Weekly Pregame: Episode 20— “Meal Prep and Philosophical Candor”
Welcome to the Weekly Pregame: the show that aims to develop the ultimate method of planning and visualising the week ahead, whilst reviewing productivity of the week prior and furthermore optimising execution toward our goals within the coming week.
This week’s episode deals with nutritional goals, and will likely be controversial to the widespread opinion on diet control and habit implementation. It’s okay though, because the widespread opinion changes with the trends of the fitness industry as a whole which is actually an oxymoron to what we are trying to do with our habits. We are trying to find health values that are relevant to us, but do not change. The fitness industry will market to whatever values the macro culture seems to have at the moment, and industry is nothing to form personal values based on — especially when it’s only goal is to sell you something.
The programs may work, they may be healthy and they may even get you results — but the culture will always move on from whatever you were sold. Whatever diet you chose to follow will eventually get old and uncool. Did it succeed in implementing a lifelong habit? Not likely. It likely followed a basic equation of: caloric deficit = weight-loss, and convinced you that there was something special about it that made it any different from the other diets. This article is not intended to razz on industry trend or diets, but it is just to cause awareness of the fact that nothing can ever change your thinking other than yourself.
We need deep reasoning behind actual life changes, and none of our new habits will be sustained without some kind of philosophical shift. Inspirational Quotes have taken over Instagram because of the fact that no one wants to directly discuss philosophy in the fitness world, it’s all about hustle and grind and screw the world and ignore feelings. Yet, people repost mushy Instagram philosophies at an alarming rate — demonstrating the need for those deeper conversation among the demographics whom are sincerely trying to make change.
This leads back into nutrition because of the fact that implementing diet habits such as meal prepping and even just shopping more healthily takes a bit more than our training habits do. We shouldn’t expect to be able to just implement habits and sustain them as quickly as we can with our workout habits. Why? Namely because:
- Workouts require $0 — you ultimately do not need a gym or trainer or ANYTHING to get into the gym, eliminating finance as a variable to success. You DO, however, need some sort of stable income to maintain any kind of nutritional endeavour.
- Workouts do not require a person to be in a certain location — even if a person has nothing but a floor, playground, or just dirt to workout on, they can make it happen. Success with nutritional habits depend a little more on the environment a person lives in.
The point being that we should be much more patient with our nutritional habits than we are with our training habits, because success with them will sometimes require certain life circumstances to have been established first. They will both take time to master, but focusing on one component at a time when making health changes can prevent a person from becoming overwhelmed and discouraged.
Don’t look for quick results. Choose your nutritional strategy based on what you think will be a sustainable habit in the long term. Remember that your philosophical outlook on training and nutrition is important to define. Without certainty as to why you value your health in general, there is not strong inner foundation to build the out habits on top of. Make sure you have healthy philosophies on nutrition before trying to implement anything in the real world.
Examples of unhealthy dietary philosophies:
- Buying/Following a diet plan based solely on how it promising to deliver fast results. Fast results are not a bad thing, as long as the methods of attaining them are both healthy and sustainable. Remember that loosing 12lbs per month is the most a quality trainer should recommend, or aim for. This doesn’t mean that you can’t loose more — but just watch out for programs markets 20+lbs of weight loss in a month. Even worse, if they guarantee those results then you should be extra careful because they will have designed the program with their promise in mind instead of your individual health.
- Building a fitness belief system based on industry trends and topics. The industry is always changing based on consumer behaviour, it does not necessarily follow the widely accepted scientific methods of developing health and wellness. People who only follow diet plans socially are likely to be reliant on their friends also following the same program. Groups of people are commonly just trying out different diets and shake systems all the time, which is an awesome social activity but we can all agree that our healthy diet habits should not rely on anyone else. Changing our diet habits should not rely on any excitement coming from how the plans and programs are marketed. Sustaining those habits should be possible, which means that just starving yourself with a shake or juice diet is probably not a good ideas — unless in certain circumstances, it is actual medical advice.
Here are some examples of healthy dietary philosophies:
- Recognising what can be changed immediately, and which changes will have to come into play at a later time — depending on life’s circumstances. A starving student should not expect the same out of themselves as a person with a stable income and lifestyle might. We need to know what we have time for and what we have money for, and start wherever we are at. It is important to be able to push forward without expecting everything to change overnight.
- Choosing habits based on their real-life practicality, so that they are actually sustainable. Meal prepping is an amazing way to increase nutrition and performance throughout the week, but may not be the right step for a person to take yet. Sure, it eliminates a lot of cooking throughout the week but it also requires a more consistent habit to get everything organised. Some people are honestly just not ready for meal prepping because they are still working on building some kind of stable lifestyle. Without some level of stability in a person’s day-to-day life, they should not expect to be capable of implementing a stable habit such as meal prepping — YET.
- Building a fitness belief-system based on personal experiences and actually placing value on long-term health and wellness. Stop it with the plans that just help you loose 20lbs and leave you high and dry. Anything you pay for should leave you with the education and understanding to maintain those results that it provided. Become educated about your personal health needs, on a scientific level, and understand the reasons behind everything you are doing so that it can help shape your philosophies and belief systems — and overall long-term success. Experimenting with new diets is a great idea, as long as there is priority placed on the habits that are important to a person’s individual needs — because those will remain the same regardless of life circumstance, let alone the fluctuations of trending diet advice.
There is a lot more to be said for this, but gotta wrap it up!
Remember, success must be calculated!