Stay on Track With Your Exercise and Nutrition With These 5 Easy Tips

Don’t let a lack of consistency sabotage your progress.

The biggest challenge most people face in terms of fitness and health is the inability to stick with an exercise habit and/or healthy eating.

Most people know what they should be doing, but they just can’t stick with it long-term.

So here we are going to cover 5 strategies that can help you get your healthy habits to stick for good.

1) Dopamine

I’ve been thinking about dopamine a lot recently in regard to improving our health and fitness. I think it’s a key tool in helping us with motivation and discipline.

Dopamine is the molecule of more — it makes you want to continue doing something. This is why it’s so powerful. If you can gain control over your dopamine system, you will experience unmatched levels of discipline. If you can train your brain to seek out triggers that will benefit your health, healthy habits become easy and sustainable.

The first step in leveraging dopamine to improve your habits is to minimize cheap sources of dopamine. When I say “cheap” here, I mean dopamine that’s easy to get and will do nothing to improve your life. Dopamine is a limited resource that can get out of whack quickly.

You need to limit these sources of dopamine as much as possible. If you’re sabotaging yourself chasing cheap hits, it’ll be physically impossible to use your dopamine productively.

Start small. Remove the smallest and easiest dopamine sources from your life. This includes:

• Notifications
• Social media
• Junk food
• Video games
• Drugs and alcohol

By doing this, you’re training your brain to seek out triggers that will lead to massive personal growth, rather than to seek out triggers that are detrimental to your growth. You will build momentum very quickly if you stick with this.

Once you’ve started limiting cheap dopamine hits, you can start using it to boost your motivation. The best way to do this is to track — your body weight, your weights lifted in the gym, your running times, your body fat percentage, your steps per day, etc. Measure and track everything you can.

When you can see you’ve made progress (e.g. decreased your body fat, increased your max squat) you’ll get a hit of dopamine. This will motivate you to keep chasing this result. This makes things like exercising and eating well much easier. You’re getting the same hit of dopamine you get when you get a text or eat junk food — that same feeling that makes you want to keep going back for more.

The key is to focus on this progress. Focus on how you’ve improved, even if it’s tiny. If there’s no progress, just think about the progress you will make if you do the hard thing (go to the gym, eat well, etc.) and you can get a hit of dopamine this way too.

2) 80/20 Principle

“What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.” — George D. Prentice

I think this quote sums up the issue — stressing about your health is no better than being unhealthy. I think most of us know by now that the impact of stress is huge. So worrying about being unhealthy or not being able to maintain good habits is just adding to the problem.

By focusing on the 20% of our healthy habits that lead to 80% of the results we want, we can see a meaningful improvement in our health. Biology works with averages. It’s what you do most of the time that matters.

The 80/20 principle and the idea of averages is a helpful tool to make health simple and quick, without the stress.

Key ideas to Understand

1) Be okay with not being perfect with your habits.

2) Something is always better than nothing, even if it’s just 5 minutes of exercise or one serving of vegetables.

3) Consistency is more important than doing things perfectly.

Nutrition

We don’t need to eat well 100% of the time.

Unless you have allergies or intolerances, or have to eat a certain way due to a medical condition, you’ve got more flexibility than you probably think.

As long as we’re eating well 80% of the time, we’re going to be okay.

This might look like 4 healthy meals and snacks each day and one less healthy meal or snack (assuming 3 meals and 2 snacks per day).

Or, it could be eating well 6 days of the week and having a free day one day per week. Maybe 80% of the food on your plate is healthy and 20% isn’t as healthy.

Whatever will work best for you, having about 80% of the food you eat be “healthy” (whatever that means for you) will allow you to achieve good health.

Sleep

We can use a similar idea with sleep — as long as we have enough sleep about 5–6 nights per week, we’re okay. A night or two of bad sleep isn’t going to hurt you.

Getting stressed about not sleeping is going to be counterproductive. Relax and know that a few bad sleeps now and then is okay.

Exercise

We don’t need to spend hours in the gym each day to be healthy. In fact, a 2015 study has shown that as little as 2 minutes of walking per hour has the effect of reducing one’s risk of dying by one-third. 2 minutes x 16 waking hours = 32 minutes a day to reduce your risk of death by a third.

If you want to go further, you can include exercises such as high-intensity interval training (HIIT) which allows you to achieve a lot in a very short amount of time.

Similarly, compound lifts such as the big 5: squat, deadlift, bench press, barbell row, and overhead press allow you to work multiple muscle groups at once, therefore reducing the amount of time needed to work out.

What we need to understand is that our habits don’t need to look a certain way to be beneficial. And they definitely don’t need to be perfect.

Many people think they need to have long and intense workouts and avoid all the foods they enjoy in order to be healthy. Because this is uncomfortable and a lot of work, they avoid trying to improve their health altogether.

Essentially, as long as you’re sticking to your good habits 80% of the time, you’re doing well. Things don’t need to be perfect to be beneficial.

3) The All-Or-Nothing Mindset

Related to the 80/20 principle is the all-or-nothing mindset.

“Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.” — James Clear

This mindset is detrimental to our progress, and to our health in general.

Thinking that if you can’t do a 2-hour gym session, or a 90-minute yoga session, or a week straight of fitness classes means you shouldn’t work out at all, you’re going to run into some problems.

