Are you working hard for nothing?
Look, no one values hard work more than I do. I wasn’t always a hard worker. Things came easy to me. I was always naturally athletic and I could get by in school never studying or doing homework because I test well. While it sounds like a gift it was the worst deficit I could ever have been born with. Because at some point in development everyone is athletic and smart, and you learn that the ones who had to work for it actually learned something. That’s when I had to learn to work. To put in the time. To win on grit rather than talent. But so often I see people working hard just for work’s sake. There’s no trophy for suffering.
When it comes to nutrition I have clients say they spent hours prepping and planning and aren’t seeing results. They are frustrated because they feel like they are working so hard for nothing. But guess what? Feelings aren’t facts. This is the crux of why research has shown that restrained eating (limiting food intake to lose or maintain weight) has been tied to weight gain; people feel like they are eating in a deficit while not actually doing so.
As the cliche goes, why not work smarter? In the case of nutrition, smarter just means using the tools at your disposal to make the nature of dieting easier. Use tools such as a food scale and a nutrition tracker like Chronometer to track your intake. Use a bodyweight scale to track your weight. Track your steps with a simple activity tracker from Amazon or a fancy new Apple Watch. Bulk prep food in an air fryer or instant pot. Shit, you can probably cook 5lbs of chicken breast on the grill in 15 minutes.
Dieting will be restrictive. Dieting will require some sacrifice. Dieting will require prioritization. But it doesn’t have to resemble some kind of medieval torture.
There’s no substitute for hard work. But at some point more work isn’t better. Smarter is. Stop driving yourself into the ground focusing on things that don’t drive results and instead focus your efforts in those things that do. Double down and work hard at working smart.