Episode 45: Trouble Sticking to Your Diet Plan? Try These 3 Strategies
Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode, I'm sharing 3 strategies for sticking to your diet plan.
The most common reasons people struggle to stick to their diet plans are things like perfectionism, emotional eating, and time constraints. In this episode, I share some practical tips to overcome these obstacles, including:
how to track your food intake effectively
planning meals ahead
meal prepping
I also talk about ways to better manage your macronutrient intake to maximize your protein and reduce excessive carbohydrate and fat consumption.
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Jayd (00:00):
Whenever you are tracking or if you're following a meal plan, the goal is not to have you tracking or following a meal plan and being super strict on your diet forever and ever. Usually tracking is something that I recommend my clients do when we are trying to make a change and form new habits, but eventually, eventually the goal should be to transition into a more intuitive style of eating where you are intuitively better able to follow your nutrition plan without having to track or follow a meal plan. Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I am Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I'm a health coach and personal trainer and I've created this podcast so that I can share with you some of the tips and wisdom that I've gained over the last 10 years working in the fitness industry. In today's episode, we're going to talk about tips for helping you to stick to your diet plan.
(01:01)
Now, by diet plan, I don't necessarily mean that you are on a diet, meaning a fat loss diet. Diet plan is simply your plan of how you want to eat in order to support your fitness and health goals. Your diet plan could be eating a calorie deficit in order to stimulate fat loss. Your diet plan could also be eating a calorie surplus in order to maximize muscle gains. You might also be on a maintenance diet plan. Your diet plan also might have nothing to do with tracking your calories and focus instead on food groups like trying to follow the healthy plate model or following a meal plan that's created for you. Your diet plan is just simply how you plan to eat in order to reach your health and fitness goals. Now, in today's episode, we are going to be talking specifically about sticking to diet plans that are centered around calories and macronutrients.
(01:55)
Calories are the way that we measure the energy that we get from food and macros is short for macronutrients, which are the main sources of calories that we get from food, namely protein, carbohydrates, and fats. Now, maybe you've gone through the process of figuring out how many calories and what your macronutrient distribution is supposed to be for you to reach your health goals, but what I often find is that many of my clients, especially when they're just in the beginning of their nutrition plan process, they struggle to stick to their diet plan. So today we're going to talk about ways that you can go about sticking to your diet plan so that you actually reach your goals. And before we get into the episode, make sure to like this video if you're watching it on YouTube and subscribe to the channel so that you always get notified when I drop a new video.
(02:46)
If you are listening to this podcast, thank you so much. Make sure that you subscribe to the channel so that you also get notified whenever there's a new episode. If you would like more information on me or the services that I offer, check out my website, Jaydigains.com. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-I-N-S.com. I've got workout plans, meal plans, and other downloadable resources that you can use to move along in your fitness journey. If you would like more help, you can join my Gains Club membership, which has exclusive content that I post every single week to help you to eat better, exercise more effectively, and achieve your fat loss goals. Every month I post meal plans, recipes, nutrition tips, fat loss tips and training tips. So check out that you can sign up right from my website, Jaydigains.com. Now without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(03:44)
Now, let's talk about why it is often so difficult for people to consistently reach their calorie and macronutrient goals every day. One problem that a lot of people experience is perfectionism. You have this idea or this expectation that you have to hit your calories and your macronutrient goals exactly just so every single day. Now, this is not only unrealistic, but it's also unnecessary. You do not have to hit your calorie goal 100% perfect to the decimal every single day. In order to make gains and make progress toward your fitness goal and your nutrition goal, instead of having this perfectionist mindset, you want to have a mindset that over the course of a week you want your calorie intake or your macronutrient intake to on average be about the level of calories and macronutrients that are in your goal for your nutrition plan. So say, if your goal is to eat 2000 calories a day, and that's your calorie goal, you might one day eat 2100 calories and then the next day eat 1900 calories and bounce between these two numbers.
(04:59)
Well, by the end of seven days, your average number of calories will be roughly 2000 calories. So roughly you will have reached your goal every day, and this is fine. You do not have to stick directly to the number just on average. You want to reach about the number of calories and the number of grams that are in your goal. And related to perfectionism, I know a lot of people also have this all or nothing mindset, which if you really want to make progress in your fitness, your fat loss, your muscle gains, you have got to work on this mindset because this mindset is going to hold you back. This is the number one reason why people wash out of my training program or they completely just never reach their goals. If you have an all or nothing mindset that says, if I can't do everything all at once perfectly, then I'm going to do nothing that is toxic and that's going to hold you back.
