Structure & Consistency with Nutrition
Working primarily with busy professionals for a while now, I’m familiar with clients who are great at creating structure and consistency in specific areas of their lives. These individuals are driven, intended on building a legacy, doubling down on efforts and jumping on opportunities that can create better opportunities for themselves and their families.
What this individual values in health. Having great health brings confidence, success and freedom.
However, the one area where structure and consistency can be difficult to create (and then maintain) is nutrition… and good nutrition underpins great health.
In theory, it’s simple to tell someone that they need to adapt their nutrition practices (aka diet) for this stage in their life, but applying this is not as easy and can result in more than just unhealthy food and eating habits. In many cases I have witnessed overtraining leading to injury and disordered food behaviours leading to confusion of a person’s internal cues of hunger and fullness, and also restrictive eating, overeating and eating foods that cause inflammation for the body.
Busy professionals work with me to look and feel their best. They may have tried to level up their nutrition before, but this type of person is time poor. So instead, the individual resorts to hacks they tried in their twenties. But the lack of direction and understanding at this stage in their life, leads to overtraining, injury and exhaustion.
For many, it’s unrealistic to eat and train as the version of themselves twenty years ago, trying to mimic who you were twenty years ago! This is not ideal nor is it a smart way of using food as fuel and training to gain strength and increase fitness. So instead, we need to understand your current environment, factoring in age, stage of life, previous injuries, work and social commitments and ultimately, health goals.
Why have structure in nutrition?
Let me ask you this: would you start a work project without a clear structure to accomplish the outcomes and desired project goals? The chances of the project failing and the outcomes not being met are pretty high if you haven’t developed a clear structure for how to meet this goals and outcomes. So, why are you not doing this with your nutrition?
Having a structured way of eating (aka meal plan) helps you to to stay on track with your desired health and fitness goals. Even if you have weeks where it seems you are going backwards, following a structure can get you back on track and alleviate a lot of your mental anguish too.
Having structure also helps you to get real, tangible benefits from your training. How long have you been training and have you seen real results from this?
Why have consistency in nutrition?
Again, let’s view this from a project perspective. If you were not consistent with delivering work projects, how would you achieve the desired outcomes? Would you reach the required milestones? Why are you not staying consistent with your nutrition?
The answer may be one of the following:
You don’t know where to start.
There are gaps in your current diet and you aren’t sure what these look like.
Eating healthy feels hard and complicated.
Eating healthy all the time is boring.
You’re feeling overwhelmed by how and what you ‘should’ be eating.
All of the above.
My clients know how to get the results that want from having a ‘nutrition upgrade’ without needing to restrict, diet or ‘eat clean’ 7 days a week (not sustainable or healthy for you). But having some consistency with a healthier diet can look like eating food that fuels and energises you 80% of the time, and having your treats 20% of the time. When we break it down like this, it’s manageable and allows for you to stay consistent without getting off track regularly.
Knowing what we know from the above, we then need to apply it to our stage of life. Where are you at your stage of life right now? Do you have a family, working long hours, injuries from past sports? You need to think about what is achievable with your nutrition and training for your stage of life.
For example, if you are in your 40’s working long hours in corporate and you have three kids, do you think it’s possible to fast for most of the day, fit in two training sessions daily, and still have the energy to get on with your life? I bet you think you can try! But the reality is, you will burn out, feel resentment that you’re not getting the desired body composition results you want from your nutrition and training and ultimately either resort to old eating behaviours and overtraining that do not serve you at this stage.
When I work with busy professionals, we have a sustainable plan that gets them from overwhelm to clarity. There is a clear path from where you are right now to where you want to be. I’ll show you how to:
Get actual results from your training.
Understand how to eat for your specific stage of life.
Stop overtraining and burning out, and instead use food as fuel.
How to mitigate the negative effects of regularly working long hours, entertaining clients and travelling for work.
Maintain your new body composition once you achieve it, and take some valuable resources home with you that you can refer to for life.
Where do you want to be? Today? In 3 months time? In 6 months time?
If you are not sure where to start, let’s chat.
Karen
