Simplicity at It’s Finest
“Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.” - Andy Rooney
In the previous post, “I know, I know.”, I mentioned the important first step toward lasting positive behavior change, self-compassion.
To reiterate, attempting to shame or punish ourselves into positive change may very well lead to different behavioral patterns in the short term, but indeed not better ones; or, at least unsustainable ones. And, ultimately, we’ll find ourselves either falling back into our old ways or feeling just as empty as we did before. We will not experience positive change from a place of negativity. A youth soccer coach who attempts to teach their players to shoot by rebuking them for continually missing will find little success and a lot of frustration.
Once we’ve reached this point, however, we may find ourselves thinking, “Okay, I don’t necessarily hate myself anymore, but where do I go now? What do I do?”, bringing us to another crucial step in the process; one that I’ll call simplification. When I say this, I’m referring to a sort of clarification– an unraveling of the labyrinth of information to which we are regularly subjected. I’ll focus mainly on nutrition in this post, but the sentiment holds for any kind of habit.
Google and social media can be lovely sources of helpful information. But, without prior knowledge or guidance, I can quickly find myself suffocating under the pressure of conflicting “facts”. “Don’t eat this!! Wait… do eat it sometimes, but add this to it and you’ll lose 20 pounds in ten minutes!! Don’t eat fruit, real men eat raw bison and tree bark exclusively!!”.
I mean… collections upon collections of the most outrageous anecdotes presented just as convincingly as honest and helpful truth. It can be overwhelming. Add to that the expansive amount of jargon within the field of nutrition– docosahexaenoic acid, poly & monounsaturated fats, phenylalanine (amino acid), disaccharides– and, I’m now buried in info, inspo, and lingo.
Most of us aren’t doctors of nutrition or health experts, we may not even be interested in improving our health habits in the first place. So, this labyrinth can be almost intimidating; making us feel like we don’t belong, or that the information isn’t for us. But, we have to move past this notion, as it couldn’t be further from the truth.
We can’t let the hesitations deter us from moving toward the best versions of ourselves. This may be controversial, but I think most of us shouldn’t worry too much about what’s best, what’s optimal, or what the high-performance athletes are doing. We should instead simplify, and spend time on what we know we can do that will be helpful. For instance, if your dietary pattern is as bad as mine was in college (daily Hardee’s trip… sometimes more than one), and you decide that it’s time to make a change, immediately converting to cooking organic whole foods every night will not be sustainable. It’ll be cool for two nights, you’ll get tired of it, and you’ll go right back to that sweet sweet Frisco burger. This kind of dramatic shift is unsustainable, regardless of the habit in question.
Instead, what if you changed that Hardee’s trip to a Chipotle trip? Optimal? No. Better? Certainly. From there, you find out what ingredients you prefer in your bowl, and maybe you make a note of them. Then, once a week, rather than buying the bowl from Chipotle, you make it at home. You begin to actualize this idea that, though it’s only once a week, you are a person who cooks. One night per week turns into two, on the second of which you try new ingredients, maybe even an entirely new recipe. Are you nutritionally optimized at this point? Still, no. But, you’ve only been to Hardees twice in the past month and you’ve lost 5 lbs. What’s really important here?
I’m not anti-optimization. I’m more so claiming that we can’t optimize if we don’t have the basics down first. In the beginning, it’s less about the details and more about proving to ourselves that we can change. If we try to make the immediate “correction” and fail, it may reinforce our previously held belief that we are incapable. If we commit to even the smallest of adjustments and inevitably succeed, we begin this upward spiral of “I’m trying. I’m improving. I can do different things…”. We begin to reimagine, in a more positive way, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. This is real change.
Once we’ve got this down, maybe we can start optimizing.
Simplify and watch everything grow.
