Consistency is Key: Achieve Your Fitness and Nutrition Goals

How to Hit Your Fitness and Nutrition Goals

When you start your fitness and nutrition journey, it can feel so easy to get caught up in all of the things that you have to do. It can feel overwhelming. You might feel like you have to be perfect to achieve your goals.

Perfection is not possible. No one on planet Earth is perfect. You do not have to be perfect to reach your goals! Instead, focusing on consistency is how you will reach your goals.

So, how do you remain consistent and achieve your fitness and nutrition goals?

1. Start With Your Mindset
2. Set Realistic Fitness and Nutrition Goals
3. There’s No Quick Fix

Start With Your Mindset 

Work on your mindset. A key to being consistent and achieving your goals is working on the way that you think. Mindset work takes time and practice, but it helps.

Likely at some point, you have gone into a mental spiral. A mental spiral is when your feelings and thoughts lead to a pattern of negative thinking. [1]

How does this play into your fitness and nutrition goals?

Let’s say that you set a goal to lose weight. So, you made a plan. You have been doing well all month. You haven’t skipped a workout and you have been eating a well-balanced diet. But, one day you had a hard day at work. Then, you eat a pint of Rocky Road Ice cream when you get home. After that, the mental spiral starts.

You start to tell yourself that all of your hard work from the last month was worthless. You keep going with those negative thoughts, and you tell yourself that you will never hit your fitness goals, and you will not lose weight. You tell yourself a story about how you can never do anything right because you always fall back into old habits. You feel like you might as well give up. 

This is a mental spiral. The feeling of disappointment in yourself for not being perfect led to negative thinking. It might even lead to you giving up altogether if you keep thinking this way.

A helpful way to overcome this way of thinking is to reframe your thoughts. I’m not a mental health professional, but here is a simple practice that I do to center myself during or after a mental spiral.

1. Notice the mental spiral.
2. Identify feelings
3. Validate ALL feelings
4. Reframe

It can look something like this:

1. Yupp, acknowledge that you are mentally spiraling. Notice that the inner thoughts are turning negative. This takes practice, but it gets easier over time.
2. Identify your feelings. In this case, you can say, “I feel disappointed.” Maybe identifying feelings is hard. A great place to start is the feelings wheel.
3. Validate how you feel. Say, “It’s okay to feel disappointed.” It IS okay to feel disappointed. Like, seriously. It’s okay.
4. Look at the big picture. It’s easy to fall into this negative thinking and then believe that all the hard work that you put in over the last month to achieve your goals didn’t matter.

Think about everything that you have achieved so far!

Hell yeah, you hit your protein goal for a week straight! Hell yeah, you upped how much water you drink! Hell yeah, you didn’t skip breakfast this morning!

You know what’s awesome? You get to keep trying. It might feel hard, but you can do it! Achieving perfection in nutrition and working out is impossible. All of the hard work that you put in over the last month or months does not go away if you aren’t perfect.

In reality, because you were so consistent over the last month, it doesn’t matter that you ate a pint of ice cream. If you look at the whole picture, you did more this month to lose weight than you have ever done before.

Consistency is always better than perfection. The most important thing you can do when (not if) you stray off the path is to get back on the path and keep going. Keep trying! 

Set Realistic Fitness and Nutrition Goals 

Another way to achieve goals (and cause less disappointment in oneself) is to set realistic goals.

Here are some practical things you can do to set yourself up to achieve your fitness goals and nutrition goals and remain consistent.

Some questions that you should ask yourself:

• Do my goals align with my lifestyle? 

• Do my goals align with my budget? 

• Do my goals align with my current mental state?

Be brutally honest with yourself. If you answered “no” to any of those questions, it’s time to make some adjustments.

For example, maybe your main goal is to get stronger and gain muscle mass! So, you set a goal to work out 5 days a week.

However, after looking at your schedule you realize that it’s pretty jam-packed. You have to get to work early in the morning and then you have kids that you have to take to after-school activities. By the time you get home, you’re exhausted. The last thing you want to do is change and head to the gym.

So, instead of lifting weights 5 days a week, you decide to lift weights 3 days a week. You can lift weights on the weekends and once during the week. This is a workout schedule that is doable and achievable.

Set realistic goals that will not lead to burnout. It’s okay to start small and adjust as you go!

Do you know what matters most out of that scenario? The fact that you are now lifting three times a week consistently! You’re starting a new habit (lifting weights) and you are adding it to your schedule. 

There’s No Quick Fix 

This next part might be hard to hear. But, you must stop listening to people who sell products or programs that promote “getting fit fast” or promote a quick fix. 

I'm sure you've seen programs that target specific areas of the body. For example, maybe you saw a person selling a program that says crunches will get rid of stomach fat. You've also probably seen something that says, “Lose 30 pounds in x amount of days.”A program that promises a quick fix is honestly, to put it frankly, bullshit.

Legit weight loss and fitness programs should promote building habits over time. Consistency is key. If you want to lose weight and/or build strength you must remain consistent. Lift heavy weights, hit your protein and caloric goals every day, hydrate, and get quality sleep!

But, remember, progress over perfection! You will go far and you will achieve your fitness and nutrition goals if you try your best to remain consistent. Also know, that you are human and you might miss a workout here and there. It’s okay. Get back up and try again.

If you want to find a program that encourages consistency and building habits that will work for you and your lifestyle, schedule a consultation call with us or check out our app here.


1. Charlie Health