Consistency and Compliance

What drives success in healthy living?

As new studies emerge and we learn more about how the amazing body works and functions, strategies are formed to help us control our lives. We are bombarded with healthy strategies and programs that promise to help achieve our goals every day. Some are heavily researched while others are more anecdotal. This means that you should be able to find a program that fits your needs and lifestyle to finally achieve your goal. Yet we don’t see as many success stories as we do unsuccessful attempts.

“Self-directed fat loss programs fail a staggering 98% of the time.  And everyone knows this. You may have tried and failed yourself once or twice.  And if not, you definitely know someone who has.”¹

Why is that?

This sequel to the last article of outcome based decision making dives into why success isn’t always based on what you do, but how well you stick to it.

This is where consistency and compliance are crucial for short and long term success. Compliance being defined as one’s ability to perform the behavior to drive change. When this habit is performed regularly, consistency is high. When we pick our exercise programs or nutrition plans we often don’t think about “how likely is it that I will continue this for the rest of my life?”. Yet our expectations are that “if I do this right now, I will achieve what I want and never have to address it again”. This trap is a double edged sword. We often pick things that are extreme because we want results now but also unsustainable. Both these create high rates of non compliance and poor consistency.

Trying to take someone from never working out to all of a sudden training 4x a week and eating different is a lot of work. It requires time, physical effort and lots of mental power to make difficult choices. People typically have enough motivation at the start to fuel these behaviors but it will quickly run out if used often. Results won’t happen quick enough to validate the effort being put in. As stated in the previous article adding in one new habit has a success rate of around 80%, two habits 35% and three habits 5%.¹

This is why starting with small changes that are easy and attainable have a higher rate of success. Using outcome based decision making to figure out a starting point and measurement system, is so crucial to being able to improve compliance and consistency. We need to know what the goals are, where to start, and are they working. After we get the data we can examine,  “was my compliance high enough to expect a result?” “Is this something that I can do consistently, if I got the result I wanted?”

The biggest pitfall is trying to do something that you know you will have a low compliance rate with and consistency is very short term. Most popular exercise and nutrition programs that promote fast results fall into this category. If you expect to lose weight in 2-4 weeks with an very restricted diet and high exercise volume program, what is the expectation when you stop and go back to your normal lifestyle?

Think of a habit you would like to change. “Stop eating sweets”. Now trying using the 1-10 scale, promoted here by Dr. John Berardi:

“On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you that you can do what I’ve prescribed every day for the next 30 days?… and if they answer anything less than a 9 — they’re going to fail.”¹

If I hear “yeah, I think I can do that, 7” to a habit suggestion. I often would take this as the person is on board. Rarely was the case. If what you are choosing makes you question yourself for a second it’s probably going to be very tough to be compliant and consistent.

So scale it back, you can always add more difficulty after your initial success. Try “no sweets while I am at work” or “I will have an apple first and see if I still want candy”.

We want to make things easy, attainable and sustainable. Improve your ability to be compliant and your consistency over time will skyrocket. Don’t fall into the trap of yo-yo dieting. Learn how to achieve success and stick with it by implementing these strategies.

¹ Precision Nutrition Inc., http://www.precisionnutrition.com/