Where do you fit on the graph?

 

 

This is taken from a post written by registered dietician Mike Rousell. This is really important in determining your starting point when beginning your fat loss journey.

“This graph represents what I call the Stages of Nutrition. Your diet (like many things) consists of a progression and you need to master one step before you move to the next. I’m going to steal my buddy Alwyn Cosgrove’s martial arts metaphor to illustrate my point.

If you want to learn Karate you can’t start out training with Jet Li. You need to know how a certain number of basic moves, master those, and progress from there to more advance tactics.

Your diet is no different. If you can’t master certain basic components then you have now business progressing to more complicated nutritional approaches.

The Stages of Nutrition:

• Nutritional Freestyling: You eat whatever you want whenever you want.
• Proper Food Choices Varying Compliance: You try to eat the right stuff but you just don’t do it consistently.
• Proper Food Choices 90% Compliance: You eat the right stuff and you rarely falter (this is the target stage for most people).
• Calorie/Portion Counting, Proper Food Choices 90% Compliance: You need to fine tune your diet more for a specific purpose (weight loss, health, performance) so you start counting calories or portions and you stay on your plan just about all the time.

If you are currently nutritional freestyling then you can’t jump straight to counting calories. That is just a recipe for failure as if you aren’t currently making consistent proper food choices .

Making proper food choices and sticking to your plan requires a discipline and behavioral skill  set that will be mastered as you progress through the Stages of Nutrition. Jumping ahead to a more ‘advanced’ stage will not get you better results faster. Instead it will lead to a pattern of brief results, diet relapse, and frustration.

My Question to You

What stage are you in?

What do you need to do to move to the next stage?

Be honest with yourself – do what is needed to move to the next stage and you will be rewarded with consistent and long term weight loss success.