After an ineffective and undisciplined April I was curious to see if there was any improvement in my eating behaviour during May.
It’s interesting moving through this process to observe how motivated I truly am to follow a semi-prescribed dietary plan. I’ve always been very liberal and spontaneous with my relationship with food, responding to whatever whims, curiosities or environments I find myself experiencing.
During a period as a ‘Stagiaire’ in some of Sydney’s finest restaurant, I would spend my days at work assisting in the creation of top level dishes, many of which I was fortunate to eat; only to then spend most of my day’s off scoffing a McDonald’s $5 meal deal, with an optional Mcflurry for pudding.
Since that period there has been a gradual but persistent move towards becoming nutritionally educated and with that a honed focus to shift to a diet of higher quality (although I’ve always maintained a degree of food liberalism).
Due to my lapse of focus during April and with May representing month four of the exercise, I found myself wanting to dive a bit deeper into the data of this particular project and review some of the supporting literature.
After a bit of low level analysis, scanning beyond the odd food stain and paw print, I counted up the empty dots on my stacks of tracking sheets and did some basic maths.
The big data was processed and after some refining algorithms I was able to extrapolate the following figures of adherence to my eating plan.
February = 87% consistency
March = 75% consistency
April = 66% consistency
May = 75% consistency
According to Precision Nutrition’s data, from coaching over 100,000 clients 74% -80% consistency is required for moderate goals whilst achieving a sustainable rate of gradual progress.
This seems consistent with my results so far with a total loss of around 3kg in bodyweight over this period whilst maintaining strength and fitness in my moderate levels of exercise.
The pattern of consistency seems completely logical and to a degree predictable. The first month had my full attention, commitment and was also a shorter month. The second month lapsed to a more relaxed, but sufficient level of commitment, in the third month motivation slipped and the most recent month was hauled back to an adequate level of consistency.
My progress has been noticeable but nothing dramatic and I’m keen to improve upon this now that I’ve got some visibility of how things have been going. A closer look at my tracking sheets and an obvious pattern emerged of weekends being particular days when the consistency was lacking.
This is useful information as it seems counter intuitive that the days with more time freedom would result in the lowest rates of consistency. The simple explanation here actually falls to routine, or in the case of weekends the switch to a different kind of routine.
Without the usual schedule of an earlier start and a fixed point at which the day begins, it’s too easy to get up later, move a bit slower, maybe go get a croissant, miss the high protein breakfast and drop the productive routine. It’s easy to think this is no big deal but in the realm of percentages, a sloppy routine on Saturday and Sunday represents around 28% of the week which is a significant proportion of the week.
Apparently 90% consistency is required for more advanced goals so if you have aspirations of a body like Frank Grillo rather than Alan Partridge, it’s important that most behaviours remain consistent throughout the week.
June is set to be a disrupted month as I’m undertaking some basic landscaping at our house with a friend and we have a planned trip to visit family after the long Covid separation, so I don’t intend on being too militant with my dietary consistency.
If I can sustain some good habits and not regress that will be sufficient and July can be a more focused chapter.