Exercise is about consistency — your efforts compound over time.

If you want to see progress, if you want to become fitter and healthier, you need to exercise consistently.

But holding on to this all-or-nothing mindset is going to interfere with consistency. You can’t be consistent if you skip your workout every time you can’t do your normal session.

“Consistency is king when it comes to progress with training. How we approach consistency when life gets in the way is important.It’s easy to get into an “all or nothing” mind state when we are too rigid with what our training “should” look like — and then write training off as a result.” — Evolve Training Collective

You need to be flexible and adaptable.

When things come up, or you’re sick or injured, or you’re traveling, you need to be flexible and have the ability to adapt to the situation. This is how you will maintain consistency. This is how you can break out of the all-or-nothing mindset.

Your workout doesn’t need to be perfect every time for it to be worthwhile.

If you only have 20 minutes today instead of an hour, 20 minutes is a whole lot better than 0 minutes.

If you’re traveling and don’t have access to a gym, doing bodyweight movements or going out for a walk or run is a whole lot better than doing nothing.

Let go of the rigidity. Training is malleable. It doesn’t have to look a certain way to be beneficial.

Consistency also builds identity.

“You need to create good habits. You need to stick to your rules. You can’t make excuses to yourself, saying, “Oh, this doesn’t matter.” Because it adds up. Because it determines what you’ll accomplish and what you won’t. Most important, it determines who you are.” — Ryan Holiday

When we let our training slide, we break a promise to ourselves.

We start to lose the identity of someone who is fit, who works hard, who trains consistently.

And losing this identity is going to drastically hinder our progress.

“The more we break our commitment to ourselves with training, the less we trust our word to ourselves, and the less confident or able we feel in achieving our goal. We then lose motivation. It’s the showing up for ourselves that really matters — keeping and honouring the commitment we make.We need to allow our training to be flexible and adaptable — and to meet us where we are. It doesn’t need to look a certain way every session to be beneficial.” — Evolve Training Collective

Actionable Steps

• Whenever you’re injured, sick, low on energy or time, or are away from your normal routine, remember that doing something is always better than doing nothing
• Your workouts don’t have to look a certain way to be beneficial. We need to cultivate flexibility and adaptability in our training to ensure that even when life gets in the way, we’re still making progress and striving toward our goals.
• Build consistency and see how your results compound over time. Build an identity as someone who gets their training done, even when life throws them a curveball.

4) The 100% Rule

Some people struggle with the 80/20 principle. You may find it easier to follow the 100% rule for certain habits.

While it seems easier to say, “I’m going to stick to this habit 80% of the time,” this can actually make things harder for yourself.

The 100% rule removes the need for decision-making and willpower.

If you do it every time, it’s easier. It becomes less about, “will I eat the piece of chocolate or not?”, and rather, “I won’t eat the chocolate because I’m someone who doesn’t eat sugar, ever”.

You don’t need to make a decision. You don’t need willpower because there is no decision. You’re not going to give in.

The 100% rule prevents confusion.

Sticking to the habit 80% of the time can lead to identity confusion.

If you let yourself slide 20% of the time, who are you? If you eat chocolate sometimes, you’re not “someone who doesn’t eat sugar”, you’re “someone who eats sugar sometimes”. Things can start to get a bit ambiguous.

If you only stick to a habit 80% of the time, you also then need to decide when that other 20% will be. Will I eat the chocolate today? Or will I not? When should I save that 20% for?

80% can lead to confusion. 100% is simple.

I find applying the 100% rule to exercise frequency and the 80/20 principle to the content of your workout to be helpful:

The 100% rule is a great way to make exercise sustainable.

You don’t need to think about whether you’re going to exercise today. You know you are. And exercising every day is the quickest path to good health.

This doesn’t need to be a full workout every day. You’re still going to need rest days to let your body recover. It’s simply moving your body in some way every day.

You might have some days where you’re going harder, say with a longer run or a weights session. Then you might have a lighter day where you go for a 30 minute walk or do a yoga session.

Just do something every day so you don’t need to decide.

But, we can 80/20 our workout by focusing on the movements/exercises that will get us 80% of our results. Things like compound movements, the big 5 (squat, deadlift, row, bench, overhead press), and HIIT. These are time-effective ways to exercise that will get you 80% of the way there.

5) Reflect and Plan

It’s good to regularly reflect on how your habits are going. Have you been able to complete them most days? What have the biggest obstacles been? How could you make them easier?

Taking the time to reflect will make things way easier for you and will make your habits more sustainable.

Similarly, planning when you’re going to do your workouts and what you’re going to do makes it way more likely you’ll do them. Same goes for meal planning, and any other habit you want to cultivate.

In my experience, this is the most important strategy. The ability to plan when, how, where, and why you’re doing your habits will make a huge difference in whether or not they get done. Similarly, reflecting on how they’re going and what the biggest challenges are will allow you to problem-solve where needed.

The key point to remember is that to make your habits sustainable, you need to remove friction as much as possible. Think about how you can make your habits easy and how to experience minimal resistance to getting them done. Planning is often the best way to do this, because you can think about what challenges and obstacles could come up, and adjust your plan accordingly.

Remember, a sub-optimal habit you can do every day is 100x better than the optimal habit you do every now and then.

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