“Building Nutrition Habits and understanding it’s a marathon, not a sprint”
We have a confession to make…when we first started our fitness journey all we wanted was the end result. We never thought about enjoying the actual process, laying down bricks, creating systems, gaining knowledge, long term sustainability, and most importantly creating good habits.
We like to use the quote “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day” because it reminds us that whoever built Rome was laying bricks every hour and every single day.
You see, flexible nutrition is just an end result for a nutrition program, but without laying down the bricks, then there is no system created. Creating the system is more important than the end goal. Laying down the bricks and building a solid system through creating habits is more important than worrying about the outcome, which in this case is flexible nutrition.
We are firm believers that in order to have a successful journey with flexible nutrition, you need to create good habits first and then the results will come.
Some nutrition habits that should be focused early on are:
As health and fitness practitioners we hold ourselves to a higher standard of how to coach our clients into these habits to set the foundations for nutrition and to set you up for long term success through flexible nutrition.
Coaches often assume that their advice is easier to follow than it actually is, and become judgmental of clients who can’t follow it. In fact, behavior change is extraordinarily difficult. Advice as simple as “Make a healthy breakfast, lunch, or dinner” can really mean an abundance of changes to a client’s life.
We can’t tell you how many times other fitness colleagues and friends have told us, “Man, we really like what you’re doing over there. You have the most awesome clients and team. If I could get clients like you have, I’d love my job.”
But we start out with the same mix of clients that every other fitness pro starts with. The difference is this: We know that each type of client can’t all start on the same program. What do we mean by this? Not every client is ready to weigh their foods, hit their calories each day, eat 4 meals per day, and time their pre and post workout meals.
We start with creating habits and believe that every client can become the “perfect client,” slowly advance them to higher nutrition levels, and we’re constantly testing new strategies through evidence-based practices to make it happen so that we can teach our clients to live a long term and sustainable lifestyle through flexible nutrition.
The key is figuring out what the client needs right now In order to have consistency and adherence in their nutrition. We ask ourselves “how we can serve them best, and what specific steps we can take to get them to that next level.”
As the old Chinese proverb saying goes, “Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
We teach our clients to fish for a long term and sustainable lifestyle through flexible nutrition and you know what? It produces results.
Stay Tuned for Part II…