5 Places Popular Health Advice Misses the Big Picture
The more time I spend in the personal development and nutrition spaces, the more contradictions I see.
Different “experts” throw their ideas into the ring and fight to convince you of why their way is the right way, and you won’t progress unless you too follow the same path.
The ideas these folks fight for go further than “do/don’t eat carbs” or “do/don’t eat meat” or “intermittent fasting is bunk/magical.” They may also go so far as to tell you how to think.
And while I watch other professionals jump from diet to diet, self-help program to self-help program, believing that each new one they find is “the one,” what I see is that there simply is no “one.”
There’s no single program or path or way of eating or set of beliefs or habits that will work for everyone.
Further, you may find a set of habits that work for you at one stage of your life that fail to serve you in the same way later on.
What I have come to value, more than any single strategy, is flexibility, nuance, and depth.
That’s why I want to share with you 5 things I used to believe about personal growth and health habits, and the context I have added over the course of time—7 years spent coaching nutrition and 17 years studying personal development.
1. Consistency is key…but your definition of consistency matters.
Consistency is the only path to achieve a lofty goal—I think we can all agree on that.
However, when we think about consistency, we often take a rigid view of what that looks like. For example, "Being consistent means sticking to my routine of exercising 4 days/week and tracking my food every day." And when we aren't able to do that, even if it's because life is getting in the way, we beat ourselves up for it.
However, YOU are the one who gets to define what consistency looks like TO YOU. For example, consistency might look like working out 4 days/week (or however many) and tracking daily when there's nothing out of the ordinary going on AND it might look like flexing when you're traveling, taking care of family members, and being extra busy at work. That's still consistent.
For me personally, consistency is giving myself flexibility when I'm extra tired or busy, and then ramping back up when the air clears. It's not getting in x workouts no matter what and always eating x grams of protein 100% of the time. It's always returning to my intentions and taking care of myself regardless of what my life looks like.
Some questions to ask yourself are: how do I define consistency? What does consistency look like to me? Is my definition something I can realistically uphold regardless of my life circumstances?
2. Controlling your environment can be helpful…but controlling your environment can also be harmful.
“Controlling your environment” or “designing your environment” are terms often used to describe actions such as keeping trigger foods out of your house to remove the temptation of overeating them, keeping fruits and veggies on hand to increase the likelihood of eating them, or avoiding certain restaurants or activities where you may feel tempted to overeat.
And I won’t deny that your environment matters. We’re influenced by what’s around us, whether that’s food in front of us, in advertisements, or other people eating food. We’re also influenced by convenience and whether certain foods are easier to acquire.
The well-meaning advice to control your environment takes these things into account and assumes that by removing temptation, you’ll be able to control your weight without the use of willpower.
But I want to ask you a radical question…
What if the fact that you’re controlling your environment is actually reinforcing your trigger foods and making the cravings for them even stronger?
Restriction, both physical and mental, is one of the primary triggers for overeating. It’s possible that by keeping certain foods out of your house, you’re increasing your cravings for them and the sense of power that they hold over you.
When I work with students in my Food Body Self® program, we defuse trigger foods by removing restrictions so that you can keep any food you want in the house.
Because to me, a healthy relationship with food includes keeping anything around and not having any food fears.
Rather than advising individuals to keep certain foods out of the house, avoid their favorite restaurants, or skip social functions, we work on the underlying causes of overeating so they feel in control no matter what foods are around or what environment they are in.
3. You can change your body composition…but gaining weight isn’t inherently bad.
Every new thing I learned about nutrition science felt like a revelation to me…
When I learned about calories, and that all you need to do to lose weight is burn more calories than you ingest (or ingest fewer calories than you burn)…
When I learned about everything outside of body fat that can influence scale fluctuations (e.g. hormones, inflammation, etc.)…
When I learned about macronutrients and how each one impacts the body…
…and so on and so on.
What became problematic for me personally AND as a coach was that these teachings became a reassurance that if you didn’t like your body or if things were moving in the “wrong direction,” you’d be able to change it by following a set of guidelines around eating and movement.
For example: if a client told me that the scale was up 2 lbs., I would reassure them it was only water weight. Or if they were worried about “losing progress” on vacation or while injured, I could reassure them that we could “get back on track” when they got home or recovered.
