When you’re aiming to make real, meaningful, and long-term changes to your health and wellbeing, it’s very easy to look at the various methods proposed that promise fast results. However, these quick fixes rarely work or provide the consistent, healthy lifestyle change that you might really need. Consistency is the key, instead, and here, we’re going to look at how you can make your healthy changes consistent, as well as some of the tools that can help you along the way.
It’s All About Repeatable Habits
One of the biggest issues with fad diets and other quick fixes is that they’re designed to be employed in the short term. Highly calorie-restrictive diets, cleanses, and the like use extreme conditions to help meet specific aims. However, they do not pose a realistic alternative to the lifestyle that you had previously. As such, once you’re done with them, it’s easy to go right back to the same habits you had before, which can quickly undermine any results that you do end up achieving. Healthy weight loss strategies are all about building habits that are easy to repeat, making them much more feasible in the long term.
The Body Needs Time To Adapt
Another one of the main problems of so-called quick fixes is that they’re designed to kick in immediately, or in a very short time, but this simply isn’t how the body works. We respond best to steady signals, not rapid changes. When we have more consistent eating patterns, our body learns to regulate hunger hormones, blood sugar, and energy levels. The same goes for exercise. You might want to jump into high-intensity sessions right off the bat, but without building up your fitness, you’re less likely to see results and more likely to hurt yourself. You need to build consistent behaviours that you build on week after week, so that your body is able to gradually adjust and help you hold onto the results of your efforts.
There Are No Miracle Cures
Perhaps the most important point to keep in mind is that there really are no such things as miracle cures when it comes to your weight. Unless you put in the work after the fact, any improvements you may see are very likely to reverse. Weight loss injectables are perhaps one of the best examples of this. GLP-1 treatments are highly effective at helping us lose weight by adjusting our body’s response to hunger signals and by helping us feel full more easily. However, they are not a replacement for consistency. While using those treatments, you still need to make sure that you’re adjusting your diet and exercise routines. This way, you’re able to sustain them once your treatment ends, and are not likely to regain the weight rapidly when your habits swing back to the other side.
Understand That Progress Is Rarely Linear
When we’re putting a lot of effort into losing weight, we expect to see the scale only moving in one direction: downwards. However, the reality is that it’s rarely quite that simple. Healthy progress should include weeks of weight loss, yes, but it may also include pauses, fluctuations in weight, and slower phases. Our weight loss is influenced by a host of factors, including hydration, hormones, sleep, stress, and digestive health. Taking steps to improve these, such as improving your digestion by maintaining a healthy gut biome with probiotics, can help, but you can’t be in control of absolutely everything. Plateaus often represent periods of the body adjusting to change, not a complete lack of progress.
Mindset Consistency Is Just As Important
The physical and habitual changes we make are the meat and bones of the changes we see in our body along the way, but they are also supported by how we think and talk to ourselves about our health. Developing a mindset that is patient, shows self-compassion, and focuses on learning is much better for developing consistent habits than one that is overly self-critical or puts a lot of pressure on oneself. If you treat every single setback as a failure, then your motivation to keep trying can quickly erode, leaving you back where you started.
Healthy Routines Support Life, They Don’t Consume It
Balance is important in all things. It is true that many of us could stand to balance things a little more towards exercise, healthy eating, and general good habits. However, if your plans require constant, rigid rules, social isolation, and little time for anything other than going to the gym or preparing healthy meals, then the deficiencies in your lifestyle are going to start weighing on you. They can show as stress, dissatisfaction, or growing frustrated with the grind. This eventually can reach the breaking point, and you might decide to throw away the whole thing. Routines need to be flexible enough to accommodate the rest of your life, as well as to change when travel, stress, or illness has an influence.
Maintenance Is Just As Important As Loss
One last thing that’s worth mentioning is that your aim towards a healthy weight shouldn’t simply stop when you reach it. Building healthy habits should make it a lot easier to maintain the weight you want, when you want it. However, you need to keep up the work. Rather than backsliding into bad habits and putting that weight on again, you should think of other ways to improve your health. Setting new goals for yourself makes it a lot easier to stick to the routines, habits, and tools that you’ve built up over your journey. Besides, at the end of the day, health should be the goal, not just reaching a number on a scale.
Building habits and changes based on consistency isn’t just the best way to make sure that your efforts are successful; it also increases your chances of maintaining them in the long run. When you’re better able to integrate healthy changes into your daily life, it makes them easier to return to, even if you make a mistake or backslide along the way.
