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Hello Love:

It might not be the most wonderful time of the year anymore, if Hallmark is to be believed… but it is the most common time of year for one thing: the pursuit of healthy lifestyle changes.

Are you working to change your lifestyle in some way? Or trying to incorporate new healthy habits?

You aren’t alone! The new year often has us working to make changes, many of which focus on our lifestyle.

But, more often than not, the changes you work so hard to create just don’t stick! Is there a better way to approach healthy lifestyle changes?

Heck yes there is! And I invited the lovely Maryann Auger, certified personal trainer, wellness coach and group fitness instructor, to talk to us about it. She’s sharing 5 common reasons healthy lifestyle changes don’t work. Plus, she shares how you can avoid those mistakes and create awesome new habits.

Ready to dive in? Let’s go! Take it away Maryann…

5 Common Reasons Healthy Lifestyle Changes Don’t Work

The beginning of the year is practically synonymous with lifestyle changes for better health. Everyone is planning on changing the way they eat, adding more exercise, drinking more water and so on with health or weight loss in mind.

How many times have you tried to do some lifestyle changes with no success?

If you answered 1 or more to this question, you may not have been focusing on the right things and need another game plan. I’m here to help by giving you 5 reasons why your last lifestyle changes didn’t work.

But don’t worry, I’m not leaving you there. I’m going to give you tips on how to incorporate healthy habits in your life for good and, more importantly, for the right reasons!

1. Focusing (Too Much) On Your Appearance

According to a study conducted by Dove, only 4% of women consider themselves beautiful (source). That means 96% of women would change something about their appearance.

Another study shows that 90% of men are dissatisfied with their appearance (source). It doesn’t matter how many times I say this, these stats always shock and sadden me.

Knowing this, it’s only normal to have goals that focus on changing your appearance. You may want to lose weight, “tone up”, get leaner or change your body in some way.

There’s nothing wrong with having appearance related goals (body autonomy yo!) But the thing is, if your main goal or if our sole focus is your appearance, you are less likely to stick to your goals.

Once the scale stops moving, the inches stop coming off or stop going up, the clothes fit the same, or your appearance in the mirror looks the same, you are more likely to give up.

Once we don’t see any progress, we get discouraged and stop altogether.

You are also more likely to participate in disordered behaviors if your goal is to change the weight on the scale or your appearance (source).

Doing things like burning off the calories of your last meal, skipping a meal to save up calories, obsessing over calories, over-exercising or having a rigid exercise routine, stepping on the scale several times a day, etc. These behaviors are often times normalized by diet culture. But they undeniably are harmful.

A More Sustainable Approach

Instead of focusing on your appearance, you could focus on incorporating healthy habits that are sustainable and feel good to you. That could involve things like:

Eating more veggies

Moving your body

Getting more quality sleep

Incorporating some tools to help you reduce your stress

Socializing more

Resting more

Etc.

2. Going On A Diet

Thankfully, it seems to have become common knowledge that diets don’t work. In case you didn’t know, 95% of diets fail. That means that only 5% of people can lose weight with the help of a diet and keep it off. (source)

It may seem obvious, but what exactly is a diet? A lot of people don’t really know and many companies out there (I’m looking at you WW and Noom) use that to their advantage. They pretend they’re not a diet but instead are a “lifestyle change”. But that’s a diet in disguise!

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of diet is “a regimen of eating and drinking sparingly so as to reduce one’s weight” (source). Basically, diets are all about restrictions.

Here are a few examples of common diets and ways diets restrict your food intake:

Cutting out macronutrients (carbs, fats and/or protein)

Tracking macros and counting calories

80/20 rule (80% of the time eating nutrient dense foods and 20% of the time eating less nutrient dense foods)

Weighing and measuring food

Juice cleanses and detoxes

Skipping meals / Intermittent fasting

Having any sort of food rule (only eating at a certain time, cutting out all junk food)

Meal plans

Diets aren’t sustainable.

