What constitues a successful diet?
A note before reading: This article won’t necessarily be about the VARIABLES to control while dieting. More so, this article will be about the questions you should ask yourself to set-up a STARTING POINT for a diet. Later articles in this series will talk about the variables you need to account for!
OUTLINE
- Starting a Diet is like Starting a Project
- Where Goal Setting Goes Wrong
- Sustainability vs Efficiency
- Roadblocks
- Reflection
Starting a Diet is like Starting a Project
How so?
Let’s look at a project such as building a house vs finishing a diet.
Before building a House you have to take in account several variables, these include:
- Magnitude: You can build a small town house or something as big as a mansion
- Purpose: Usually to provide or improve a particular living situation.
- Starting Point: You can start building a house from the ground up or even renovate something that exists already.
The same goes for starting a diet
- Magnitude: Intentful dieting phases for some can last years, while for others can last as short as 3-4 weeks.
- Purpose: Usually to improve body composition, performance or overall health
- Starting Point: This can vary depending on experience with dieting as well as intial body composition
While the two goals differ, they essentially have the same framework and end point. Completion of the project.
Completion of the house. Completion of the diet.
Projects have many different variables that separate themselves from each other. But overall, the goal of any project is to be successful within the given time frame proposed to complete it. Therefore, before you start the process of DOING the project, it is important to look at your different variables and define what the gameplan is to complete the project.
So what should this "gameplan" be for setting up a diet? What are some things we should take into account?
Let's looking at building a house. What is our goal? Simply put, it is to build the house. However, we usually would like to build the house in a given time frame for whoever the house is for. What are some factors to take into account for our gameplan? Houses can be big or small with a multitude of features that will make this take longer or shorter. The seasons and weather will change throughout the year and construction will be harder in some seasons vs others. In addition to this, the workforce devoted to building the house will dictate the timeline, efficiency and potential final result of the house.
Now, with different factors involved, there must be different expectations within our gameplan.
It seems obvious that a small team tasked with building a one-story townhouse should have different expectations than the team responsible for building Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s next mansion.
Therefore, it should be no different when setting up a successful diet. Given the different VARIABLES associated with dieting, we need different frames of reference for what our game plan should be. The problem is, with crafting a smart game plan means crafting a smart GOAL to begin with. But how do you make smart goals? How do we know where to start? Where to finish?
Where Goal Setting Goes Wrong
There is a sense of accomplishment when your goal is reached that will propel you to reach the NEXT goal you create. Now this sense of accomplishment can change based on the difficulty of the goal. Graduating college vs Being on time for work, which one should feel more rewarding? There is obviously a spectrum of goals and satisfaction given a variety of circumstances.
Now where should we aim on this spectrum?
Often people say to “set realistic goals”. This saying often gets taken out of context and here is why:
Unrealistic expectations will make it so that you will never reach your goal and will never feel accomplished even though you are working hard.
On the other end of the spectrum, setting goals that are too easy will give the false perception of accomplishment when there is still a lot of hard work left on the table.
In reality, there is a spectrum that one falls on.
Where you lie on this spectrum of expectations depends on experience level. Appropriately setting goals based on experience level is something that takes time and comes with a lot of trial and error.
Now, someone who is a competitive bodybuilder and has been training/dieting for 15+ years is going to have a different duration, goal, and starting point than someone who has never lost weight before and is looking to make a lifestyle change. Although these two individuals will focus on their own dieting, nutrition and routine, the way in which they do so will obviously differ.
The experienced Bodybuilder may be looking at competing and winning on the World Stage. On the other hand, the beginner just starting their weight loss journey may be looking at just establishing healthy habits that will carry over long term.
Keep in mind that both parties want to reach THEIR goal. The level of satisfaction, given their experience, will more than likely be similar! This satisfaction will drive future goal setting and accomplishment.
Takeaway:
Finding a happy medium of a realistic vs difficult goal to reach is an important part of a successful diet.
Sustainability vs Efficiency
Dieting can have numerous goals, but for physique purposes the goal is aiming towards a particular body image. To get to this goal, there usually is a correlation with a change in scale weight, body fat percentage, and muscle mass. This will be done through a manipulation of training, nutrition, and routine from their current baseline.
The way in which it differs comes down to the tradeoff of sustainability and efficiency.
