Frustrated with Lack of Progress.
Welcome to this edition of BETTER, the email series that provides strategies for pursuing meaningful goals.
Today's article discusses tools and strategies to help navigate a lack of progress toward your goals.
Read on:
Be Completely Honest with Yourself. Most folks have a good idea of what they need to do to progress toward their goals. If you want to lose body fat, you must eat less. If you want to gain strength, or fitness, you're going to need to be in the gym putting in effort. If you want to have more energy, you're going to need to be sleeping enough, exercising, eating well and taking care of your mental health. If you have one of these goals but are frustrated with a lack of progress, you may benefit from an honest conversation with yourself. Have you been doing the things you need to do to get you closer to your goals? If so, how often? 90% of the time? 80%? or 60%? If that is the case, it's OK to admit that you have been coming up short about consistency. Now you have data you can act upon. Refocus your effort, and you should start seeing progress again.
Track your Effort. If you follow the advice in the bullet point above and come up with "I have no idea how consistent I have been on doing things that I need to do," you need to start tracking your efforts. If you want to lose body fat, write down everything you eat. I love an old-fashioned pen and paper to do so. However, there are so many apps to help with this. If you want to get stronger, track your workouts. Over time, you'll be able to see if you are lifting heavier loads for more reps, and then you'll know you're progressing. Tracking takes extra time and effort, but it gives us valuable data to make future decisions.
Have you been Consistent for Long Enough? Consider this: one pound of fat has 3,500 calories in it. That means if you are in a caloric deficit of 250 calories daily, it will take you two weeks to lose 1 pound of body fat. That's a long time to stay consistent so that progress is immediately visible. If we use the same caloric deficit of 250 calories a day, it will take you over four and a half months to drop 10 lbs of body fat. 4 and a half months is longer than any season on the calendar. If you started your fat loss efforts on January 1st and stayed in a 250-calorie deficit every day for four and a half months, you would hit 10 pounds of body fat loss in mid-May. Gaining muscle mass is an even longer process with even more variables than losing body fat. It's helpful to utilize information like this to reframe our expectations to match what is realistically possible. Before we get frustrated about a lack of progress, be honest with yourself; have you been consistent for long enough?
A great line of thinking for those aspiring to achieve great things is to focus on what we need to do to make progress as often as possible. Do these things as consistently as possible, and have enough patience and faith in the process to let all these actions create enough change to become visible.