The "Conversation" to have with YOURSELF before you start a Diet
A note before reading: This article is part 2 of 5 in the article series “The Conversations to have before starting a diet". To read part 1: “What Constitutes a successful diet” click below:
In part 1, I talked about what makes up a successful diet. This includes topics such as goal setting, sustainability, roadblocks and reflection. Now that we know the overall structure of a diet, how do we start planning? What are these variables that we now need to account for?
First, let’s go back to the concept of the diet being a project. Any good project starts with an exceptional project manager. The project manager is responsible for planning and more importantly, communication with all fronts to make sure everyone is prepared to complete their tasks to finish the project.
In dieting, YOU are the project manager.
If you have a coach, he or she can help manage the project. But for most scenarios, the person responsible for the communication between all teams in the project/diet is the person dieting. Now, any good project manager will sit down with the team and make sure everyone is on the same page ready to go before things move into action.
Before you start a diet, there are also “conversations” you need to have with YOUR “team”. This may sound a little weird because it's really only you who is doing the diet, but let me give an introduction to your team. Each one of these members play a crucial role in your journey on completing a successful diet.
The Diet Team:
Your Mind/Yourself
Your Body
Your Environment
All three of these “people/members” are responsible for the successes and failures of your diet. As the project manager, you need to make sure your mind, your body and your environment are set up appropriately such that the three can work together to help you complete a successful diet.
Now as someone who has dieted down myself and others, I have picked up several areas of trouble that will throw off the equilibrium of these three “people” working together. Let’s take a look at the variables involved with keeping this project running smoothly.
Throughout this article series I will be breaking down how each team member plays a role in three separate articles:
Part 2: (this one): Your Mind/Yourself
Part 3: Your Body
Part 4: Your Environment
I will also talk about:
How to plan around the negative aspects of your mind, body and environment
How all three work together to make harmony
YOURSELF
1. The most basic roadblock of a successful diet is not having a reason to do it.
Dieting is a choice, no one should be forcing you to do it. Because it is a choice, you also don’t HAVE to do it.
This means that to start a diet you have to be motivated to diet. Your body and environment can be set up perfectly to start the process of dieting. You could have no life stressors or events coming in the near future. Your body may be itching for you to start a diet. But if you don’t have the motivation or see the reason to start dieting, then your “project” will never start.
How do we get motivation to start dieting?
A quick disclaimer about motivation.
I believe that a lot of times true motivation has to be deeply rooted. Usually the more emotion and trade off involved, the longer lasting the motivation. For example, a person looking to just lose an extra couple of pounds for summer will have a different level of motivation than someone who has to lose 50 lbs or else they will fall in the very at-risk population and may not live much longer if he or she doesn’t change.
Motivational videos, inspiring quotes and stories work well for the short term, but if you don’t outline what your purpose is to do something, then you will always question it.
I believe a great exercise before you start a diet is do go through a thought exercise and ask yourself “why”. The trick is to keep going until you get deep into the root of your motivation to diet. An example is like this:
Goal: “I want to lose 10-15 lbs”
Why?
“Because losing weight will help me look and feel better. Along with that I want to learn what it takes to do this change”
Why do you want to look and feel better?
“Because sometimes, I feel that my body makes me feel unconfident. I know I should not feel this way, but maybe following through with making this change will prove to me that I am in control. And me looking and feeling better will propel me to change other areas of my life with this boost in confidence”
Why do you want to learn about healthy eating?
“Because growing up as a kid, my family never had the healthiest eating habits. I can see now in hindsight how it can be harmful in the later stages of life. And I want to look out for future me and make sure that I set myself up now to sustain a healthy lifestyle.”
Now that you have your true purpose, you can always stem back on it when the diet/project gets tough. Instead of looking at your mission statement as “I want to lose XX lbs” it becomes:
“I want to change and improve my confidence and eating habits, and losing this weight is the goal that will propel me to help achieve this.”
Your "why" will change
Another big take home message from this is, your “why” isn’t a static variable, it changes over time.
Most of us will have motivation that gets us started that will DIFFER from why you end up staying. Remember that a successful diet includes being REFLECTIVE. It’s important to reflect at the end of each dieting phase or change something up in your routine.
Keep asking yourself why you want to do this next goal and it’ll be an easy way to have a base for the future.
2. Preparation
Along with finding your purpose, you are also the central planner/organizer of your daily and weekly routines. I've often seen people with great intent and motivation to pursue a diet. The aspect they often forget is the preparation that goes into a diet.
What are some often overlooked variables that come into play?
Time Management
You are responsible to set aside time to do all the various aspects that are included in a diet.