HOWEVER…
The idea that losing fat and gaining muscle is good while gaining fat and losing muscle is bad is not a fact.
It’s not a universal truth. It’s just something we’ve been conditioned to inherently believe.
Additionally, we don’t need to believe that anytime we gain fat or lose muscle, it means that we’re backsliding or letting ourselves go.
You might have needed to take time away from your regular workouts because of additional work or personal responsibilities, because of your mental health, or because of a global pandemic. That doesn’t automatically mean you’re regressing. It means there were other aspects of your life that either took priority or that impeded your ability to work out.
Same goes if your level of body fat increases.
The most important point is, if I were to use my abilities as a coach to soothe your insecurities about your body by telling you that I know how to help you change it, I would be doing you a massive disservice because I would be reinforcing the objectification of your body, and thus your reliance on your body to look a certain way in order for you to feel okay.
Your body is not where your value comes from.
Your body is not where your self-worth arises.
Your body is not and never was a problem.
Therefore, there is nothing to fix and nothing to undo.
And, at the same time, we can also bring our focus to your health behaviors and examine what, if anything, you'd like to change so that you can feel better. That’s where the magic is.
4. Enjoying something can make it easier to stick to…but you don’t need to feel good to do hard things.
Intrinsic value is the inherent pleasure of an activity. For example, when I lift weights, I love the feeling of pushing through a tough rep. When I write, I love seeing different pieces of my writing come together to form a coherent whole. The opposite of intrinsic value is extrinsic value, for example, seeing my muscles growing or getting praised for my writing.
Intrinsic value is connected to intrinsic motivation; when you enjoy an activity, you are intrinsically motivated to engage in it and to do well at it. Lacking a sense of intrinsic value, it’s more likely that you’ll develop boredom or an aversion to the activity and give up even before you begin to see results.
This is the reason why I encourage Food Body Self students, when exercising to uncover: What feels good? What do I enjoy about this?
And similarly I encourage them to eat foods that they like and to find ways to make eating healthy (or what we call “fundamental”) foods more pleasurable.
When it comes to food, I stand by a singular rule: Don’t eat food you don’t like.
However, when it comes to exercise, it may also be helpful to remember that you can feel both pleasure and discomfort at the same time.
Or to think, “This is supposed to be challenging AND I enjoy being challenged.”
And when it comes to things you might be procrastinating, you can always remember: you don’t need to feel good to do hard things. You can feel uncomfortable and do it anyway.
5. Working on yourself is worthwhile…but you’re not a project that’s in need of fixing.
I value personal growth because I didn’t learn all the tools to live a rich, full, and meaningful life during my school years. And I can say with certainty that there are certain psychological tools I’ve learned as an adult that I would not be here had I not discovered and practiced them.
Additionally, I’ve learned a great deal about how to manage my nutrition, body image, time, exercise habits, relationships, finances, and more that have positively impacted my life.
But even if you have certain behaviors or character traits you don’t like, it doesn’t mean that you’re obligated to work on them or that you’re not already enough.
Even in my role as a coach, I don’t believe that anyone who comes to me is broken. I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with them. I can see their value and worthiness, whether they see it or not. In cases where they don’t see it, I try to open them up to what I can see.
There’s a big myth that if you think you’re enough, you won’t feel any motivation to change. That's also not true. You can be happy with yourself AND continue striving to improve…but you also don’t need to. You can take breaks from personal development, or you can choose not to change certain things about yourself at all.
Accepting yourself doesn’t come from believing that you need more. It comes from believing that you have everything you need already. You’re not broken, and you don’t need to be fixed.
After spending considerable time exploring the realms of personal development and nutrition, it has become increasingly apparent to me that contradictions abound in these spaces. Various self-proclaimed "experts" vehemently argue in favor of their own methods, asserting that their path is the only path to progress.
I have come to realize that there is no singular solution. There is no universally applicable program, prescribed way of eating, set of beliefs, or habits that will prove effective for everyone. Furthermore, what works for us in one phase of life may not necessarily serve us well in another.
Ultimately, the journey of personal growth and health is a dynamic one, requiring us to continually reassess and refine our practices, and to rely on principles and big ideas, such as those taught in Food Body Self, rather than on specific strategies.
It’s through embracing a multifaceted perspective and being open to change that we can truly unlock our potential on the ongoing quest for personal development and holistic well-being.