(05:56)
I would rather you abandoner perfectionism, abandon the expectation of all or nothing, and then just do some of what you need to do, right? If you can hit roughly your calorie goals or your macronutrient goals on most days, right? That is enough. Think of the 80 20 rule. If 80% of the time you're roughly doing what's on your plan, then 20% of the time you can afford to fuck around the 20% of the time you can afford to eat over your calorie goal or eat foods that are not necessarily within your plan. Your body is going to reflect what you do most of the time. So if most of the time you're generally more or less reaching your goals, then that's fine, but also remember that we are organic creatures that are stuck in our habits. A lot of times it takes time for us to adopt new habits, and so if you have this all or nothing mindset towards your diet or towards your fitness, you're going to really struggle to implement all of the things all at once that you need to do to reach your ultimate physique goals or your ultimate fitness goal.
(07:06)
You have to be okay with just working on one little thing at a time and allowing your progress in implementing that one little thing to be imperfect, right? Imperfect action is better than no action at all. Okay? So let's ditch the all or nothing mindset and adopt instead a growth mindset which says, I just want to do a little bit more than what I was doing yesterday. I'm going to try to do a little bit better today than I did yesterday. 1% better every single day means that one year from now, you'll be 365% better than you are today, okay? So it's enough to just make small changes. You do not have to do all at once, and you also don't have to be perfect. Now, another reason why people tend to struggle in sticking to their diet plan is that their eating is very, very tied to their emotional state and their mental state.
(08:08)
Eating is not just something that we do for fuel and energy and nutrition. Eating is also an emotional thing. It's a social thing. It's integrated into many different aspects of our lives. But one of the most common disordered relationships with food is using food as a way to dissociate from unpleasant, anxious, or uncomfortable feelings that we might be having using food as an escape the same way that someone might use drugs or playing too many video games or doom scrolling on social media. If you're using food to dissociate, to disconnect from how you're feeling or as an escape from how you're feeling, that is not a healthy relationship with food. And for that reason, I would suggest that you work with a coach or a dietician or a therapist to address that relationship and that way that you're using food for emotional regulation. You want to develop other strategies for emotional regulation that don't involve you eating.
(09:15)
Sometimes it's okay to eat comfort foods. I eat comfort foods from time to time, and that's totally within my nutrition plan. I have it structured that way. But if you have an uncontrollable impulse and to regulate yourself primarily through eating, that's a problem. And so you want to work with a therapist. You want to work with a dietician to develop other strategies to help yourself to regulate your nervous system. When you're dysregulated, that doesn't involve food because until you address that, until you work on that, you are going to continue to sabotage your nutrition plan. You're going to continue to break your diet and not follow your plan because your brain's automatic systems are always going to override whatever it is that you have set out to do in the moment when you're just regulated. That is when whatever is automatic for you is going to be strongest.
(10:12)
Your instinctual drives are going to be much stronger. So if you instinctually habitually automatically reach for food to regulate your nervous system, when you're dysregulated, meaning you're anxious, you're upset, you're worried, you're sad, if you primarily use food to regulate yourself and get back to a calm state where you feel safe, where you feel calm, where you feel steady, then you are more likely to continue doing that automatically, and it's going to be very hard for you to break that habit unless you replace food with other regulation techniques. So I would recommend seeing a therapist. I would recommend seeing a dietician or working with a coach so that you can develop those other strategies to regulate your nervous system so that you're not automatically reaching for food to regulate yourself. Now, another reason why people struggle to stick to their diet plan is time constraints.
(11:05)
We are all so busy and we spend the majority of our waking time rushing from place to place, going to work to our hobbies or maybe shuttling kids around to their school and afterschool activities, and then to the grocery store, and then all of these errands. It's really hard for us to make time for food the way that we need to. We find ourselves reaching for convenience foods or ordering takeout from restaurants. We tend to also go for what's more salty or sugary versus what's actually nutritious for us because we're all crunched for time. So now let's take a look at what different strategies you can use to deal with these very common difficulties with following your nutrition plan. Number one is to track your food. It's so hard to make sure that you are actually eating according to your calorie goal every day or your macronutrient goal every day if you're not actually tracking what you eat.