You need to make sure that you are setting time out of your day to nail all the variables that impact your nutrition plan. This includes time spent picking out which foods you are going to eat, buying/preparing those foods, and pre-planning your days and weeks to make sure they fit your diet plan.
Not only are you adding time to make this change, but you will also need to subtract time from other areas of life to make the exchange.
Here is a neat little checklist to go through with some overlooked aspects of time management and dieting:
Do you plan to wake up earlier on days to make your meals? Meal prepping and cooking meals takes a decent amount of time. A common roadblock is when other commitments take up more time than expected and you run out of time to cook. You end up staying later at work one day and on the way back you grab fast food because you won't have time to cook. When dieting, account for the worst case scenarios of time commitments so you know you can stay on track. This is why meal prepping is a commonly used tool when dieting. This consolidates time spent in the kitchen and takes about 1-2 up front commitments during the week so that even at your busiest you still make time for proper meals.
Do you plan on pre-planning macros and training sessions the day prior so you don’t have to stress about it the day of? The worst is being dedicated to a diet, but then messing up the execution of a meal plan due to not planning. I've seen several scnearios where individuals run out of carbs/fats by noon and are stuck eating chicken breasts for dinner. Don't be that person. Plan your day beforehand.
What areas of your life are you going to subtract time from? Leisure time? Sleeping? When deciding to pick-up a new hobby or task to do throughout the week, you don't get any extra time in your day. People forget that when adding a task into their busy schedule, they must subtract from other areas. Diet commitment is no exception. To make time to plan, you need to subtract time spent in other areas. This usually comes down to hard tradeoffs revolving around liesurely activity.
Too many times I have seen people fail at diets simply due to the fact that they have not set aside any time to plan out what they are eating. This leads to instinctive an unplanned eating, which can easily take someone off plan.
The most successful dieters are those who do the most planning. Contrary to popular belief, the best aren't those with the highest motivation or purpose. The best are those who make the commitment to set aside time to prepare for the worst and set themselves up for success.
Time management is all about tradeoffs. If your "why" is important enough. You will make the necessary time commitments to succeed. For those just starting out, it gets better. The more experience you have with dieting, the more you get better at the time equation.
Knowledge
In any scenario, you need to devote time to your diet. But you also need to make the most of your time and be efficient. Efficiency means dieting with a strategy in place so that you reach your goal and don’t waste time in the process.
Now finding the best strategy is doable, but difficult. Now more than ever, there is a plethora of information at our fingertips. This is especially true for information related to dieting.
As the project manager, you are the one responsible to sort through the information and make the judgement call on how to set-up your diet. Here is a checklist of several topics that you need to be responsible for:
Type of diet: Track Macros? Keto (read here if so) ? Intermittent Fasting? Paleo?
Food selection: what are the best foods to get you to your goal?
Diet Speed: How fast should you diet? 0.5% Bodyweight per week? 1% Bodyweight per week?
Diet Length: How Long? 4 weeks? 6 months?
Diet Breaks: Are you going to take breaks from the diet? If so, How? When? How long?
Adjustments: What are you going to do if you stall? How are you going to adjust?
Training: What type of training to do? Resistance training? Should you include cardio?
Failure: What will you do if you fail? If you don't reach your goal by a deadline?
Remember in Part 1 that goal setting is dictated by experience level. Not to mention, the answers to the above responsibilities will depend on your own:
Starting body fat percentage
Genetics
Gender
Age
Level of activity
Personal preferences
Past experiences of dieting
This is overwhelming to say the least. I could go on and on and get this list up to hundreds of questions if I wanted to. This information overload is a roadblock in itself in which every person automatically assumes the burden.
Because of this roadblock, this is part of the project management where it may benefit you to get help.
Getting help from trusted online sources, people who have successfully dieted themselves, or a coach is something I highly encourage. If you were a project manager for the construction of a building, wouldn’t it be beneficial to reach out to more experienced mentors or resources to make sure your plan is solid?
The same goes for setting up a diet and training plan. You need the knowledge to set up the long term plan and everything that is going to go into it. If you don’t know how to do this, seek out these answers BEFORE you start dieting.
Any good project manager knows when to be responsible for work and when to offload it to someone else. While dieting, make sure you do the same.
Takeaway
You now know:
What constitutes a successful diet
How YOU impact its success
You are responsible for:
Motivation: Finding out your "why" to diet
Preparation: Finding out how to plan your diet
In Part 3, I will talk about how YOUR BODY is the next variable in the equation. You can be motivated to diet and have a solid plan ready to execute. But what if your body rejects the diet? What happens when your own body makes it harder for you to diet? How does the project manager have to make sure YOU and YOUR BODY can work together towards completion of a successful diet? More to come...