Menu Design
It should come as no surprise to readers here that the way I suggest you alight this murderous merry-go-round is to make the switch to a manner of eating you can and will do forever. It takes work, but a helluva lot less work than switching your dietary allegiance every week or month or year all on the same hollow promise. Not to mention dealing with the same dissatisfaction and anxiety surrounding your health and fitness.
Most of you will know that I am not one for shortcuts. A life hack is usually just a quick way to be shit at something, but today you’re going to get one. One simple rule to help you cut to your dietary chase, and no one else’s.
And one that by contrast to ignoring reality and viewing your dietary intake steadfastly through a single lens - typically calories - you instead look to mealtimes as an opportunity to make everything better. Because health, body shape, and enjoyment of life are not, and never have been, mutually exclusive.
Timekeeping: Tell Me Why I Don't Like Mondays
Bob Geldof is hardly alone in being less than enthused about the start of the week, and the mystery as to why we don't like it has been equally universal.
We can point to psychological factors that might make it less appealing, than a Friday certainly, but there's a corresponding physicality to it that has, seemingly, made less sense. An off-ness to it that makes catching your tram on Monday morning feel more like you’re struggling to make your connection through Frankfurt.
Baby steps: Bringing the abstract of a distant goal into everyday reality.
Behaviour goals are the means to the end, an action, over which you have direct control every day - things you can choose to do. Or not. This step further imposes a degree of honesty likely missing from an ‘aim for the stars’ fantasy. If reality was absent from the goal-setting process, here is where it makes it's boringly necessary appearance.
Aesthetic vs Athletic: Form will always follows function, but not vice versa.
In just the same way that different training methodologies will help or hinder us in achieving a particular goal, so will our point of focus.
Give Me Strength: The fountain of youth.
It's not a game-changer. As the precursor to all other qualities - power, speed, endurance and skill, strength is the game. Despite this, it's pursuit has been denied to half of us. If they train, men, will sooner or later try to pick up something heavy. Being men, it's likely to be sooner, and heavier, than it should be. Women, conversely, are lead away from this and those that do cross the divide - usually through high-level sports coaching - have been the exception.
Movement Literacy: The alphabet with which your body speaks.
If mobility is restricted, this sensory capability is dulled, affecting the quality of information passed back up the chain. Every joint beyond that point in the chain then operates on only part of the story - best guesses and rumour over the full facts.
Breathe Easy: When you're doing something 20,000 times a day, you want to do it right.
As with our quality of movement - for whatever reason, whether through injury, posture or habit, even with fundamental flaws in our patterns, the body will find a way around things - a compensation. For breathing it is no different, and our posture and daily habits can also be feeding subtle breathing pattern disorders.
Drawing the Heat: How to nail your warm-up
Skipping the warm-up is, at the very least, ignoring some strong cues from your body that it needs to prepare. We are under no illusions that sitting on our arses all day, only to get home, walk into the kitchen and pick up the fridge, is probably not the best idea, but the equivalent happens every day in any gym.
New horizons: The practice of goal setting
The most inspiring speech from someone else will never outweigh your own whispered argument in defence of your goal.
Decisions decision: Avoiding decision fatigue
By lunchtime every day you may already have made hundreds of individual decisions. From whether to hit snooze one more time, socks or sandals, toast or crumpets, tram or train. They rapidly stack up, ranging from the trivial to the more significant, and they are all chipping away at your willpower.