(12:08)
So track what you eat using a calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal or some other type of macronutrient tracking app to actually track what you eat, keep an eye on how many total calories and grams of protein, grams of fat, grams of carbohydrates you're eating every day. Now, there was a study a couple years ago that showed with a group of people who were trying to lose weight. They had a control group of people who didn't track what they eat, and then they had another group of people that kept a daily journal or diary of what they ate, and they weren't even really tracking calories at this point. They were just writing down what they were eating. And on the whole, they found that the group that actually wrote down what they were eating and kept track of what they were eating every day lost more weight than the group that didn't track what they were eating every day.
(13:01)
So even if you're not actually tracking your calories, just maintaining some awareness of what you're eating and being mindful and reflecting on what you're putting on your plate and just making sure you're noticing it is huge for helping you to stick to your diet plan. And the reason this works is because we are so busy, because we have so many demands on our time and on our energy and our attention, it's very easy to go an entire day eating, and then at the end of the day, you have no idea what you've eaten, no memory of it at all, or maybe you've forgotten a lot of stuff, or maybe you ate something and you weren't even aware of what you were eating. You were just grabbing something so that you could keep going. This happens to all of us. It happens to me all the time, and that's normal.
(13:49)
So if you find that that's more often the case for yourself, then starting to track what you eat may be very helpful for you to just develop some mindfulness. But then if you find that your mindfulness is only going to take you so far, you track what you eat and you're consistently missing the mark where you're not able to actually stick to your calorie goal or your protein goal or your other macros, in that case, you want to be a little bit more intentional about your tracking. In that case, I would recommend don't track just as you go, just eat something and then just track it. Instead, what I recommend is track what you are going to eat, what you're planning to eat first, plug it into MyFitnessPal or your food journal, then see what the calorie number is, see what the macronutrient distribution is, and then you can make a decision on whether you're going to eat it or not, or you can make a decision on whether you need to maybe reduce your portion or change the portion or maybe substitute that with something else.
(14:52)
So start to practice not only just tracking what you eat, but track intentionally before you eat the thing. That way you have time to actually make adjustments. I had a client a couple of years ago who was consistently just not reaching his goals, and I asked him more about it, how he was tracking when he was tracking, and I found out that he was really just plugging everything in at the end of the day after he had already eaten everything. And I said, my dude, what good is that? Do you really think that that's going to help you to make better choices? And he's like, well, no, I guess not. I keep just doing the same thing and I just see the number every day. I'm like, yeah, exactly. Plug it in before you eat it. Then make adjustments. That's how you'll reach your goal.
(15:41)
And this is a very common mistake that a lot of people make. They think, oh, I'll just plug it all in at the end of the day, or I'll just plug it in after the fact. That's really not going to help you to actually make any changes. And that's the whole point of tracking, right? Especially if you're trying to make a change to your diet. If you're trying to change how you're eating, then be more effective with it and tracking. Become aware of what it is that you're eating before you eat it. Now, personally, I don't love tracking my food. I find it to be tedious. I also really don't like to have to think about what I'm going to eat every day throughout the day. I am the type of person that is very, very busy. I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about what am I going to eat, and then sitting down with my meal planning app and running the math, I don't have the executive functioning to spare on my day-to-day life in my day-to-day life to be able to do that.
(16:40)
So what I do instead, and what I encourage a lot of my clients to do instead is plan out what you're going to eat ahead of time. You can plan out what you're going to eat at the beginning of the day and just plug it into your app or write it down in your fitness journal. You're going to have this for breakfast, this for lunch, this for dinner, and these are going to be your snacks. Make adjustments as needed to make sure that everything you plan on eating that day fits within your calorie goals or fits within your macro goals. So that's one way to approach it. My way that I typically approach it though is I like to plan a couple of days to an entire week ahead of time. I don't mind repeating a meal. In fact, I really like to repeat a meal.
(17:18)
So what I often will do is eat the same thing for four days and then I'll change it up and I'll eat a different thing for four days, and that way I only have to calculate out the calories and the macronutrients for each day. One time, maybe two times per week. Planning and pre logging your meals before you eat them can help you to stick to your plan. Now, you can stay even more ahead of the game to help you to stick even better to your plan is to go ahead and actually prepare the food that you have planned and pre-GED. This is called meal prep. Meal prep is the practice of preparing your food ahead of when you're going to eat it, either at the beginning of the day or at the beginning of the week or every couple of days. This is my number one strategy that I have found very, very helpful for myself because again, I don't like to spend a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about what am I going to eat?
