Why Consistency Is So Important For Fat Loss

Cori (00:00):
Welcome to the Redefining Strength Podcast. Everything you need to succeed on your health and fitness journey, even the stuff you don’t want to hear. You know what the suckiest truth, the hardest fact you have to face. If you want to see lasting results and the best results as fast as possible, you have to be consistent. And it’s a forever process. You can never stop doing what made you better. Yet, when we really think about what we’ve often struggled with, it is consistency with something. We search for a perfect workout, a perfect diet plan, and we keep ourselves stuck in the same cycle of doing something, seeing some progress, maybe not as much as we hope to only have life or stress or something get in the way. And I actually did a poll in my broadcast channel on Instagram asking, what do you find is the biggest struggle to getting consistent?

(00:51):
And it wasn’t even enough time. It wasn’t knowing what to do. It was life getting in the way and stress. And I thought this was such an interesting thing because I think it’s a mindset that I struggled with for a long time, and I see it a lot with clients as well. But it’s this mindset that we have to be on this perfect plan or there is some routine or habit we have to be in order to see results instead of realizing that habits and routines are very individual and can be done in so many different forms, like tracking. We think when we think of tracking, we have a very specific image in our head, but tracking isn’t just only that one image. It isn’t just using a food tracking app, for example. It could be using visual portion guides, it could be taking pictures of your food.

(01:32):
There’s lots of ways to track what we’re doing to get data. And I bring this up because so often we let stress or life be our excuse for not being consistent, but we need to be consistent if we want to see results. So these things are warring. And the reality is, is that we have to own our lifestyle, own our stressors to create something we can actually be consistent with. So instead of seeing it as life or working towards our goals, we have to realize that the only way we can work towards our goals is if we own our life. If we find those minimums we can do, if we embrace this forever process, because what you do to reach a goal isn’t even what you do to maintain it. And in the process of working towards that goal, you will have evolutions. I go over the three phases of fat loss a lot of times where we will go on those lifestyle builds, so to speak, where we are trying to create habits that overall feel very sustainable, that feel like something we can be consistent with.

(02:25):
And when I say sustainable, it doesn’t mean easy, but they feel very much in alignment with our overall life. That isn’t actually how we approach dieting a lot of times. Usually when January hits, we get really motivated with the new year. We go all in and we actually go into more of a mini cut. We push all these sort of extremes. And I’m not using extremes in a bad way, but it is still perfection things, right? The six days a week ideal workout schedule, really clean macros, extra clean foods, maybe not even eating out as much, not traveling. We have these different time periods where we feel like our life is ideal for seeing results. And so we plan for those times only. And then when life is no longer like that, we don’t know what to do. Not to mention we’ve seen the progress.

(03:05):
We get a little complacency with that, but then we don’t evolve because we have this picture of this is the only thing I do. And in being so clean, trying to be so perfect, we don’t own actual habit changes to handle life. We only start at the right time. And then that’s what never builds lasting change. So instead of doing that, we have to sort of recognize that what is going on with life? What does that lifestyle build? So instead of just doing the mini cut, which is one of the phases of fat loss, where we’re going to more extremes and our deficit trying to push our workouts a little bit harder, we’re doing things that yes, yield potentially a little bit faster results, but really aren’t meant to be done. And we try and force them instead of saying, okay, what’s this lifestyle build?

(03:45):
What can I do to owe my life? What do I really want on weekends? How are weekend habits even different so I can really plan around them instead of trying to force some mold? And there is the balance of these two things. You can’t always just do what you want. If you’re like, okay, well on Friday nights I like to have my margarita, I like to let loose, I like to have my cheat day. That might be all well and good, and that might be part of your lifestyle build, but there might also have to be those weeks where you do that mini cut where you’re like, Hey, I’m not going to do this. And it’s not that I’m restricting, I’m making this choice not to do this, to understand the impact it really has. And because right now it is really important that I go a little bit faster towards my goal, but with that balance, we get so honed in on only that weekend, right?

(04:22):
Oh, I’m not having something this weekend over realizing like, Hey, I’m not having something this weekend. But part of this is also then having the vacation where I can go a little bit more crazy and not feel as bad. And so that’s where we’re seeing those two things, and that’s where even the third phase of fat loss can come into play. Diet breaks where we actually have to slow down to speed up because if we just keep constantly pushing, we don’t realize that mentally we’re getting burned out. We’re not pausing to assess changes in our lifestyle, and even our metabolism is adapting in a way that we’re going to see results slow despite working just as hard. And so sometimes easing off that gas pedal a little bit in advance can really help us. So we want to use those three different phases, and I bring those up because that is what building actual results is all about.

(05:06):
That is what is embracing the forever process that is reaching your goals. And with this forever process, you can never stop doing what made you better. While habits will shift, because what you do to reach your goal is not what you do to maintain it, right? You don’t just stay in a deficit when you’re trying to maintain your weight, when you’re trying to even build lean muscle and rev that metabolism back up potentially after being in an extended deficit. But there is some evolution in those habits. And so you can never stop doing what made you better in that. You can never forget those fundamentals. If you’ve done rehab work for an injury, that rehab becomes prehab. No, you might not be doing it as much. You might have to include all the moves all the time because you might have more consciousness of where you’re seeing overload creep in, but you’re going to keep in some of those fundamentals, the foam rolling, stretching and activation that you’ve done, you’re going to keep in some of those moves that you did to make you move better and make sure that you’re still strengthening.

(05:54):
You’re going to be intentional with exercises to still focus on what you feel working. You’re going to keep those fundamentals in. And as a human, you’re probably going to get a little lazy within my points and have to come back and do a little bit more because you did a little bit less, right? That’s the ebb and flow, but you’re still doing all the things that helped you get there because you have to maintain those habits. It isn’t a set and forget a thing, it isn’t do one thing and then you’re fixed, right? You don’t brush your teeth once and be like, okay, my teeth are clean, I’m good, right? No, you have to do that every single day, multiple times a day to really maintain those results. Same thing goes, it goes back to that saying success is never owned, it’s rented and rent is due daily.

(06:31):
You have to make sure that you’re doing the things daily that build the habits and the person you want to be. If you think about everything you have in your life, it is built off of everything you’re doing consistently. So when we do reach our weight loss goal, when we do see progress, we have to keep doing those things. The form we do them in just evolves. So tracking where you might be doing intensive macro ratios might become more minimalist. You might shift the macros you’re doing. You might shift your workout schedule, but you’re optimizing everything you’re doing based on your schedule and even owning the mindsets that come with it, because you can never stop doing what made you better. And this is a forever process, and that means embracing that life is going to try and get in the way, and it’s not trying to do something despite that. It’s trying to own your reality to constantly plan for it so that you can do those minimums, pay that daily rent, and see success truly lastingly snowball.

*Note: This transcript is autogenerated there may be some unintended errors.