When you’re 90 year old, in a nursing home, you’re not going to count your calories or make sure the pudding they give you fits your macros.

And let’s be real, life happens. You might go through a breakup, the loss of someone you love, go on vacation, have to work more hours at work, etc. You likely won’t have the energy, time or desire to fixate on food when those moments arise.

There are also a few holidays throughout the year that are a great opportunity to spend some time with loved ones enjoying good food and good company. It’s not a fun time for over-analyzing your food or counting your calories.

A More Sustainable Approach

Instead of dieting, you could learn to eat in a way that makes you feel good and happy. You could absolutely eat in a way that promotes health, if that’s important to you. But you could also eat in a way that is sustainable for the rest of your life, regardless of what life throws your way. The two can go hand in hand.

Bonus, you get to create amazing memories and not be consumed with thoughts around the food you eat!

A great place to start would be reading the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.

3. Focusing On Your Weight

Most lifestyle changes involve losing weight or gaining weight. However, relying on the scale hurts us in 3 ways.

It can be pretty discouraging It may not be super accurate It doesn’t determine how awesome you are

Let’s start with number one.

It can be discouraging because the number on the scale may not show you what you want to see. And that can be enough to stop all your efforts at incorporating healthy habits.

It can also trigger overeating episodes. If the number you see is “good”, you may celebrate by overeating.

And if the scale shows you a number you didn’t want to see, you may decide to be even stricter with yourself. Which could lead to a “last supper moment” where you try to eat as much food as possible because you’re never going to be allowed the food ever again once your diet starts.

You may also feel intense feelings of guilt and shame.

Because you didn’t reach that number on the scale, you may feel like a failure and like you’re not (doing) enough. Which is not the case, I promise you!

Secondly, weighing yourself may not be super accurate.

This is because the number on the scale reflects so much more than the amount of fat you have. That number can be affected by things like

The amount of water you are retaining

If you ate before weighing yourself

If you ate more the day before

If you went to the washroom or not

The phase of your menstrual cycle

If you drank water and if you ate more or less carbs

And lastly, the scale doesn’t determine how awesome you are.

Have you ever stepped on a scale and stepped off either sad or happy? The number you see can either make your day or ruin it.

But the truth is, that number doesn’t determine how kind, funny, smart and amazing you are. At your funeral, people won’t remember you for how much you weighed. They’re going to remember your amazing qualities and who you are as a person!

A More Sustainable Approach

Focusing on the scale can lead to a lot of disordered thoughts and behaviors. Instead, you could focus on incorporating healthy habits that make you feel good and happy regardless of whether it affects your weight and/or appearance.

4. Setting An Unrealistic End Date

Your last lifestyle changes may not have worked because you set an unrealistic end date. You may have wanted to accomplish a certain appearance or weight related goal in a week, 30 days, 4 months, 1 year and so on.

When you have an end date, you may result in disordered behaviors to reach your goal. For example, if you have a goal to lose x lbs in x days. And you might go to extremes to make sure you do reach your goal. Those disordered behaviors aren’t sustainable and, sadly, they will most likely backfire.

A More Sustainable Approach

Instead, if you stop focusing on appearance and weight and start focusing on incorporating healthy habits, there’s not normally an end date.

You’re never really going to stop doing your best to eat veggies because they make you feel good and are good for you. You won’t stop moving your body because it helps you manage your stress, makes you feel good and helps you mentally. And you’re not going to stop using the tools you have to reduce your stress.

If one of your goals is to improve your health, incorporating habits that are sustainable and that you can do for the rest of your life is key. The goal shouldn’t be to do something only for 30 days. It should be about doing them for as long as it feels right. Potentially even for the rest of your life.

As you may have guessed, I’m not a big fan of intentional weight loss.

Intentional weight loss is linked to weight cycling and weight stigma which both have negative effects on our health (source 1, source 2).