(18:16)
My preferred way to stick to my nutrition plan is to just grab something out of the refrigerator that I've already cooked and pop it in the microwave to heat it up or pop it in the oven or eat it cold. Okay? I don't want to have to think about it. I've already created these meals, I've already plugged them into my nutrition plan app, and I already know how many calories it is. All I have to do is eat it, right? So that makes it very easy for me to stick to my nutrition plan because I don't have to think about it as much. Other people who really like to cook and who want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen preparing stuff, that's fine. I love that for them. It's just not right for me, and I found that I struggle with sticking to my diet plan when I don't prep ahead.
(19:02)
So prepping ahead is a really great way to ensure that you're sticking to your plan, and in fact, even further is to batch cook. My favorite thing to do is I will make something that is four to six, sometimes even eight servings of an entire meal. So I'll cook all of it at once, cook it all up ahead of time, and then I'll divide it out into separate entree containers like those restaurant to-go containers. This past year I started using the glass containers. I really like those because they don't absorb the smell or the taste of the food, so that's my favorite. You also can cook the meals directly in the glass Pyrex containers, so that's another way that I make it super, super easy for myself. Now, in addition to this, I also take it even further in terms of my planning ahead. I don't want to sit down at the beginning of every single week and calculate out what I'm going to eat and make sure that it fits within my calorie goals and whatnot.
(20:02)
Instead, I actually eat a standing rotation of a couple of weeks of meal plans, and they go for about six weeks, and every six weeks I'm repeating a meal plan. So in one week, one of my lunches slash dinners will be a Turkey stir fry with green beans, and then the other meal prep, batch cook meal that I'll have is Turkey pot pie or chicken pot pie. And then the week after that, I'll do for lunches and dinners as eating, cooking it all ahead of time for four to six days, alternating between lunch and dinner, I'll do shepherd's pie, and then some kind of a pasta casserole, and every six weeks, I just start over with the same plan. Now, this makes it very easy for me because all I have to do is flip to like, oh, I guess we're at week one again.
(21:00)
Let me go back to week one and see what my recipes are, make sure that I have everything that I need in my kitchen or just go to the grocery store. That also saves me time because it keeps my grocery list pretty consistent every six weeks. Now, if this is interesting to you, I do have some meal plans, some four week meal plans that you can download as examples from my website. If you go to my website, Jaydigains.com, J-Y-D-I-G-A-I-N-S.com, and you click on meal plans in the top menu, you'll be able to take a look at some of the four week meal plans that I've created. I've got one for high protein, 2000 calorie diet, a vegetarian diet, as well as a 1500 calorie diet, and you can check all of those out on my website and give them a download, give them a try.
(21:44)
These are four week meal plans that you could just alternate every four weeks, every month restart, and then you can swap out recipes for new recipes that you want to fit in. It's a really easy way to stick to your nutrition plan. Now, I do find that protein is the hardest macronutrient for most people to hit the goal of every day. It really does take some planning to make sure that you're eating enough protein every day. For most people, and this is true for people who are vegetarian and vegan diets, as well as omnivore diets, okay? So you do kind of have to be mindful and plan for eating enough protein, and one way that you can do this is anytime you go to eat something, just look it up in your meal tracking app or look up the nutritional info online or look at the food label and just give a quick check to what the protein content is of that food.
(22:44)
Because in order to reach the protein goals that you need in order to build muscle effectively and burn fat, it is kind of high, right? A lot of us have pretty high protein goals, and it's hard to hit those goals unless you're planning for it and being very, very mindful. This is especially true when it comes to snacking, okay? Snacks are where a lot of people miss the opportunity to hit their protein goal for the day, because a lot of times when people reach for snacks, what do they reach for? Chips, cookies, crackers, which are basically carbohydrates. You get enough carbohydrates in other foods that you eat most often, so instead of reaching for a bag of chips or some cookies or crackers, instead, try to fill your refrigerator up or pack your lunch with some snacks that are high protein instead. Okay? Snacks that are high protein are things like Greek yogurt, non-fat or low fat Greek yogurt.
(23:41)
Also, protein shakes are a good snack alternative. You could also do egg whites, make some egg whites for yourself or mix them with whole eggs. Cottage cheese with honey or fruit is another good option, and then some lean meats like Turkey chicken and lean beef. A lot of my clients will snack on deli meat, which is a great source of protein. It's pretty satiating, and especially if you tend to crave salty things like salty snacks, like crackers, the deli meat is going to satisfy that itch while also giving you some protein. Now, if you find yourself struggling in overshooting either your carbohydrates or your fats grams every day, which are very, very common problems that people find with following their nutrition plan, here are a few recommendations when it comes to your carbohydrates. Very, very frequently if you order something from a restaurant or even maybe this is how you cook in your own kitchen, it's very common to have your meal be a ton of carbohydrates like pasta or rice or bread making up the majority or half or more of what is actually the meal, right?