A diet where you may only lose 0.5 lbs/week may be easier than one where you lose 2 lbs/week. But if the target weight loss and initial starting point is the same, the 2lbs/week scenario will be more efficient, but most likely less sustainable. From case to case, this tradeoff of sustainability and efficiency changes over time, but is important to always take note of.
Someone dieting for the first time must be careful. They need to go fast enough to see progress, but not to the point where they burn out and revert all their progress they made.
I believe a vital tool for any diet is to have the skill and the knowledge to be able to perform the diet as efficiently as possible to where the transition out of the diet is sensible enough to maintain their progress. There is no sense in losing 30 lbs in 10 weeks if 2 months later you unwillingly gain all 30 lbs back and then some. In this scenario, the person would have been better off just dieting slower to make everything more sustainable and chip away at their goal.
Takeaway:
Again, this sustainability/efficiency part of the diet is dictated by your experiences. Your experience is the rate limiting step that you need to look at before you start answering this aspect.
Roadblocks
Even with this central idea of what a good diet looks like in theory, there are number of ways I’ve seen where things can go wrong.
Some Examples include:
- Not buying into the diet and the process of doing it. This usually stems from just a lack of purpose. If someone doesn’t see a purpose to start the diet, then why do it at all?
- Lack of time spent preparing and doing tasks surrounding the project will obviously impede on the efficiency of getting it done.
- The person dieting too hard and their body “rejecting” the concept of dieting. This results in the body conserving energy by being lazy, hungry and stressed to signal to the person to bring them back to normal levels.
- Not looking at the long term effects of the diet.
- Not realizing how their environment will affect their diet. Work, friends, relationships, and events can all easily make the diet harder.
All of these roadblocks may prevent you from potentially reaching your goal.
In goal setting and managing expectations, it is important to plan AROUND roadblocks. Ask yourself what are the biggest obstacles that are holding you back from getting to where you want to be?
Takeaway:
Appropriately diagnosing your pitfalls is just as important as planning how you will achieve your goal.
Reflection
Lastly, as a coach I personally value this point as it the foundation to make sure 1 & 2 can continuously be refined. Understanding the why behind how everything is or is not working in a diet is the tool that keeps everything in check.
Having the knowledge behind what is important for you to reach your goals will help you focus more on the main principles and less on the minute details. Cutting out the fluff and navigating through your roadblocks ensures that you can keep striving for your goal. In my experience, even in things unrelated to fitness/dieting, this is the aspect that most individuals lack. Reflection is the aspect of gameplanning that I consciously devote a significant more time too in relation to others.
What happens if you start to build Beyoncé’s house and failed because your work force was too small, too inexperienced, and had an unrealistic timeline to finish the project? The key is to reflect and manipulate the variables you can control OR change your goal. This evaluation process is what allows you to take that next step. You need to keep accruing more experience and learning from successes and mistakes.
As a coach, I educate my clients on the process and reasoning behind EVERYTHING I prescribe them. I assign macros for my client to hit, but I also give an explanation of why I gave them these macros and what their purpose is. For example, I will prescribe a higher protein intake for the sake of keeping a client satiated on a diet and to maintain muscle mass.
I help my clients understand how certain VARIABLES correlate with particular OUTCOMES. I do this in hopes that they get better at the process of reflection. This means looking back at their training/nutrition when things go good and bad in order to propel them to make changes to reach their goals.
Every step along the way in the diet is for a specific reason and every positive and negative outcome has an original root cause. The better one gets at picking out these root causes, the more they can keep the good and throw out the bad.
Takeaway:
There are many cases where an individual does not reach their diet goal. There are other cases where they reach their goal, but cannot sustain it. In both scenarios, the knowledge acquired before and after the dieting process will help them get back on track for next time.
Completing your diet requires viewing it as a project. You have to account for experience level, sustainability, efficient, and roadblocks. Within these landmarks, you must also be reflective of the process itself to continue making progress.
Now that we have a better understanding of what it takes to do the project, what is it that we actually have to account for before starting? What particular variables, resources, and roadblocks should we be looking out for?
This article serves as the first article in a 5-part series. In parts 2-4, I will go in more depth of the variables to account for such as your mind (part 2), your body (part 3), and your environment (part 4). Part 5 will then be my personal navigation through these variables and how I dealt with each. Stay tuned!
Learn more about the Author of this article:
Instagram: @brandonjod
