Recently inside of my FREE Facebook Group, I put a poll with about 18 different topics for people to vote on. I did this because I wanted to make sure I was serving people properly and teaching them about what they truly needed help with. One of the poll options was about needing help with consistency. People seem to keep raising their hands needing help when it comes to being consistent.
What does consistency mean to you?
For a lot of my friends and clients, consistency means perfection. It means that you do all the things perfectly. You eat the salad and chicken, work out and get sweaty, drink the water, and don’t touch the damn cupcake. You have the mentality that you have to suffer and struggle appropriately for your goals. And if you’re not perfect, then fuck it.
Let me ask you this…if your car had a flat tire, would you go out and then slash the other three? The same logic applies to your weight loss journey. When you have the “fuck it” mentality and you “screw up”, you will start to really catastrophize your choices and decide you’re not enough, not doing enough, or didn’t do it right, and you not only fall off the wagon you set that bitch on fire. This is why consistency does not equal perfect. You can eat the damn cookie and then make the choice to eat healthier for the rest of your damn day. You don’t have to light the wagon on fire, okay?
How does self-talk play into consistency?
When you’re standing there with the match in your hand ready to light the wagon on fire, you can start to see that self-talk about how you have to show up perfectly or not do it at all really can affect your choices. Truthfully, you need to work on silencing your inner mean girl and tell her you’ll sit wherever the hell you want. Hello, fellow Mean Girls movie lovers. You have to see your styles of self-sabotage to really understand that we show up sometimes as the perfectionist or the people pleaser, or the murderer, and that really does affect our consistency.
Another thing that affects consistency…boredom.
For me, I find boring food, structured routines, and all of that stuff are actually good. I like to have kind of boring plain food because I don’t want to be getting my joy from food. There are foods that I enjoy. But when I only have food to look forward to, that’s a problem.
So I also want to offer you this. You can be bored. I know there are parts of your life that you might be bored in or with. You might be bored driving to work, at the actual job you perform, or you might find the people you work with boring. YOU CAN BE BORED AND STILL SHOW UP. Boredom can be no big deal.
You THINK boredom is a problem. And when people tell me that they’re bored, I say, “So what? What are you making that mean? Why is that a problem?” Boredom should not be a no go when you want to do the things that will put you on a path toward your goals.
Fuck what the diet industry has taught you about consistency.
Sometimes, because of diet culture, you think that in order to lose weight you have to take away all the food and do a certain level of workout. You end up thinking that if you couldn’t walk 45 minutes today, and you could only walk 20 minutes today, then that is not good enough. Fuck that. Walking for 20 minutes is better than walking for 0 minutes. It still means you are consistent.
Here is my challenge to you.
The first thing is to just figure out for yourself, what does consistency mean to you? Maybe you have a standard that you just really can’t meet because it’s just not practical. It’s just not part of real life. Everything that we do to lose weight and keep it off is the thing we’re going to have to do for a lifetime. That’s the reality. This is why “diets” typically don’t work.
I am not one of those trainers or coaches who is telling you to just eat whatever you want. This is going to be a diet-free lifestyle and diets are bad. I’m not preaching that at all. It’s just that typical diet culture is so restrictive that it’s just not practical. That’s how you end up having a really crazy high level of our expectation of consistency that we cannot perform day in and day out. And when you have that crazy high expectation, of course, you’re going to fall off and you’re not going to be consistent.
NOTES IN ANCHOR
Recently inside of my FREE Facebook Group, I put a poll with about 18 different topics for people to vote on. I did this because I wanted to make sure I was serving people properly and teaching them about what they truly needed help with. One of the poll options was about needing help with consistency. People seem to keep raising their hands needing help when it comes to being consistent. CONSISTENCY DOES NOT EQUAL PERFECTION. And the thought that in order to be consistent you have to be perfect with your fitness and nutrition might be what’s holding you back from achieving permanent weight loss.
ABOUT THE HOST
Bonnie Lefrak has been in the health and fitness industry for 25 years. As a former bikini competitor, Bonnie helps other women achieve their dreams of being on stage as bikini competitors through her bikini program at the gym she owns in Massachusetts called Fitness Asylum. But as a self-proclaimed professional dieter, Bonnie also realized the toll dieting takes on the human brain.
Bonnie helps women over 40 lose weight without killing themselves in the gym, eliminate all the BS food drama, and help to create a life and body they LOVE. She wants to help women create certainty in their own lives, their own results, and their own abilities. Weight loss is not about the one “right” diet. It is about MUCH more than that.
Weight loss is not about the one “right” workout. Weight loss is not about being positive and putting a big smile on. Weight loss is about FEELINGS. All of them. Not trying to bury them or hide from them but knowing and allowing the full human experience. Weight loss is not about grinding hustling and will powering your way to some end line. Transformation (when done well) is done from the inside out. Transformation doesn’t happen on the scale. She is an expert at Demystifying weight loss and helps you unfuck your diet brain.
Connect with Bonnie-
Facebook Group- https://www.facebook.com/groups/707942356603835
Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/bonnielefrak/
Website- https://bonnielefrak.com
Application- https://bonnielefrak.com/application
Email- bonnie@bonnielefrak.com