That’s why I always promote health-related behaviors instead of intentional weight loss. But that doesn’t mean that I’m judging you if you want to lose weight! It’s completely normal and you have every right to pursue intentional weight loss if you want. I don’t promote intentional weight loss but I do believe in body autonomy.

And there’s also nothing wrong with wanting to reach a goal in a certain amount of time. As long as you set a realistic goal.

For example, you may want to squat a certain amount of weight in a certain amount of time. And there’s nothing wrong with that if your timeline makes sense.

Setting an end date can help you have a bit more structure and help you achieve your goal. But some people prefer not having an end date. Do what works best for you!

5. Focusing On Too Many Things At The Same Time

We’ve all been there. We’re excited about making these changes in our lives and we try to change a thousand things at the same time (cue the exaggeration).

When we try to change our habits, we usually try to change ALL of them at once. We try to drink more water, eat more veggies, change the way we eat drastically, hit the gym 5 days a week, go to bed early, wake up early, etc.

I’m getting exhausted just writing all of that.

We should instead focus on one thing at a time and make sure that it’s finally a habit and becomes part of our routine before we move on to the next thing.

When I talk about this, I always talk about that time I tried to meditate and practice gratitude every night before bed. I would occasionally end up practicing gratitude by writing 3 things I was grateful for that day in my journal. But I would never make time to meditate. I got frustrated with myself for not being able to keep up with my goals.

However, when I decided to focus solely on journaling, it became more of a daily thing instead of being something I only did a couple times a week. Now, it’s a habit. I grab my journal before bed without thinking twice about it. That means that I can now work on incorporating meditation to this routine.

Focus on one thing at a time. It’s more likely to work and you’re less likely to be hard on yourself for struggling to reach your goal.

Speaking of being hard on yourself, make sure to be kind to yourself if things aren’t going your way. Slow progress is still progress! Every step counts.

Final Thoughts

There is a lot of pressure to change our appearance and lose weight in today’s society because we are bombarded by pictures of this specific ideal body type and messages from diet culture. Especially if we’re plus sized.

So before I pass on the mic back to Sara, I want to share the conclusions of a meta-analysis and a study. In case you don’t know, a meta-analysis groups studies on a similar topic that help to determine an overall trend.

In the meta-analysis they were evaluating the association of cardio-respiratory fitness and weight status on mortality. (source)

Here are some conclusions found in these studies:

“Compared to normal weight-fit individuals, unfit individuals had twice the risk of mortality regardless of BMI.”

“Overweight” and “obese-fit” individuals had similar mortality risks as normal weight-fit individuals.”

They also mention at the end that, “Researchers, clinicians, and public health officials should focus on physical activity and fitness-based interventions rather than weight-loss driven approaches to reduce mortality risk.”

This other study that evaluates healthy lifestyle habits and mortality in “overweight” and “obese” individuals concludes that “Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.” (source)

I hope these studies can at least encourage you to start incorporating healthy habits without bringing your weight or your appearance in the equation.

It’s Sara again sweet friend!

Wasn’t this goodness from Maryann so helpful? And I love her final thoughts. Because those studies show that, ultimately, what the scale says doesn’t have as much power as we’ve been taught to believe.

Here’s to creating lasting healthy lifestyle changes that uplift you and make you feel awesome. Because that’s what you deserve, a life you love.

Have you struggled to create lasting lifestyle changes? What advice would you share with someone who is? Share your thoughts and feelings with us in the comments below. We’re so excited to hear from you!

Health and love,

Thought of the day: You deserve a life that supports your well-being and makes you feel amazing. You deserve a life you love.

About Maryann Auger

Maryann Auger is a certified personal trainer, wellness coach and group fitness instructor. She creates Daily Inspirational Posts on social media where she shares tips, tricks, experience and advice to help you build your healthy balanced lifestyle.

She’s a self-love advocate that strives to help people get fit while loving themselves and their balanced lifestyles. She loves her dog Zea, food, Disney movies and fantasy books.

You can find her goodness right here:

YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

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