December, 31st.
A great day to make New Year’s resolutions. Or not.
Who has never had a goal, swearing to yourself to lose weight, or to hit the gym and get in shape before summer? Or something similar.
And then sometime later only to give up and get back to the usual lifestyle that got you where you are in the first place.
How to Set Up Better Goals
It’s not enough just to go ahead and scribble what you want to accomplish on a piece of paper.
However, it’s way better than not having written down anything at all. At least you are thinking of what needs to be done. But that’s just wishing. Wishing is not very helpful.
You’ve got to connect the goals to the reasons why you want to accomplish it. And it has to be deeply meaningful and important for you.
So many people set up very ineffective goals.
For instance, they decide to lose some weight. And it goes something like this, “by the end of this year I ought to lose 30 pounds.”
This is what I call an example of a band-aid goal. It’s not an effective one.
What happens is, you go after it.
You jump on a strict diet and you work out hard and often. You practically live at the gym and spend hours on your kitchen prepping those healthy tasteless meals.
You say to yourself, I can’t use ketchup, I can’t use oil. I can’t use mayo. I can’t use deep-fried food, I can’t eat Nutella, I can’t eat white bread and any other bread for that matter.
I can’t eat right before going to sleep. I can’t eat chips, I can’t eat pasta, I can’t eat white rice. No more burgers, no more fries. No more sex after 6. No more life.
I can’t do this, I can’t do that.
That’s Pretty Overwhelming and It’s a Lot of Pressure
Is there anything I can eat? Oh, I heard kale is great for you. Kale that I hate more than anything. Great. Nice start. Highly motivated already.
You are slowly but surely setting yourself up for failure and misery.
No wonder you give up quite often without accomplishing anything.
You are setting up your diet in a way to avoid every single thing that you normally eat. You go cold turkey.
And let’s say by the end of the year you did it.
You successfully lost 30 pounds, which is an amazing accomplishment. It’s amazing!
We all know what happens after that.
We’ve all been there.
Let’s reward ourselves.
Let me just have one of those chicken wings…Or one of those gummy bears, or one piece of those delicious pancakes with Nutella, etc. But it never one, is it?
And in no time, we pick up everything we’ve lost and then some.
This Approach is Very Inefficient, and Rarely Works
It doesn’t provide you with results that you can sustain and then improve upon further.
It’s so hard to adhere to such diets. It’s tyranny.
But more than that, it doesn’t address the problem that caused the weight gain in the first place.
What you did is you accomplished a really difficult goal. It was really hard but you did it.
But that’s not good enough.
You only got rid of the symptoms of the disease. But you left the root of the problem unaddressed.
So what is very likely to happen – you get back to the lifestyle you had and that will bring you the exact same issues you had to begin with.
The excessive weight that you tried to shed will be coming back again. In many cases, it’ll get even worse.
When you decide to go cold turkey, but only for some time to hit a certain marker.
Once you achieve the result you wanted, there is nothing really stopping you from getting back to those delicious things you’ve been avoiding. And you are back to square one.
So What Approach is Going to be More Effective?
The 80/20 rule
Reality check, too.
I am definitely doing something wrong since I’m getting the results I don’t like. I’m gaining weight.
So what is it?
Instead of starting to diet religiously and eliminating the symptoms, what you should do is use that 80/20 rule and see what can be done about the root of the problem.
Make better goals.
What is the one thing you can do that only takes 20 % of your effort but will give you 80% of the results to develop better eating habits?
You can also use this rule the other way around, and it works just as great.
Identify the bad eating habit that you keep exercising every day that contributes the most to your problem.
This is a big deal.
Before you get overwhelmed with what to eliminate from your daily intake. Things like oil, fats, pasta, dessert, bread, and many other things.
So what are the one or two things that stand out the most?
More often than not, it’s not ten or fifteen things that are messing you up.
It’s one or two that contribute the most to the problem.
Identify what those are and make taking care of them your highest priority.
You will be astonished by the results.
If you do just that, what you will find is, to conquer the issue that you have takes WAY less effort and time than to go cold turkey and attack the desired goal from different angles.
Applying the 80/20 rule will take the least effort from you, giving you the best results for the effort spent.
That’s what efficiency is.
Instead of working on ten thousand things that are less meaningful and impactful, work on one or two that DO matter the most.
This approach will make sure that you accomplish all the things that you are set out to do.
Go ahead and give it a try, and see the results for yourself.
