Assuming that you have a reasonable framework (whole-food based with a variety of vegetables, fruit, and quality animal proteins), most people’s failings wont stem from the specifics of their diet plan. More likely it will come from the inability to stay consistent long enough to see results. Everyone has their own reasons for falling off the wagon, but the main issue I want to address in this article is falling victim to negative peer pressure from friends and family.

I recently had the honor of hearing the legendary bodybuilder Dorian Yates speak about his career in professional bodybuilding and life after retiring from competition. He had a lot of great stories and insights, but the one thing that really made an impact was when he said, “You’re truly free when you stop giving a fuck.” It may sound funny and a bit crass, but that’s the mindset that will help you maintain unwavering focus on your own plans, and to not let distractions and other people’s opinions throw you off track.

We’re not going to get into diet specifics at all in this article. What we’ll be emphasizing is the ability to actually stick to a plan and follow through with what you set out to do, while deflecting the negative peer pressure many people are bombarded with when they are in the process of revamping their diet and transforming their physique.

Get Clear on Your Priorities

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”

–Jim Rohn

If you’re not 100% clear on what your priorities are and what you want to achieve with your physique, it’s not likely that the choices you end up making will improve your situation. Without being committed to a plan, you’ll be much more likely to procrastinate, get distracted, and just follow the crowd. Be specific with what you aim to do and how you will do it. For example, a specific body composition goal would be to gain 5lbs of muscle mass over the next 6 weeks while maintaining your body fat percentage. A specific plan of action would be to eat at least 1.5g of protein per pound of body weight per day, and ingest 300g of low-glycemic carbs on training days.

You might be changing your diet for health reasons, such as improving energy and reducing systemic inflammation. In this case, your specific plan could be to implement an elimination diet for the next 4 weeks, and then reintroduce one food per week during the “challenge” phase of the diet.

Regardless of your goal, make sure it’s specific enough that you can put some numbers on it and track your progress. If your goal is too general, something like “I want to get bigger,” then you won’t be able to make a specific plan of action around that.

Jump-Start Your Momentum

When you first embark on a new eating plan, let’s assume that you have no willpower. Why? We want to minimize your chances of slipping up. Live like a hermit the first few weeks while you get yourself on track. As much as possible, avoid any situations where you could fall victim to temptations or peer pressure. This might mean skipping out on after-work events, happy hours, and dinner outings.

This might sound a bit extreme, but it’s also the fastest way to get results. If you want to get momentum going and start making progress, it is my preferred way to avoid slipping up in those first few weeks that you’re on a new program. I’m sure you’ll have friends and family who think you’re crazy for doing this, but the ones who truly care about you will understand that you’re pursuing a positive change in your life, even if they do give you a hard time. Besides, this phase should only be temporary. The point is to build up some consistency in your habits.

If you’re lucky, you might be able to recruit a friend that has the same health or physique goals as you, which will make the process much easier. Surrounding yourself with people of the same mindset, or who have already achieved what you are striving for, is a great way to increase motivation and adherence to your plan, and you’ll have a support group you can go to to ask questions and bounce ideas around.

Learn How to Eat in Public

Focusing on yourself those first few weeks of starting a new diet plan is a great way to build good habits and get your metabolism shifting in the right direction. But I’m not suggesting that you become a permanent social outcast just so that you can stick to your diet. The last thing I want is for your diet to become a burden that interferes with you enjoying your life.

Maintaining your diet while eating with friends and family will definitely be a challenge. Everyone has friends or family that couldn’t care less about eating healthy, especially during the holidays or at social gatherings, and they always want to drag you along in their overindulgence. When you’re planning to go out, here are a few strategies you can implement to help minimize the chances of getting off track:

• Eat before you go! If you know you’re going out to a place that doesn’t have a lot of great options that fit with your diet, have a good meal an hour before you go. That way you can avoid having to choose between sitting there being hungry and miserable, and ordering something that will set you back a few days. Maybe you can find an appetizer or side that fits with your dietary requirements. If you eat a good meal beforehand, you will also be in a better mood, and won’t make rash decisions due to hunger.

