seem to take an enormous amount of willpower, and plan for how you’re going to handle those occasions.’
Here are some key strategies for success.
Re-set your default position
It’s human nature to deliberate over decision-making, and, surprisingly, the more options you have available to you, the more difficult it can be to make a choice. Faced with this indecision, in many cases you’ll either choose to do nothing or select an option you’ve chosen many times before.
Have you ever spent so much time trying to decide whether or not to exercise on a cold or rainy morning that you’ve realised that you no longer have time to go at all because if you do you’ll be late for work?
Or have you ever stood in front of a sandwich bar brimming with so many fresh and appetising ingredients that you can’t decide what to eat, only to end up ordering the same cheese, ham and tomato on white bread you eat every other day of the week?
In isolation these seem like insignificant decisions, but the reality is that a lifetime of ‘default or do nothing’ choices could add up to a lifetime of sitting on the couch eating junk food and getting more overweight and unfit by the day. As Robbie explains, ‘‘We are what we do often, and we become what we eat often’.
All it takes to turn this characteristic of human nature on its head is to re-set your default choice to one that supports your healthy lifestyle. Remove some of the options you have available to you from the equation in advance, or even make your entire decision ahead of time.
How about these for alternative strategies?
- Whenever I wake up and it’s raining, I get in the car and go straight to the gym so I can run on the treadmill.
- Whenever I order a sandwich, I order salad on wholemeal, with no butter or salt. Usually I have it with salmon, but every now and then I mix it up a little and have chicken or sliced turkey.
These are tiny decisions that don’t take much will power (in fact, they’re easy to make, because there’s no deliberating), but over the course of your lifetime, they add up to an enormous accumulation of better choices.
Plan ahead for temptation
If we put our minds to it, most of us can identify a number of situations in which we’re likely to let go of discipline and drop the new, healthy behaviours we’ve worked so hard to implement.
This is particularly likely to happen if you’re stressed or pressed for time. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, taking a logical approach and telling yourself what you ‘should’ do doesn’t always spur you on to action. That’s because during stressful times, our emotional needs over-ride our common sense. So, rightly or wrongly, if you feel that eating chocolate for dinner is the only way you’re going to feel better after a tense day at work, that’s probably what you’ll end up doing – unless you have an alternative strategy in place.
Take a moment now, when you’re not feeling stressed at all, to think about the situations in which you’re most likely to slip back into unhealthy habits, and ways you could make it easier to stay strong. For example, if you always turn to take away on the nights you’ve been stuck at work late and can’t be bothered cooking, maybe it’s time to stock the freezer with healthy frozen meals?
Similarly, some people find that social situations are the occasions when their willpower fails. This is particularly likely to occur when you’re drinking alcohol, which lowers your inhibitions and makes you more likely to eat any delicious morsels on offer. If that sounds familiar to you, try volunteering to be the designated driver – you’ll be astounded at how much more disciplined your party snacking becomes!
