Shifting Your Baseline with Nutrition
January 25, 2023 | Words by Gabe Yanez
Real Changes Take Time
Nutrition is a hot topic at the beginning of the year, so we’re running with it and focusing on a few different nutrition topics over the next few weeks!
Get ready to dial in your nutrition habits with us on the blog and in our EOE Weekly newsletter. Make sure you share these posts with anyone you know that’s also trying to feel their best in 2023.
To start, let’s dive into forging a powerful mindset shift that could help you finally give up chasing short-term results and look at the bigger picture instead.
Shift Your Baseline
When it comes to many people prioritizing their fitness goals at the beginning of the year, body composition tends to fall at the top of the list for almost everyone. Whether you want to lose weight, burn excess body fat, or add lean muscle, your goal falls into the body composition bucket.
Sure, we all want to feel our best, but if we’re being honest, most of us also want to look a certain way. Maybe we just want to fit into some old clothes or dial things in a little bit for a big event in 2023. Regardless, there’s nothing wrong with aesthetics being a big part of what you’re hoping to achieve in 2023. After all, if you look good, you’ll feel good.
When it comes to changes in body composition, however, the one thing we all lack is patience. We all want to lose weight, burn fat, or gain muscle in 30 days, but the truth is that those changes take time, especially if you want them to stick.
So here’s a helpful way to think about body composition changes and why a more patient approach is almost always the way to go:
We all have a baseline body composition.
The best way to think about this baseline is the body composition that takes minimal effort to maintain. It’s the state of homeostasis that your body has settled into based on the habits (good or bad) you have adopted.
You’ll see results when you do a 30-day challenge or a crash diet. Your body composition may change, but your baseline probably won’t. All of the changes you made to get those results don’t have the time to turn into habits, which means that shortly after the challenge or diet is over, your behaviors will start to creep back to your baseline. As your behaviors start to slip back into old habits, your body composition will eventually return to your baseline as well.
It’s three steps forward and three steps back.
This is why a holistic, habit-based approach is the best way to make sustainable progress toward your goals. It will take more time to see results, but those results will stick because you’ll get there by turning behaviors into habits.
By definition, a habit is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. That’s the key: Hard to give up.
If the body composition changes you accomplish are built off habits, those changes will stick because the behaviors that got you there are now hard to give up. You shifted your baseline, and your new baseline looks good!
One Thing to Try This Week: Pick One Habit & Start Small
Instead of making a handful of big changes to kick off the New Year, pick one habit to work on and start small. What change can you implement this week that’ll move you closer to your goal while feeling so easy that there’s no chance you’ll fall short?
That’s where you start! And if you already jumped into some 30-day challenge to kick off the year, that’s OK — just go into it knowing that it should be a jumping-off point for sustainable changes throughout the year and not an instant fix or a shortcut to get where you want to go.
Bay Area Members: Nutrition Coaching Coming Soon!
And if you’re a member at our NCFIT Campbell or Mountain View flagship locations, keep an eye out for the opportunity to work with an NCFIT Nutrition and Accountability coach very soon!
We know nutrition and accountability play a key role in reaching your goals for 2023, which is why we’re bringing this service to our gyms in the coming months.
We only have a limited number of NCFIT coaches that will be taking on nutrition and accountability clients at launch, meaning spots will be very limited.
To reserve your spot and receive more information as it becomes available, fill out the form below. Members on the waiting list will be the first to find out when nutrition and accountability coaching will become available in the Bay Area!
