Lifestyle: Maintaining Social Life while Prioritizing your Health and Fitness

If you just started your journey towards improving your health and fitness, it can feel overwhelming! There's a common saying: “nothing changes if nothing changes”, so it’s expected that lifestyle and habits are going to look different. This can be very difficult depending on your current schedule, career, family, and social life.

As someone who has always been into training and living like a bodybuilder, I too have struggled with balance at times. Not finding time, but making time to do everything that is required to achieve my goals can feel impossible if I’m not prepared. It’s taken experience, knowledge, and mentoring, to get where I’m at today. It did not happen overnight. There's also the pressure I put on myself to lead by example for my clients, and present myself as an expert in my craft.

But what if you don’t even know where to begin to tackle this issue? What if you don’t want to be extreme and just want to begin laying the foundation of living a healthy and balanced lifestyle? No matter the goal, it’s not a great idea to heavily sacrifice social life to prioritize going to the gym or making different nutritional choices. There's a method to the madness, and it comes in the form of a sustainable and measurable approach.

Start Small (Baby Steps)

Maybe, you want to be very assertive from the jump to get ahead. You want to make up for lost time, as you’ve been putting off this fitness goal for months or years. You’ve been listening to those podcasts or watched that movie that motivated you to get off the coach and get moving! This can be a great source of motivation, but we don’t want that emotional response to hurt us in the long run. Going too fast too soon sacrifices sustainable results. I don’t know about you, but if I get to my goal, I want to maintain it in a healthy way (assuming we get there in the first place). If you’ve tried and failed in the past, maybe your approach looked similar to this. Think of this like an ultra-marathon runner, you shouldn’t sprint the first mile of a one-hundred mile race.

The first step can be just showing up. Go train when you say you’re going to. Hold yourself accountable and follow through. For nutrition, it can be: just eating more fruits and vegetables, prioritizing quality protein sources, tracking calories, or educating yourself on nutrition with evidence based sources of information.

Consistency is Key (Avoid the “All or Nothing” Mindset)

Focus on building the habits first by building momentum with better decision making in regards to your nutrition. It could be as simple as having enough lean protein source paired with a fruit or vegetable with every meal. Swap out the sweets, trail mix, the bag of chips in the office cafeteria ... .for a protein bar, banana, apple etc. it does not need to be an “all or nothing” practice. If you put the pressure of perfection on yourself, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Life can vary in terms of what we have on our plate (no pun intended) and stress can cause us to feel overwhelmed, leading to poor adherence to the plan for our goals. If you slip on your consistency with nutrition, don’t beat yourself up. Take the emotion out of your thought process and analyze the situation. What caused you to fall off track? What is a reasonable strategy to prevent the same negative pattern from happening again? For me, I know I should not have the tasty snacks in the pantry when I’m in a contest prep or dieting phase.

Communicate

Communication is an underrated and un-emphasized part of the habit and lifestyle change process. I hear it so often from my clients “I can’t enjoy life…my family and friends don’t understand….”. It shouldn’t be like this! It starts with a simple conversation. How you say this matters, so think about how you’re going to communicate with your circle before you start this fitness journey and lifestyle. It could be something like “hey ____, I'm going to begin prioritizing my health and fitness. This might affect my decision making if and when we go out. I would really appreciate your support during this time….”. To be clear, don’t ask anyone to diet and train with you if they don’t want to. YOU signed up for this! The ball is in your court, and at the end of the day, you need to be the one that executes the plan.

To sum this up, navigating nutrition and training in the beginning can seem like the most difficult thing. Like any skillset, it takes time to improve and gets better with time. Don’t get discouraged, never quit, and get after it.