Why Your Diet Keeps Falling Apart

“My diet isn’t working.”

As you can imagine, over the last 18 years of coaching people, I’ve heard this before.

When someone says this to me, my first response is usually to ask more questions. I need to know things like: what does “not working” mean? I need to know if you are following the plan consistently but not seeing the results you expected. I’d like to know if you are following it some of the time or if you fell off a few weeks ago.

Or I simply need to know if it just doesn’t work for you in the chaos in your life.

Each of these is a wildly different problem, and they require different solutions.

Sometimes a nutrition strategy genuinely isn’t a good fit, but most of the time the strategy might be perfectly capable of producing results, but the person can only execute it some of the time.

In that case… we probably need to find another way of eating and understand why consistency is so difficult.

Here’s a thought for you: one of the bigger problems I’ve seen over the years is that we’ve gotten very good at teaching people how to follow diets. We have not, however, done a good job of teaching them how to eat.

That sounds weird, I know. Let me explain.

The Problem With All Or Nothing

There are plenty of approaches to nutrition that can work, and people have successfully lost weight using any one of them. The problem I see is that the strategy often becomes dogma.

In other words, let’s say you decide to follow a particular diet and you’re going to do it perfectly. You see other people having success with it, and so you figure this has got to be the way to do it, and so I’m going to do it.

For a while, maybe it works.

Then you go to a restaurant or a party, or your kids want pizza, or you go on vacation or something, and suddenly the plan doesn’t fit anymore because it’s just not feasible in the environment.

If your brain is operating from an all-or-nothing mentality, once you can’t do it “all,” there’s only one other alternative: nothing.

A bad meal becomes a bad day. A bad day becomes a bad weekend, and then Monday comes around and you’re promising yourself, “Yeah, I’m gonna start all over and do it perfectly again.”

But life, as life has the tendency to do, happens. Again.

Maybe the Diet Isn’t The Problem

Maybe this has happened to you. Your co-worker or your friend or your family member or some person at the gym told you you should eat [insert diet here] because they had great results with it.

You try it, and it’s at best ineffective for you, and at worst sets you back.

Intermittent fasting is a great example of this. Some people love it, and they swear by it, and they naturally prefer eating within a smaller window because it works with their schedule and makes things more simple. They can follow it consistently, and they don’t feel like their entire day revolves around food.

Other people simply hate it. They spend the morning being hungry. They think about food all day. They arrive at their eating window and go completely off the rails.

And in neither one of these are we talking about results.

This doesn’t make intermittent fasting good or bad necessarily. It just makes the strategy that fits some people and doesn’t fit others.

Instead of moving from one diet to another – “I tried this and it didn’t work, so now I’m gonna try that” – I’d rather treat nutrition as sort of an ongoing experiment.

I am a habits-based nutrition guy, so I want to know…

• What worked?
• What didn’t work?
• What could you actually sustain?
• What helped you feel good, train well, manage your hunger, and make progress toward the goal you told me that you wanted?

Keep the things that are useful and support your goals, and then change the ones that aren’t.

This is not a one-size-fits-all approach after all.

You Don’t Need More Rules

That “my diet isn’t working” phrase does happen. What I hear more often, though, is: “I know what to do. I’m just not doing it.”

Sometimes that’s true.

Other times, once we start asking questions, we discover that the person isn’t actually sure what good nutrition looks like without the structure of a specific diet telling them what they can and cannot eat.

Either way, simply handing them more rules isn’t solving the problem. It’s just feeding into their “I know what to do” mentality.

My approach to coaching nutrition is much more habits-based. In other words, I want people to become more conscious of their decisions around food and gradually build the skills they can continue using when I’m no longer standing beside them.

I’m not going to follow you around and hit food out of your hand after all.

I love, though, starting it very simply in the form of, “do you have a protein source on your plate?” How about, “what are some fruits or vegetables that you like that you can eat consistently?” Another great one is “How do you feel afterward?”

We can build this from here.

If eventually we need to get more precise with tracking calories or macros, sure, that can be useful, but not everybody works and operates that way. In fact, that can create a real negative relationship with food if we’re forcing that person to do something that is wildly outside of what they would normally otherwise do

Here’s a fun thought experiment for you. The more complicated you make your nutrition, the more time and attention it demands. If you have a career, maybe you have children, and they have activities. Complexity, time, and attention are not something you want to use on something like this.

Monday And Saturday Aren’t The Same Type of Day

One of the things I ask people early on when we’re looking at their nutrition is what they eat during the week and what they eat on the weekend.

There’s a reason for that (I know what you’re thinking)…

Monday through Friday could be incredibly structured. You wake up at the same time, you go to work at the same time, lunch happens roughly at the same time, and you generally know what food is available.

Then Saturday arrives…

There are kids’ activities, restaurants, errands, birthday parties, friends, drinks, and the pantry is very, very close in proximity to where you’re sitting right now.

Your Saturday may just be as consistent as your Tuesday, but what that consistency looks like might be a completely different thing.

