Getting organised

At this time of the week it’s often time to refocus and get sorted for the week ahead.

I know I am probably preaching to the converted here when it comes to managing your working diary, but what about managing your training and nutrition? The two factors that will give you the strength and energy to achieve everything you want to at work.

Here are some of the factors we consider at Storm and a little about their relevance before making plans and getting our Stormers organised.

What do you like?

This goes for food choices, meal timings and even macro nutrient splits. For example if you are in the midst of start up of a relatively new business and you are running around like a blue arsed fly if we were to give you an 8 meal per day strategy with loads of food prep and insisted on two training sessions per day with one nap how long do you think you would last?

On the hand if we advised some realistic targets for your macro nutrients worked out a training program where some of the sessions could be done at home you would be much more likely to succeed.

Similarly we could spend months trying to change your palette in order to start taking on the majority of your daily calories from carbohydrate instead of fat however if you already have a strong proclivity to getting calories from fats rather than carbs we may be wasting energy.

In my experience as long as your carbohydrate and fat intake fit somewhere within a “normal” range there are other variables that can be adjusted with greater effect.

What diets or nutrition plans have you tried in the past?

Its really important to gain an understanding that our bodies, our metabolisms and our bias’ are complex things.

We are never starting with a clean slate.

One of my favourite quotes (I made it up, so not sure I can call it a quote) is;

“All we are, is all we were.”

This means every time you took extreme diet advise, every time you binged on chocolate for several weeks and every time you rubbed yourself with the inside of croissant (maybe this one is just me) will have had some effect on the person you are today both physically and the imprint these events left on you mentally.

Don’t ignore what you have done with your diet before but rather work with it.

Its not that the intervention you used last time is necessarily going to work again. Consider that you found nutrition that worked for the person you were then and you need to find nutrition that will work for the person you are now.

I bet if you asked most people at Storm who have changed their body shape, they would tell you their nutrition program fit their lifestyle (including family and work schedule) their budget and they were able to fit in some degree of the foods they liked.

So shouldn’t matching the unique circumstances of the person we are NOW be something we all aim to do when selecting a diet plan?

And finally a question I often ask

“tell me in detail exactly what you think you should be doing with your diet?”

This may seem a weird thing to ask considering you have come to me to help however most people either respond with “ I have no idea that’s why I am here”

“Great” I’ll say let me get to work. Or you may say something like;

“I followed “x” diet “y” number of years ago which worked well so I think I should do something like that.

Now diet “x” may still have some benefit today so we may include aspects of that diet or the diet that worked for you then may be unlikely to work now in which case we need to explain why so you can buy-in to our approach.

The key factor here is belief and buy-in.

Success demands it, and when you reach your goal, it will be because you made a decision that you would do so through your chosen course of action.