One of the most important concepts I discovered about health and fitness has been a guiding principle for the past 10 years of my career.
First, you will want to gain hindsight before you can achieve your goal. Hindsight is defined as the knowledge and understanding you have only after an event has happened. Therefore, I will ask you to take the first step in a 3-phase process. First, I want you to record everything you eat for 3 weeks.
When you record everything you eat, and stop deciding what you should/ or should not eat, then you decrease the pressure to perform. You are no longer forcing yourself to follow a strict plan. The only decision you have to make has been simplified. The first phase in your nutritional challenge is to record what you eat. How would it feel to stop second guessing everything you ate? How would you feel if you did not have to learn some new way of eating?
Since you enjoy seeing patterns, then we are going to use this to your benefit. After three weeks of recording your nutritional habits, then we are going to look over your record together. We are going to look for and recognize the patterns in your habits. Will this type of log change the number on your scale? No, probably not. Have some clients lost 5 to 10 pounds in the first three weeks just because they started to become mindful of what they are eating? Yes.
When we are at phase 2 the operating of pattern recognition starts to change. The record helps us to build a model of your habits. Each morning for breakfast you will typically eat this, for example. Most evenings you choose to eat this for dinner, and this for dinner on the weekends. In phase 2 we apply the 80/20 rule to your food record. Where are the key areas within your model, your habits of eating, that we could make the smallest change, but get a great reward?
We are not trying to give you a new way of eating. We are taking what you have already captured as a pattern of your nutritional habits, and now we are looking back. Now we will look back and make a decision on the greatest leverage points.
How to Gain Hindsight in order to Recognize the Pattern, Phase 1 and 2.
- Record your nutritional habits for 3 weeks
- In week 4, review your model of eating
- Look carefully to find the points that you could change, and give yourself healthier options
- Ask yourself- how could I simplify this change? And give myself a bigger benefit?
- Plan for the small changes, and execute the experiment for the next 3 weeks.