Imagine you’re going on a journey, maybe to somewhere you haven’t been for a while or maybe somewhere completely new.
You might have a vague idea of the way but you know you can’t find it on your own so you program the sat nav to tell you step by step how to get there (now we all know how that sometimes works out - u-turns, one way streets or ending up in a field…. but let’s ignore that for now and imagine this sat nav has the power to take you to the right place!).
Now imagine having a sat nav but no way of programming where you want to go - it has a few set routes it can give you but they might not take you where you actually want to go. Most likely a complete waste of time and effort following the instructions when it might not get you anywhere near the right destination!
Imagine the journey...
I see the world of diets and diet products as just like the sat nav that you can’t programme. You can find thousands of diet clubs, apps, free advice, books, magazines, meal plans and meal replacements. Some people will find that one of these hits the spot first time and they get to their goal destination unscathed, some of those people may even find they are then able to stay at that goal for the long term. But that’s not the case for the vast majority of people. Many start on that journey, believing it’s going the right way, headed to the place they have their heart set on, but in reality, they’re starting on a circuitous route that ultimately takes them back to where they started or even further away from their end goal, disillusioned, or worse still with less confidence and self esteem than they started out with.
Yet it’s so easy to get trapped in that cycle of believing the promises that these products offer and getting sucked into a miserable spiral of spending money on plans and products that are destined to fail because you just can’t stick to them or you rebound afterwards and just can’t stop eating all the things you’ve been craving.
For someone who gets trapped in this cycle for many years, it’s soul destroying, damaging and expensive to keep living this way over a long time.
Imagine having a new reliable sat nav and this time you can tell it where you’d like to go, whether you want the fastest route, or the gentler more enjoyable scenic one, which places you want to avoid and how many stop offs you want to make time for. You trust it to get you to the place you want to go and you can have the best possible journey to get there.
Investing in working with a nutrition and lifestyle coach is like buying the quality sat nav - someone that not only knows how the science of how to reach your goals in a healthy way without guesswork or faddy diets, but can tailor your journey according to important factors such as your work routine, family life, social life, how you enjoy eating, fuelling your training and exercise, how you handle hunger, how to incorporate your favourite treats and simple ideas for swaps and tweaks to your diet that can make a big difference.
Work with a coach, then when the going gets tough, you need to take a detour, re-route or hit bumps in the road, you have an expert guide who cares as much as you do about seeing you get to your chosen destination who can keep you going in the right direction and help you find the way through those barriers. Investing in the right quality sat nav now or delaying and spending years on paying for cheaper ones that keep you going round in circles, what makes more sense in the long run?