It’s January, and the colder weather and promise of a new year has people everywhere thinking about two things: how they can improve their nutrition and fitness, and where they can go on their next vacation. While health is rarely a factor in planning a vacation (I doubt “all-inclusive resort with the best salads” ranks very high in the search engines), vacations very often are a consideration when it comes to our health (I’d wager “how to get beach ready fast” hits a bit higher.). Setting a goal for a specific event or timeline can be a powerful motivator, but it can also create an artificial endpoint for our nutrition and fitness…and this is problematic!
Consider the following scenario: You want to lose 20 pounds before your Spring Break trip to Cabo in 2 months. You decide to start with a juice cleanse, followed by a low-calorie, small-portion diet with limited food choices. (Maybe you even utilize weight-loss aids.) You also commit to spend at least 1 hour in the gym every day, waking up earlier to do so. You have a lot of motivation at first and quickly lose a few pounds! As the weeks go on, however, you find it harder and harder to keep it up, your cravings and hunger have increased, and your energy, workout performance, and sleep quality have all gone down. You tell yourself you just need to make it 2 more weeks until your vacation!
Finally your trip arrives, and you can let loose! You have a great time on your vacation, indulge in a lot of great food, and skip the hotel gym in favor of lying by the pool. When you get home, you’re faced with a choice: resume your diet plan or go back to old habits. Maybe you were so thrilled with your results that you decide to get back on the wagon. Progress eventually stalls, however, and without the dangling carrot of vacation to keep you on this extreme program, you fall right back into the old eating and fitness patterns that led you to have weight to lose in the first place! Or, perhaps you don’t even attempt to return to the diet, because vacation is over and you won’t need to “look good” in a swimsuit again for another few months.
For a lot of people, this is a pattern that repeats itself year after year, leading to a phenomenon known as yo-yo dieting (or more technically, weight cycling). We pick an arbitrary endpoint or timeline and center our health goals around it, jumping into several big (and sometimes drastic) changes all at once. Eventually we lose motivation, progress plateaus, the cost or time commitment becomes too great, or we hit our goal and go back to “normal.” Perhaps, as in our Cabo example, we wind up overindulging in response to too much restriction, which sends us back past “normal” and towards the other extreme. When we do this, we are treating our nutrition and fitness like a vacation – we heavily invest in temporary, expensive, and unsustainable measures without any plans for how we can maintain them in the long-term.
Bungee jumping in the rainforest is exhilarating, but eventually you won’t want to do it everyday. The lemon cayenne cleanse may help you lose 5 pounds fast, but (not so eventually) you won’t want to do that every day either. Diets and weight loss hacks don’t last because they aren’t sustainable – we get tired of them, our bodies adapt, or we start seeing detrimental side effects. This can include anything from fatigue to metabolic adaptation to nutrient deficiencies. What’s more, relying on restrictive, short-term measures to meet health goals inevitably leads to regression, and we wind up right back where we started – or worse. In the case of weight loss, several studies point to increases in body weight, body fat percentage, and health risks in those who regain weight after losing it on a short-term diet!
So, how do you improve your nutrition, get fit, and meet your health goals without backsliding, losing motivation, or winding up worse than you started?
Change your mindset on health, planning for it like a permanent relocation, rather than a temporary vacation.
Moving to a new city requires planning, seeking out new resources and systems, and budgeting for the long-term so that we can thrive in our new environment with the least amount of stress and effort. Thinking in the same way regarding our nutrition and fitness allows us to skip the endless cycle of short-term diet trends, rebounds, and disappointment, and instead replace it with a toolbox of healthy behaviors. We should make choices that will help us grow and progress our health, rather than ones we have to temporarily suffer through.
Instead of:
- Severe calorie restriction and calorie counting
- Purchasing special diet foods, taking weight loss pills, and following strict protocols
- Exercising excessively without adequate recovery
- Changing too many things at once
- Tying health goals up in a time-specific event
Try:
- Taking a long-term view of your health
- Making changes one at a time
- Creating new habits that you can do every day, indefinitely
- Finding nutritious foods that you like and can eat regularly
- Learning how to be dietarily flexible and approach potential obstacles
- Creating a nutrition and fitness framework, rather than a list of rules and measurements
- Identifying physical and mental stressors, and potential “trigger” foods
- Implementing a balanced routine of exercise, daily movement, and recovery
Remember that health is a long-term goal. Instead of being bound to short-term goals and restrictive thinking, implement habits that will serve you for a lifetime!
ThinkWell Nutrition Coaching 
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