Welcome back to the Bite Me Nutrition podcast. Today I want to take you through more of a practical topic.

It is a topic that's very dear to me because it is, by far, I believe, one of the most important skills you can possibly have if you want to successfully improve your health, your fitness, your relationship with food. In my experience with the thousands of clients I've seen over the years, their ability to build this one skill is the most important deciding factor between whether they're going to be successful with their goals or not. I'm not just talking about weight loss. I think that's where everyone's mind goes. But I mean, any goal, I mean successfully identifying and managing IBS symptoms, I mean running a marathon, I mean gaining as much muscle as possible, I mean bringing down the HBA one C or managing their blood sugars. All of those goals, any goal you can think of benefits from this approach.

Now, I know that sounds very clickbaity, but I don't care because I still believe it to be true. And it is Your ability to get back to normal, by far the successful trait in those clients isn't their ability to be perfect. 1000% of the time, they're all human beings. I've never had a robot as a client. Instead, what they can do is do something that's unusual, that's off the plan, and they can get back to normal very, very quickly. And I intentionally use the language of unusual with my clients rather than off plan bad negative, because all of those things off the wagon, all of those things imply that you did something wrong, whereas unusual just implies, or doesn't even imply outright says that you just did something unusual. That's not your normal approach. That, to me sounds far better than doing something bad or off planned.

So firstly, I like to use the word unusual or the terminology unusual. Then I like to talk about getting back to normal and not just getting back to normal, but the fact that I can get back to normal at my very next meal. A lot of the time what happens is we have one meal or one snack, or we grab that thing from the vending machine, or we do this one thing, this one isolated activity that we feel is going to completely derail our progress, and it won't. If that is all that happened, and then you got back to normal at your very next meal, you would be perfectly fine. Now, if you let that little decision to grab the Kit Kat chunky that's always my go to anyway, the Kit Kat chunky from the petrol station on the way home. And you decided that you've been bad, you couldn't have a perfect day anymore, and so you threw caution to the wind. And for the next 24 to 48 hours, or slash the rest of the weekend, we forgot about what our normal eating routines and habits were, yes, that is going to significantly impact your progress. However, if you got the kitkat chunky, went home, had your normal dinner, woke up the next day, had your normal breakfast, and went on with your normal routine, that would be a drop in the ocean.

Now, like I said earlier, it is a skill. Knowing that this is something that we need to do doesn't overly help. That's a fact. This is not a fact. This is a skill that we need to get better at. So knowing that we're going to try and practice getting back to normal after we've done something unusual, knowing that we need to practice getting back to normal after doing something unusual is helpful, but it's also something that we need to work on long term. You're going to suck at it at first, and that's okay. Maybe instead of waiting two to three days to get back to normal, you manage to drag it back to 24 hours. Maybe it's two or three meals before you get back to normal. Maybe it's one meal before you get back to normal. Those are still all massive improvements, right?

This is not about going from zero to one hundred, which is what everyone tries to do. It's about getting better and better at this skill. And I promise you, if you can build this skill and improve on it and get better and better at it and get more practiced at it, and it can become second nature, you're going to be far more successful with your health and fitness goals.

So I hope that was helpful. If it was, let me know. If it wasn't, let me know and I'll stop doing these sorts of podcasts. But if you have a friend in particular that you think would benefit from hearing this podcast, I would be eternally grateful. That's not true. That's a big claim. I'd be grateful for quite a long time. If you shared it with them and said, hey, I really think this would help. I don't even need you to put it in your stories. I don't need public shows of affection, but that's totally fine too. However, please, please consider sending it to someone you think would benefit, and I'll chat to you next time.