(25:00)
So you kind of have to change how you think about the structure of your meals to not include so much of these high carb foods. Remember, if you're following the healthy plate model, your grains and starches, which are your pasta, rice, bread, et cetera, should really only make up about a quarter of your plate or your bowl if you're having a bowl food, and then most of the meal should be vegetables or vegetables and fruit and protein. But what you see in a lot of restaurants and a lot of cuisine is that they will actually put half of the plate is one of the grains, so that will cause you to overshoot your carbohydrates more often than not, and so you want to make sure that you are following the healthy plate model when it comes to what types of foods or what food groups you're putting on your plate, and in how much.
(25:51)
If you're overshooting your fats, often, there are a few things that you need to be mindful of and maybe start practicing when it comes to your day-to-day, what you put on your plate and what you eat for your snacks. If you're eating high fat meats like sausage, you might want to swap those out for leaner cuts of meat, okay? If you're cooking your meat like ground beef or ground Turkey, an easy way to reduce the fat is to actually drain out the fat into a bowl or a cup after you've cooked everything. Let that cool and then throw that away rather than leaving it in there. I know what many of you're probably saying is that takes away the flavor. It may be taking away some of the flavor from the food, but it will reduce the fat intake and allow you to stick better, stick closer to your calorie and macronutrient goals.
(26:40)
You can put flavor back in through using sauces and spices and mixing the meat with other things, okay? If you are consistently overshooting your fats, then sometimes you got to make those sacrifices. You also will probably want to reduce the amount of oils that you're using. If you use butter to cook things, you might want to use a spritz spray. If you tend to just dump oil in the pan, then again, switching to a spritz and then using a non-stick cooking surface is a great way to reduce the amount of fat that you're taking in. Remember that fat is a very calorie dense macronutrient. One gram of fat is nine calories versus one gram of protein, or one gram of carbohydrates being only four calories. Okay? So it's something that you want to be mindful of how much you're consuming. These are great ways that you can reduce the amount of fat that you're taking in.
(27:35)
Now, I want you to keep in mind that whenever you are tracking or if you're following a meal plan, the goal is not to have you tracking or following a meal plan and being super strict on your diet forever and ever. Usually, tracking is something that I recommend my clients do when we are trying to make a change and form new habits, but eventually, eventually the goal should be to transition into a more intuitive style of eating where you are intuitively better able to follow your nutrition plan without having to track or follow a meal plan. Okay? You want to get to the point where it's settled as a habit following the healthy plate model, and it settled as a habit. You just kind of intuitively know after so much practice of tracking what the calorie intake and what the macronutrient distribution is of the foods that you tend to eat on the regular, once you become more familiar and more practiced with the stuff, eventually you can reach a point where you sort of take your foot off the pedal with the tracking and you can be a little bit more flexible.
(28:40)
This is the place that you want to be. Okay? So I know that tracking can be really boring and tedious, and change is hard. It's stressful on the system, that's for sure, and that's probably another reason why you struggle with it, but give it a good go and one thing at a time. You don't have to change everything at once. Instead, think about one to three things that you can change at a time when it comes to trying to eat according to a new diet. Plan one thing at a time until those things become habits, and then add in another thing, okay? The goal is always to build these things into your life, to the point where you do them intuitively and automatically, okay? That is what's going to allow you to have sustainable success in following your nutrition plan and reaching your fitness goals.
(29:35)
So there you have it. Those are my suggestions for if you are struggling to follow your nutrition, please let me know what you think, and if there's anything that I missed, maybe there's something that you're already doing that has been helpful for you, or maybe there's something that you've struggled with with following your nutrition plan that I haven't mentioned. I would love to hear from you. Leave those things in the comments below. If you're watching this video on YouTube, or you can join me while I'm live on my Twitch channel on Tuesdays and on other days throughout the week, just go to Twitch tv slash Jaydigains and give me a follow or subscribe to support the channel. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, aka Jaydigains. Check out my website, Jaydigains.com if you would like to know more about me and the services that I offer. That's it for today's show. I hope that you enjoyed it and that you found it helpful, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. In the meantime, take care.
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