• Think about how a bad meal affects your progress and how you will feel the subsequent days. If you are someone who is has struggled with keeping your body fat down and are just now starting to make progress, one high-calorie meal loaded with carbs will absolutely set you back. You don’t yet have the metabolism or insulin sensitivity to be able to handle that without losing progress. On top of that, after you deviate from the plan once, it is much easier to keep cheating and fall off the wagon altogether. On the other hand, being able to string together several weeks of good eating will increase your motivation to keep your progress going.In my case, my motivation for sticking to a diet doesn’t have anything to do with losing body fat, but instead with keeping food sensitivities out of my diet so as to not set off inflammation in the gut and throughout the body. My main triggers are wheat and cow dairy, so I know that avoiding them is key to me feeling good and keeping my system running at 100%. If I were to have several slices of pizza, I know that for the next 3-4 days I will feel achy in my joints, bloated, constipated, and my skin will break out. Enjoying one meal is not worth all that, especially when there are equally as delicious alternatives to choose from.

• When people bring up how you used to eat differently and you “turned out okay,” what they don’t realize is that you were not satisfied with just being “okay.” Let them know that while that may be true, now you’re trying to better your situation. Being overweight/underweight/low energy wasn’t ok with you anymore.

• Put your needs first. At the end of the day, you’ll either be closer to your goal or further away from it, and there’s no one to blame for that but yourself. Do you really care that much if people think the way you eat is funny, or that you are wasting your effort trying to improve yourself? Don’t take people so seriously! Seeking validation from others won’t do anything for your long-term success and happiness. Besides, when those people are alone at home, do you really think they’re sitting around contemplating your diet? They couldn’t care less!

Not Everyone Wants to See You Succeed

Whether you’re just starting to make positive changes in your diet and exercise routine, or you have been at it for a while now, you will inevitably come in contact with haters, naysayers, and people who want to put you down. Despite the fact that you are minding your business and not bothering these people in any way, they will still go out of their way comment on your life choices. Understanding the reasons why they do this will allow you to ignore them and to stay focused on what’s important to you.

Many people have tried and failed to accomplish what you are trying to do. For those people, seeing you fail will make them feel better about themselves, because it allows them to rationalize their own failures. Instead of trying to identify what they could improve upon in themselves, they would rather have the satisfaction of knowing that someone else couldn’t do it either. Accept the fact that you will have people rooting for you to fail, but realize that they are doing it because of their own shortcomings. For them, it’s much easier to justify in their mind that something just can’t be done, instead of admitting that it’s a lack of drive, determination, planning, or organization that led to their failure.

Other people will hate on you just because you have a different diet philosophy than they do. They’ll feel challenged by the fact that you are going about it in a different way, and will want to waste time arguing with you or trying to convince you that their beliefs are better. I’m sure you’ve encountered shouting matches (in person or virtual) about the merits of paleo vs. vegan vs. IIFYM vs Atkins, etc., that inevitably end in an exchange of insults. And at the end, not one person will leave with a new perspective. Galileo Galilei once said, “You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.” Realize that you’re not going to change anyone’s mind by engaging in these fruitless pissing matches, and on top of that, you’ll waste a lot of time and energy that could be devoted to being productive.

Some people will hate on you simply because they are insecure, which is closely related to the last point. People who are insecure are generally afraid of change, even if that change doesn’t directly affect them. For an insecure person, someone doing better for themselves will make them feel worse about their own situation, so they’ll do whatever they can to discourage you and kill your spirit. We’re all insecure or envious at times, but dwelling on what other people are doing is a total waste of time and energy. Instead, learn from the habits of other people who have been successful in what you’re trying to accomplish, and focus on applying those habits to your own life.

Focus on Your Goals, Not Your Excuses

At the end of the day, it’s up to you. Hold yourself accountable for the physique and health goals you want to accomplish. You’ll encounter a lot of people who want to put in their two cents, but no one has the ability to distract you from your goals unless you let them. Now you have no excuses, it’s time to put in the work!