Developing a nutrition strategy that ignores that difference isn’t particularly useful and doesn’t do good things for your headspace. The goal is to have enough understanding and enough good habits that you can navigate both the week and the weekend.

“I Can’t Have That” vs “I choose Where I Put That”

Here’s a giant shift I want people to make that I stole from one of the guys who used to be a personal trainer with me when I was at a different gym:

There is a wildly different feeling between saying “I can’t have that” and saying “I choose where to put that.”

Short of a legitimate medical reason you need to avoid a particular food, I don’t generally want you to build your entire nutritional strategy around a giant list of things that you can never eat again.

Here’s a thought experiment for you: we’re climbing one of those giant towers, and I turn to you and I say, “Hey, don’t look down.” What do you do?

You probably look down because that’s all you can think about now.

Food works the same way. If I tell you to “don’t eat bread,” the only thing you’re going to think about is, you guessed it, bread.

You can hang on for dear life and follow that for a while, but eventually life kicks you where the sun don’t shine, and you’re going to have it, and then some.

I’d rather give you some ownership.

Maybe you know you’re going out Saturday night. Great! That can be where you choose to have the dessert or the drink you wanted. The rest of the week, you continue making choices that generally support your goals.

That dinner or that dessert, that drink didn’t just happen to you. You knew it was coming. You chose where that stuff was gonna happen.

This distinction is huge because it gives you ownership of what’s going on, and you get to prove to yourself that you can do what you need to do to support your goals and your health.

What 80/20 Actually Means

This is probably one of the big reasons why I like the general idea of an 80/20 or 90/10 approach to nutrition (and most things).

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean you need to get a calculator out and determine exactly what percentage of the week’s meals qualify as “good.” The number really isn’t the point.

The point is that most of your decisions should support what you told me that you wanted to accomplish, while leaving some room for you to actually live your life.

On the other hand, if you have a very specific goal on a very aggressive timeline, that amount of flexibility is going to change. You can do something “perfectly” for a given amount of time, but as far as a lifestyle and something you can sustain, that’s not the direction we’re going to go.

That one decision that doesn’t perfectly support your goal doesn’t erase the 20 decisions before it that did.

You’re Casting Votes

I had a mentor once explain it to me this way: think of your choices as votes for the person you’re becoming or votes for the person that you’re coming from.

Every time you make a decision that supports your health, you’re casting a vote for that version of yourself. And on the other hand, every time you make a decision that does not support your goals and your health, you’re casting a vote for the person you’re moving from.

In that way, if I have 20 good votes and then I vote the other way one time, I didn’t just erase the previous 20 votes.

Do what you need to do for the entire week and then had pizza on Saturday night?
That doesn’t change anything.

And moreover, you get to vote again at your next meal.

In my eyes, this is a much healthier way to think about nutrition than deciding you’ve ruined everything because one choice wasn’t perfect. If you’re trying to make it a lifestyle and make it consistent, you need to be in a better headspace.

Nutrition Gets Harder When You Have Other Mouths to Feed

This is exactly why it’s particularly important for parents, because you aren’t making decisions for you, yourself and… yourself.

The kids have all of their activities, and when you make something for dinner and it’s later and everybody’s stressed out and hungry, and then your kids say they don’t want it anymore (even when they absolutely raved about it and loved it the previous week)… That’s hard.

Or maybe tonight is Chicken Nuggets and French Fries Night.
Great! But what can we do with that?

There’s still a source of protein there. If you’ve got some errant vegetables that you can just warm up that are sitting in your freezer, do that. Maybe you pay attention to your portions. Maybe the plate isn’t perfect, but you’re hitting your protein and your carbohydrates, and you’re hitting your vegetables.

This, my friend, is the skill.

And I would absolutely argue that this skill is much more valuable over the next 20 years than your ability to perfectly execute a meal plan for 12 weeks.

The Goal Is To Need Me Less

Ultimately, that’s one of the aims of nutrition coaching: to make sure that six months from now, a year from now, you’re not completely dependent upon me to tell you what you’re allowed to eat.

Now, that doesn’t change the coaching and accountability side of it, but the know-how and the decision-making, that’s you.

I want you to understand how to build a meal. I want you to understand your hunger, how to recognize different foods and meals and how they make you feel, how to make reasonable choices at a restaurant, and everything that goes with it.

This is real life, and real life isn’t perfect.

A Good Nutrition Plan Needs to Survive a Bad Day

There’s an enormous difference between a plan you can follow for 12 weeks and the set of skills that you can use for the next 20 years of your life.

How can you tell?

The real test is when stress is high, time is low, kids are screaming and yelling at you, and you got to make a good decision.

And then, even when you don’t, can you make a good decision at your next opportunity without deciding you’ve ruined everything?

My goal for you is to help you hone the skills required in making those decisions, regardless of what your life throws at you.

That’s the nutrition strategy I’m interested in building.

Want some help with that? You can email me at [email protected].