Consistency is more than related to success, surely the key to it. Let’s take an example of someone trying to achieve the splits. You look up some exercises, or let’s say you take a class on how to achieve the splits. Now, you have the right exercises you need to do…. every…day…. to achieve the splits in 1 month hypothetically.

Day 1 you kill it, a little frustrated but you know you got this. Day 2 you’re motivated and can’t wait to see the results. Day 3 you didn’t sleep well the night before, you got the exercises done but you kind of half-assed it. You tell yourself it’s OK I’ll get back (you look up motivational quotes like this one below…haha..)

Despite your lovely motivational quote……you get busy and you don’t do your exercises for 4 days. You attempt to do them the day after but you feel you have not progressed at all; you’re back where you started and you give up. You say to yourself: “I tried”.

Here’s the question to ask yourself, have you put in CONSISTENT effort to achieve the splits? (Referring to the example above). It takes consistency, not perfection. THAT is what I learnt. I am a perfectionist and some of you might relate to that. The key is not doing things perfectly and creating an all-or-nothing mentality, the key to JUST DO IT…consistently.

Another example is when I see some of my clients or patients and ask them to food journal consistently. They come back and I often receive the response: “It has been on and off” OR “I screw up so I did not record that day”. Then they are frustrated because on the “good days”, they followed the plan we came up with. But…….what about the days they did not? How do you expect to see CONSISTENT results when your ACTIONS are NOT consistent. It doesn’t quite work that way.

I’d like to speak to food journaling a bit and say that if you have a bad day, it’s ok ONLY if you STILL journal it, LEARN FROM IT, and have it help you be mindful of your choices next time. Now, you could choose to be in a “learning stage” and accept that you are learning consistency and learning about yourself and food habits. During this stage, you cannot expect consistent results, although you might see some results, of course! When you are TRULY consistent, then it’s a different story. Even if you are consistent and did not see results, if you have been food journaling truthfully, we can do back and see what happened, we can assess and problem-solve and try a different approach. At this point we still have DATA…CONSISTENT…data to work with.

Just a quick blog. HAPPY CONSISTENCY……AND……Remember to be patient, it’ll all be worth it at the end!

Hannah Deacon, RD