If you Google “Percentage of Diets that Fail” you will see statistics like 80%-95% of diets fail. There is enough research to drive even the most motivated/interested person away. In addition to the high rate of failure, many of these articles go on to state the majority of people gained all of their “lost” weight back, plus more. So, are diets really bad?  My goal is to explore the idea of a diet/fitness challenge and change the way that people are looking at health and fitness as a whole and incorporate that into a healthy lifestyle.

To begin, let’s explore what fitness challenges and diets have in common. They are both completed in a short amount of time with extremely high accountability and defined lines of success and failure, resulting in temporary behavioral changes. People involved in fitness challenges and diets typically make comments such as:

“I can’t eat that, I am on a diet”

“I have to be “good” for another few days until this challenge is over”

“I can’t wait until this is over to go back to the normal way I eat”

“I really want that, but I can’t have that”

It doesn’t take a professional to realize these programs are not sustainable. So, how do we change this idea?

First off, forgive yourself for not being perfect. Health and fitness is a journey and everyone’s journey is a little bit different and imperfect….well maybe Jillian Michaels did it right, but who wants to live like that or has that much time? At In Motion Fitness, we partner with Precision Nutrition as certified coaches because its concepts address implementing healthy behaviors over a 12 month period to achieve your goals that will be sustainable for a lifetime. To learn more about Precision Nutrition and how to achieve sustainability in your nutrition, go here.

Secondly, If you go to the gym (assuming this is a group fitness gym, like In Motion Fitness) and you didn’t complete every rep that was written in the workout, it is easy to focus on the reps that you not complete, but guess what, there are a lot of reps that you completed. There were many successful things that DID happen. If you made poor nutritional choices in a meal, it’s not the end of the world. It is all about how you respond from these decisions and how you learn from them. There is no workout routine or nutrition program designed to be successful without consistency. So, make it fun, stop overthinking, and strive for sustainable consistency.

So, how do we put this information into day to day actions? Here are a few things to consider when finding your way to a healthy lifestyle.

1. Find a style of fitness that you enjoy. (maybe it’s here at IMF) Your workout is YOUR time. Make it a positive part of your day
2. Remember that results take time and consistency but one bad decision will not throw you off track
3. This journey is about you, not the person next to you. Everyone is different and dealing with their own internal battle
4. Use fitness professionals when you need them. There are a lot of good resources out there but do your homework and make sure it is a good fit before diving in head first with a personal trainer or nutrition coach (we are biased to ours)
5. Think about how your nutrition could be better. *I didn’t say perfect! Here’s an example:

You have an apple, apple sauce, apple pie, or caramel apple.

Which apple option is going to give you the biggest bang for your buck and which is highly processed with added sugar? There caramel apple, duh 😉 

As we say at In Motion Fitness: Fitness never stops; everyday try and make the best decisions for you and your body.