“I’ll resume healthy eating after my holiday… once the baby is born… after Dad gets out of the hospital… January 1… Monday.” While this kind of “pause-button mentality” seems reasonable, it could be ruining your health and fitness. Here’s why, and what to do about it.
There’s a question that’s been asked of me a LOT lately — from my clients and potential clients:
"Why don't your programmes offer a Pause function?"
After all, what’s the harm in letting clients take a break from a nutrition and fitness plan when they’re:
· going on holiday,
· completely swamped at work,
· pregnant, or just after delivery,
· injured, or
· caring for a family member?
For a client, the thought process boils down to:
If I miss some workouts, eat the wrong things, skip the homework… I fail.
Aren’t I more likely to succeed if I take a break, just until I have the time to do it right?
This is what I call the ‘pause-button mentality’.
OK, don’t get me wrong.
I think it’s normal — even commendable — to want to do your best. To consider taking time to regroup and then resume (or start over) when life feels easier.
At the same time, this completely natural and well-meaning impulse is one of the fastest, surest, most reliable ways to sabotage your plans for improved nutrition, health and fitness.
Here’s why — and what to do instead.
Starting fresh after you lose your way is a really comforting thought.
That’s probably why New Year’s resolutions are so popular, especially following the indulgence-fuelled holiday season.
Give me some of that cheesecake. I’ll start my diet again on Monday!
In fact, I’ve learned in my nutrition coaching programmes that the idea of a start-over is so alluring you don’t even need a mess-up for the pause-button mentality to take over.
Every January, I welcome new clients. Every July, I take in the second, and final, group of the year.
In July, six months in, just knowing that there are new clients starting the programme fresh in January makes some July clients “itch” for a new beginning, even though they’re already making progress, changing their bodies.
If only you’d let me start again, I’d really nail it this time!
But here’s the problem: The pause-button mentality only builds the skill of pausing.
Whether it’s tomorrow, Monday, next week, or even next year, hitting that imaginary pause button gives you some sense of relief.
It allows you a little respite from what can be really a tough slog.
(And the middle is always a tough slog, it doesn’t matter what kind of project you’re working on.)
This perceived relief is compounded by the illusion that if we “start fresh” later we can find that magic “right time” to begin.
Yes, I get it.
It can feel absurd to try to improve your eating and exercise habits while you’re in the midst of chronic stress / looking for a job / starting a new job / going on holiday / caring for relatives / raising small children.
That’s probably why there are so many 21-day this and 90-day that. What adult has more than 90 days to go after their fitness goals with an all-out effort?
But what do these intense fitness sprints teach you?
The skill of getting fit within a very short (and completely non-representative) period of your life.
What don’t they teach you?
The skill of getting fit (or staying fit) in the midst of a normal, complicated, “how it really is” sort of life.
This is why the yo-yo diet thing has become such a phenomenon.
It’s not about willpower. It’s about skills.
In most fitness scenarios, you learn how to get fit under weird, tightly-controlled, white-knuckle life situations.
You build that one, solitary, non-transferrable skill — to slam the accelerator pedal down, drive the needle into the red, and squeal down the road for a little while, burning the rubber off your tyres until you (quickly) run out of fuel and crash.
What you don’t build is the ability to get fit under real-life conditions.
That’s why it doesn’t stick. Not because you suck.
But because the natural and predictable consequence of having a limited skill set is short-term progress followed immediately by long-term frustration.
What will be different next time?
I remember having lunch with a colleague who swore up and down that her low-carb diet plus daily running was the secret to staying in shape.
I had to follow up with a painful question: “Well, why aren’t you actually in shape?”
After a long pause: “Well, I’ve had a hard time sticking with it. We just had our second child. The holidays just ended. I just switched jobs.” She trailed off…
“But, once everything settles down, I’ll get with the programme and get in shape again! I guess I’m just on a little break.”
This story illustrates the point perfectly.
Here’s someone who’s built his fitness on a house of cards. He knows only one thing: How to get in shape by following a very challenging programme when the conditions are perfect.
And whenever life isn’t perfect, which is most of the time, she hits the pause button. She waits for a better time. (All the while losing the health and fitness she previously worked so hard for.)
That’s why, when my clients ask to press pause, I usually ask them:
“What will be different when you come back?”
Nine times out of 10, the honest answer is nothing. Nothing will be different.
