Consistency
Consistency is the single biggest factor in your health and fitness journey. Everybody wants that quick fix but unfortunately quick fixes simply don’t work, you have to take a long term methodical approach if you really want to elicit change and want it to stay that way. To make real long lasting change, you have to be consistent, essentially, forever. This sounds daunting taken at face value, but the trick to maintaining consistency is to not completely overhaul your life overnight. You can’t go from sleeping 5 hours a night, minimal exercise and an unhealthy diet to 9 hours a night, exercise everyday and a perfect diet straight away and if you try, you will more than likely snap right back to where you started pretty soon after.
Instead, you should slowly make better and better lifestyle choices over time. When it comes to your exercise, nutrition and sleep, making smaller incremental improvements reduces the likelihood of completely “falling off the wagon” and reverting back to old ways. If you instead start off focusing on making smaller changes, just adding in one extra hour of sleep, some light exercise twice a week, and increasing your vegetable intake, those are much easier and more sustainable choices that you can maintain for much longer. Then once you are comfortable with your new choices, you’ve been consistent for a couple of months and it feels normal, take the next step, add a little bit more sleep in, a little bit more exercise, and some better food choices. Rinse and repeat, after a few rounds of this you will have made a significant change.
The benefit of this approach is it’s easier to make small changes over time, therefore you can more easily stay consistent with your routine. And if you do happen to take a step back, instead of going from everything to nothing, it’s only a small step to a spot that was better than where you first started anyway, and it’s much easier to take that step forward again.
The longer you are able to be consistent, the harder it becomes to falter, it becomes your everyday lifestyle instead of this big challenging hurdle that’s too scary to jump over.