Don’t overthink your plan:

Simplicity Rules: Start Your Diet With Natural Food

The post Peer Pressure, Haters, and Sticking to Your Diet appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

At some point, that second person will always come to me and ask when they can start real training. He will usually ask about whatever program the other person is on. He seems perplexed when I say the other person is using the exact same program and diet information I gave both of them when they signed up. The only difference is in application.

Successful Change

As a case in point, I recently spent some time speaking with a good friend who has lost a considerable amount of weight – about 100lb/45kg. He hasn’t been to a gym or had help of any kind. This is amazing to me because I know how hard it is for people to lose that much weight. I’ve seen it time and again. Some are successful, but many aren’t. Even the successful people often lapse back to old habits not long afterwards. The contestants on The Biggest Loser often succumb to this trap.

So I had to ask this guy, who had been overweight for most of his adult life – what changed? What was it that made him make this massive change to his life?

Small Steps

His story was fantastic. At Christmas he bought a Fitbit for his wife. By chance, two of them turned up. He decided to keep the spare one and enter into a small bit of friendly rivalry with some other parents in his area. His goal at this point was simply the 10,000 daily steps.

This little bit of friendly competition spurred him on to look into other ways he could use the Fitbit. He noticed that apart from the walking there were metrics for sleep, diet, weight loss, and more.

So he began with something simple. He punched in the numbers for how much he weighed and what he wanted to weigh, and the device told him how much to eat. He had no idea what those numbers meant, so he bought a set of food scales. The first time he weighed his food, it was four and a half times more than he should have been eating, even though it was all healthy. That simple fact made weight loss easy. For one month, he weighed all his food. Now it comes naturally to him.

“There is no difference between a weight-loss plan and a lifestyle fitness plan, except for some minor calorie restrictions to help lose weight. The only secret is consistent application of basics.” 

His next change was water intake. Like the food, he quickly realized that to get his star for the day he needed to increase his water intake to five times what he had been drinking.

After that was sleep. It can be tough for parents to get to bed early by the time you put the kids to bed, clean up a bit, and maybe get some extra work done, but he was only getting six hours a night. Now he gets seven, which is still a bit short of ideal, but by the end of the week, one extra hour per night is equivalent to an entire night’s worth of sleep.

After these changes to his eating, water consumption, and sleep habits, he was feeling pretty good. So he started running a few days per week. The first time he went for a run, he couldn’t even run 400m nonstop. But, as anyone who starts running will tell you, that quickly changes. Ten months later, he is running around 45km per week with a long run of 15km on the weekend, and his 10km PR is around 50 minutes.

Consistency Is King

This is where I came in. He came to me because he wanted to add more to his training but didn’t know where to start. Because he travels a lot for work, trying to give him an actual gym program to follow is kind of a waste of time. But I pulled out my faithful copy of Scrapper’s Mod 1 (bodyweight conditioning) and told him to use that when he has time. Realistically, between his three or four weekly runs, if he can get in two or three Mod 1 workouts each week, he will be in fantastic shape.

My friend doesn’t have a special Fitbit that does the work for him. Fitbits were one of the highest selling presents last year at Christmas, but the problem is no one uses them. Maybe they pay attention to one of the markers, with little regard for everything else. Perhaps they are tracking everything, but aren’t being honest with themselves about how much work they’re doing or what they’re eating.

In other words, the only special thing in my friend’s case is that he actually followed the Fitbit’s metrics and acted accordingly. No secrets or special Russian training plans.

A Simple Concept

My clients often think I am doing something more advanced than they are. I must be, right? After all, how does a guy my age stay at 10 percent body fat and do all the athletic things I do? Well, I get eight hours sleep each night. I don’t drink alcohol, and I make sure to drink 2.5-3L of water daily. I track my food. And I try to get in an hour (at least) of exercise daily. In other words, I am doing the same things my good friend does.

There is no difference between a weight-loss plan and a lifestyle fitness plan, except for some minor calorie restrictions to help lose weight. The only secret is consistent application of basics. 

You’ll also enjoy:

• Return on Investment: When to Prioritize Weakness and Strength
• Not Getting the Results You Want? Time for a Reality Check
• Results: How to Live at Your Goal Instead of Visit It
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post What Is the Secret to Success? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.