Life is just…happening. And it’ll happen again in January, or after the baby is born, or after Dad gets better, or at any other arbitrary point you pick.
And what then?
I’ve wanted to press “pause” myself.
If you’ve ever felt like pressing pause, or you feel this way right now, it might help to know I’ve felt exactly the same way.
A few years back, I decided to start my own business at Helen Clare Ryan.com Fitness & Wellbeing.
Every day I’d wake up and get straight to work seeing back to back clients. At the end of the day, I’d drive arrive home exhausted. Then I'd have to start preparing a meal and eat before retiring to bed and starting all over again the following morning.
At first, I thought there was no way to exercise. My schedule was completely packed, I had nowhere to work out, and my eating was less than ideal.
But after a couple of weeks I realised that something was going to be better than nothing.
Running a business would only get more demanding as I took on more clients.
I realised I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t press pause. Because, if I didn’t continue, there’d never be that “perfect time” to hit play again.
I needed to find a way to squeeze in some kind of workout, however quick, easy, and unglamorous.
Let’s accept that life has no pause button.
The key lesson here is that, like it or not, the game of life keeps going.
There is no timeout.
There’s never going to be a moment when things are magically easier.
You can’t escape work, personal and family demands. Nor can you escape the need for health and fitness in your life.
Here’s a thought experiment:
What if you tried to hit pause in other areas of your life?
Imagine you’re up for a big promotion at work. For the next two weeks, all you want to do is focus on mastering an upcoming presentation, and winning over your boss.
Trouble is, you’ve got two young children at home who tend to grasp, koala-like, onto your legs and demand your full attention.
Darling, you say to your spouse, I’m just gonna press pause on being a parent for now. I’ll be staying at a hotel. Don’t contact me.
I don’t know about you, but that would NOT go down well in my family.
You can’t really press pause — and you definitely can’t hit reset — on being a parent. (You’ve thought about it, though. I know you have.)
Just like you can’t stop showing up for work and expect not to get fired. Or “take a break” from being married and not end up divorced.
Generally, when it comes to life, we know we’re not always going to be on our A Game. Sometimes we’re superstars. Most of the time we just do our best.
We muddle through. We keep going.
So why do we expect it to be any different with fitness?
In my case, above, I gathered myself together and came up with a simple workout programme that met these criteria:
· No more than 3 x a week.
· No more than 10 minutes per session.
· Has to be done upon waking up, right next to the bed.
· Requires no equipment.
I did this for about 6 months. Was it the Best Workout Ever? No! Did I end up, after 6 months, fitter than ever? Heck no!
But was it better than hitting the pause button and doing nothing? You bet!
See, perfectionism is not the point.
“Completing” a programme, on your own or with the help of a coach, is not the point.
Being the “best” for a tiny window of time is not the point.
The point is to keep going. Sometimes awkwardly, sometimes incompetently, sometimes downright half-heartedly. But to keep going nonetheless.
As I often teach my new clients:
The “all or nothing” mentality rarely gets us “all”. It usually gets us “nothing”.
That’s when I propose a new mantra:
“Always something”.
Instead of pressing pause, adjust the dial.
Nowadays I like to think of my fitness and nutrition efforts as a dial.
There are times when I want to dial my efforts up, and times when I want to dial them down. But I never want to turn the dial off completely.
Here’s how this plays out in the context of my life.
Sometimes, say when I’m concentrating on a particular goal, my fitness dial might be tuned to 9 or 10 out of 10.
Channel 10 means I work out every day. Every meal is planned and carefully considered. I think a lot about fitness. And not much about anything else.
Work, family, hobbies…they’re all in maintenance mode (with the permission of the people this affects, of course).
However, as I write this, my life involves the following:
· Supporting my recently widowed Dad.
· Running a comfortable home for myself and my partner.
· Constantly marketing my own business
· Keeping up with my ever increasing client base.
So these days, the dial rarely goes past 3 or 4. I work out, maybe, three days a week. And most of my meals are just “good enough”.
(For the record, I’m totally cool with that. There is no guilt about having my dial set a little lower. What’s most important is that the dial is still set to “on”.)
The important lesson: There’s a big difference between tuning your dial to 3, 2, or even a 1, and turning the whole thing off.
And when you realise how doable — and effective — channels 3 and 2 and 1 can be, you see that there’s never a good reason to hit “pause”.
Want to learn more? Join my FREE 4 Day Weightloss Reboot Programme