It’s not about willpower. It’s about adjusting the dial.
If you’ve ever felt like pressing pause, or you feel this way right now, it might help to know I’ve felt the same way before.
Nowadays I like to think of my fitness and nutrition efforts as a dial.
There are times when I want to dial my efforts up, and times when I want to dial them down. But I never want to turn the dial off completely.
Here’s how this plays out in the context of my life.
Sometimes, say when I was training for a competition or concentrating on a particular goal, my fitness dial might be tuned to 9 or 10 out of 10. Channel 10 means I work out every day. Every meal is planned and carefully considered. I think a lot about fitness. And not much about anything else.
Work, family, hobbies… they’re all in maintenance mode (with the permission of the people this affects, of course).
However, as I write this, my life involves the following:
Managing my chores and task at home *So that Rosie doesn’t end me!
Keeping my relationships intact with friends and family
Trying my best to keep my business afloat.
So currently, the dial rarely goes past 3 or 4. I work out, maybe, three days a week. And most of my meals are just “good enough”.
(For the record, I’m totally cool with that. There is no guilt about having my dial set currently a little lower. What’s most important is that the dial is still set to “on”.)
The important lesson: There’s a big difference between turning your dial to 3, 2, or even a 1, and turning the whole thing off.
And when you realise how doable — and effective — channels 3 and 2 and 1 can be, you see that there’s never a good reason to hit “pause”.
The point is to keep going. Sometimes awkwardly, sometimes incompetently, sometimes downright half-assed. But to keep going nonetheless.
As I often teach our new members: The “all or nothing” mentality rarely gets us “all”. It usually gets us “nothing”.
That’s when I propose a new mantra: “Always something”.