It’s not so much a “real graph” in that it’s not based on real data, so much as it is an illustration of a logical point. Now… for people about to come into the New Year with a resolution of achieving some sort of a goal via training and dieting over the course of the year… here’s something to think about.
The key word here is TRAJECTORY.
First up though let’s talk goals. Your goal is multifaceted as follows:
- Weight: It’s not helpful or healthy to be too concerned with a very specific weight on the scales, but perhaps falling somewhere closer to / within a suitable athletic weight range is a part of it.
- Body Fat %: For most people it is not necessary nor helpful to be too concerned with a very specific body fat % reading, however we’re likely to want to see an increase in lean mass as we adapt to training, aka body composition or as I like to refer to it “body condition”.
- Performance: On an individual level depending on how competitive your nature is, you may have a specific performance / ability goal, or it may be enough just to see progress and improvements, and in simple terms be able to “do more” whether that is to run a greater distance, lift a bigger weight, or whatever.
- Body Satisfaction: This is super important. We want to feel good about ourselves, how we’re performing and the changes in condition that we see as a result. What I always feel is the ultimate success is when a client has already gone beyond what they had previously thought was the limit of their potential, and knows exactly what they would need to do to go even further, but thinks something like “who gives a shit though, what I’ve already done is awesome enough and now i just want to enjoy training and fueling and feel good about myself instead of thinking ‘it’s still not enough it’ll never be enough’” you know what I mean?
- Enjoyment: Training and eating is supposed to be enjoyable, right? Never lose sight of that.
For that to occur, what would need to happen between now and then?
It is easy to get sucked in to the idea that it would mean never missing a training session under any circumstances, strict dieting day in, day out, hitting our macro and energy targets consistently with the best choices of healthy foods.
Well… that all sounds great but in reality, it’s just not humanly possible. If you were really to chart a successful person’s attendance at training, adherence to the nutrition plan, motivation and enthusiasm levels and so on… in reality it might look more like the yellow line in my illustration… and in fact even this is probably overly optimistic. Some periods you do a little better, some periods you go off the boil a little, once in a while life’s not perfect and your ability to attend training suffers… but over all you do enough to keep you on that trajectory towards improved condition & all of those other goals.
People have to be realistic and they have to be for real, too. Writing these posts there’s always a danger of people choosing to interpret it like “cool, I can just do a half arsed job, not show up very often, not hit intake targets, and I’ll still make good progress because this guy says it can work like that”. No. You have to come into something with the intention to do the best you can, as consistently as you can… but being a realist you also accept that perfection isn’t possible and perfectionism isn’t helpful. What’s important here is that when you do have a rough period, you don’t convince yourself that it’s the end of the story and that you’ve failed. So long as you are genuinely doing what you can, when you can, you should expect to move closer to your goals even if the process is gradual.
So that’s it in a nutshell really. The goal that we set is to be on that trajectory that keeps us moving closer to and beyond our goal condition as described above. To keep moving in the right direction, via establishing and practicing habits that are sensible, sustainable, healthy and conducive to improvements in performance, condition and mindset.
What you can also see on this chart in the red is my illustration of the trajectory we’re likely to follow via yo-yoing on and off crash diets. As you can see, over the long term we only move further and further away from all aspects of our goal condition. Many people reading this will know this all too well from personal experience already.
If you want to get off that yo-yo dieting cycle and into effective training, appropriate fueling and a sensible and sustainable approach that will keep moving in the right direction towards all of your condition goals, you can register your interest in the next launch of my Online Flexible Fueling Program, via the survey to the right of your screen.
