When we are coming back to exercise there are many similar things that we do as humans. The problem is some of these are big mistakes. Reading this for the next 3 minutes will ensure you don’t fall into the trap of making this mistake and then falling off the bandwagon again.
The mistake we are talking about here is that of jumping on a very restricted diet. We tend to do this because in our heads ‘discipline’ of training goes with ‘discipline’ of eating well.
The reasons this is a big mistake is because of the following:
- When we are coming back to exercise we most likely haven’t been eating our best and have been sedentary. All of a sudden you are adding in training and you will automatically make smarter choices to support this. It is true that what you eat will affect your results but in the initial stages we just want to keep things simple and not stress ourselves when we will still be getting some results without going all out on the diet front.
- Whenever we restrict ourselves our inner child self is suffocated and wants exactly what we cant have. If we are on a very restrictive diet we not only crave what we ‘can’t’ have but when we give in to the urge we also make ourselves feel guilty. These feelings of guilt will often cause us to a) feel crappy and ‘try even harder’ next time. Or b) decide it’s too hard and go to the other extreme of the diet we are on and ultimately fall off the training bandwagon.
What we suggest you do to ensure you don’t fall for this mistake is:
- Focus on adding things into your eating rather than ‘taking out’. For example focus on getting more quality water in and more greens in rather than saying you’re not allowed chocolate. This will help smooth out the extreme thought process of ‘I’ve screwed up now as I just had a piece of chocolate, so there’s no point carrying on with the diet’.
- Keep it simple. Don’t try and be a diet saint when your current habits are a long way away from ideal. Just start with small changes and wait until they are habits before moving on.
We hope this short blog has helped you in some way. Please share it with others or tag someone you know that can benefit from this!
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