Don’t Be Perfect, Be Consistent! By Health & Fitness Columnist Jamie Stedman

Don’t be perfect, be consistent!

I read the other day that 45% of adults set resolutions in the New Year. How many of these do you think fail to reach the first week? The answer is 25%. Of the 75% of people who survive the first week only 8% of them succeed.

Why is do you think that is?
Could be lack of will power, motivation, lack of support, yeah that will account for a lot!
BUT I think that there is one major factor which stops people sticking to their resolutions and their goals in general and that is……..the pursuit of perfection.

I’ll give you a scenario, a lady has decided she is going to give up eating chocolate for September.
She’s going well but then after a stressful afternoon she gives into the cravings and devours kit kat chunky!

So she has failed in her attempt to eat NO chocolate in September, what now?
Well it can go 2 ways:
1. She carries on eating well and avoiding chocolate as much as she can for the rest of the month.
2. She’s failed her goal so she might as well eat as much chocolate as she wants now.

Sadly many people go down the route of number 2.
They feel as if they have failed so they might as well give up.
Surely looking back at the end of the month it would be better to eat 3 chocolate bars rather than 33 wouldn’t it?

Perfection is a very difficult thing to achieve, I can’t do it and I don’t know anyone who can.

Eating clean is great, the food is delicious, it isn’t boring and there is plenty of variety to what you can eat (honest), but it’s in our nature to crave the sugary, fatty foods which cause all of the health problems if eaten often. SO it is inevitable that every now and again we will give into temptation but the most important thing is you bounce straight back to your healthy routine soon afterwards.

Seek consistency not perfection.
This will work a lot better, it’s perfectly human to fall off the wagon sometimes and give into temptation and laziness.
It’s called life.
Just make sure you nip it in the bud and get back on the wagon straight-away.

If you get to Wednesday and you miss your exercise session and have a take away don’t wait until the following Monday, or the start of the next month to carry on training and eating clean, do it on Thursday. The longer you delay the more work you have to do to get back to where you are.
Never quit starting again.

Things don’t have to be perfect to start, you shouldn’t have to wait until a new calendar year to make your changes. If you want it bad enough you should start straight away.

People can be too hard on themselves, If you do have a takeaway don’t spend days feeling guilty about it and beat yourself up, it’s done, it’s gone it probably tasted good now you can get back to the hard work.

If you don’t it’s likely you will be depressed, unmotivated and overweight.
It’s better to be consistently good for 12 months than perfect for 3 months and rubbish for 9 months! All or nothing shouldn’t apply here but sadly that’s how a lot of people see it.

So my take home advice today is be as consistent as possible, dwelling on your past mistakes are a waste of time.

Look at today and look at tomorrow.
Good luck!
From Jamie ‘not perfect’ Stedman.

Photo source: Grace Louise Powell (Editor at The West Wales Chronicle).