A new client set a goal to be photo-lean by the end of September.
And, well, things aren’t going well.
Now, I hate saying “I told you so,” but in this instance I sure wanted to—because way back on Day 1, when we were discussing her end-of-September goal, she added, “I’m also traveling to Europe for vacation, but I’ll be sticking to my plan.”
My first words were, “That’s gonna be tough.” Sadly, I was right.
The gym availability near her is terrible.
The food is wonderful and plentiful.
She’s getting in lots of steps but that cranks up her appetite (did I mention the wonderful and plentiful food?) and leaves her too exhausted by day’s end to piece together a travel workout.
Hence, I had the urge to say I told ya so, but obviously that wouldn’t have been nice or helpful.
What I did tell her wasn’t too nice, either, but I think it was helpful.
“Okay, we all have bad luck sometimes. But you picked a goal and a deadline and it’s clearly something you want. So you gotta want it.
That means you gotta do what ya gotta do. Or in this case, do the best at what you CAN do.
The fat loss process has 4 parts:
• Diet
• Lifting
• Movement/cardio
• Sleep/recoveryThink of them as legs on a table. If you have all four the table works great — its stable & functional.
But take away just one leg and it changes. It can maintain balance, barely, but you wouldn’t lean on it or trust it to support anything. It’s not really functional.
Take away another leg and it’s over. It crashes down.
Currently, the movement leg is there. The sleep/recovery leg sounds okay, though maybe it doesn’t match the movement leg. Might need some adjusting there.
The diet leg is way off. You can maybe adjust it to fit, but it will require willpower and lot of do-whatcha-gotta-do.
That leaves the training leg. And that leg is probably not gonna fit until you get back home.
So you’re left with 3 legs out of a possible 4, which could be good enough to maintain, but only if you adjust and rein things in.
It’s probably not what you wanna hear but it’s reality. So manage expectations. Shoot for the 3 legs you can get and do the best you can to maintain.
It’s better than attempt the impossible and fail, and then LOSE progress or even quit the goal altogether.
And it goes without saying: when you get home, we put it ALL together and really get after it.”
– Coach Bryan