I’m writing this blog post as we are in the middle of the Holiday Hot Zone, right between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is the time of year that people tend to chuck all of their healthy lifestyle principles and give in to temptation which results in some holiday weight gain. The goal of this blog post is to help you form a plan of action for your fitness comeback. The ideas and principles discussed are not just about holiday weight gain. They can be applied to any situation where you put some of your weight back on and then have to deal with it.
The Art of the Comeback: Four strategies to get you back to your best
#1. Get rid of your weight gain guilt: This is a bigger deal than most people realize. Anyone who works in the fitness industry will see this happening with their clients. You will have a client that gets awesome results and is going along strong until…LIFE HAPPENS……and they put some, or all, of their weight back on. This tends to create a situation where the client is embarrassed and they feel bad about “letting their trainer/coach/program down”. The solution that many of these people come up with is that they must get back to their best on their own before returning to the program that they had success with in the first place. When you sit back and think about this most people realize that this is not a great solution. You relied on that expert/trainer/program when you needed some help and they produced. Go ahead and let them do what they do best and HELP YOU. You have to release that weight gain guilt and ask for some help from the people that specialize in exactly what you need.
#2. Take ownership: The one thing that I see holding more people back than anything else is that they don’t take full ownership over their situation. Instead they tend to project their problems and blame anyone or anything else other than themselves for their issues. During the holiday season people are surrounded by relatives and they usually take the blame. I hear things like “My Grandma makes these pies special for me and she expects me to eat them!”…….REALLY???. I feel like it is going to be tough for someone to fully move forward and get back to their best fitness level if they are still constantly projecting all of their problems onto other people. Once you can step up and and realize that YOU made a decision to put that food in your mouth and OWN IT then you can start moving forward. I will have a more in depth blog post on this topic in the near future!
#3. Get started again like a rookie: When you are back in the right space mentally and ready to take action it is important that you bring a fresh attitude and are ready to be coachable. Sometimes I will see someone come back for another bootcamp after gaining some weight and they kind of have a “been there done that” attitude. They don’t attend our orientation sessions because they “already know all of that stuff”. I think that you have to step back and analyze your situation. What worked before and where did things go wrong. You have to try and exactly duplicate the processes that worked the first time and then make a change to produce improvement where things went south. So I encourage you all to get started back with a fresh mindset and just approach the process like a rookie. If you read a nutrition book and then followed the plan and got some results I would repeat that exact process. Read it again, make more notes, and get those results going again. Maybe the trouble started after you read the book and didn’t have a “fitness home base” anymore so you need to solve that problem. Maybe you can get connected with a personal trainer that can keep you accountable with weekly workouts.
#4. Don’t repeat your mistakes from last time: Once you analyze things and discover the point where things went wrong the last time it is critical that you don’t repeat that part of the process. When our clients do an eight week bootcamp they are in a pattern where they have been submitting food logs to their coach every day. One of my most common, and successful, strategies to help them phase from bootcamp life to real life is to do a staggered accountability program where they go two weeks with daily coaching and then they go two weeks without to practice on their own. We run them through a few cycles of that process and then adjust the program as we go. Sometimes our bootcampers come out of their eight week program and they choose to not do a transition strategy. Some people can handle this and some can’t. If people choose to not do the transition strategy and gain their weight back I will make a suggestion to try it out after they do their next bootcamp. The real KEY here is that YOU, the client, are able to step back and see where things fell off track, OWN IT(see step #2 above), and make sure you don’t go down that same path again.
Weight gain happens to the best of us so don’t beat yourself up if it has happened to you. If you are in the middle of a weight gain catastrophe the key is to take a step back and formulate a plan to first stop the bleeding and then head back in the correct direction. Think about what motivated you to start your fitness journey in the first place and stoke that fire again. If you are struggling with weight gain right now my challenge for you is to TAKE ACTION……NOW. Your next step after reading this blog should be to contact someone who can help you get things going in the right direction. 3…….2…….1…….DO IT!
I hope you all finish off 2015 with great momentum!
Adam
