If Fitness is the dish you are cooking, then E&P sauce is a must for your success. You may see some short term progress without it. Long term success is possible only if you use the E&P sauce in right proportion. Let’s break down the two basic ingredients of the sauce.
The E: Expectations
Your success or failure depends heavily on the expectations you set for yourself. You set very high expectations, chances are you never meet the expectations and ultimately give up. Setting low expectations doesn’t provide enough motivation or drive to take effective action.
Say you want to get rid of your fat tummy. You want to have a very nice and flat abdomen. It’s a reasonable expectation and definitely achievable. But then if want it within the next month, that’s a really unrealistic expectation. You will fail!!
At the other extreme, you want a flat tummy but you don’t expect it to be possible. You will never take the required action. Probably, you will end up even fatter with time.
Same goes true for anything else you want with your fitness, gaining muscle, running faster and longer and building stamina and endurance. All of those goals need a long time to reach. It takes at least 2-3 months to start seeing visible results. In fact, it is in the initial 3-6 months, you get to see the fastest results if you do everything right. Later on, it gets much much slower. That’s the reason we need the next ingredient.
The P: Patience
Like I said, Fitness is a long game. You need to put in consistent effort for an extended period of time to see the results. But we all are in a hurry. We need everything to happen fast and quick. That’s the reason people are always looking for quick and easy method to reach their goals. That’s also the reason why “7 Easy ways to lose belly fat” kind of articles are so popular on the internet. It’s easy to grab attention but will never work!!
Majority of the people give up within couple of weeks. You can hardly see any result in such a short time period. Expectations and patience go hand in hand. You will always lose if either of these are not in a right place.
When you set very high expectations and don’s see results in a short time, you will lose patience and quit. If you are impatient and try to do all the work in a single day, you get over worked and cannot keep up.
Some people start by doing everything right at first. But they get impatient very quick and switch to doing something else within 2 weeks. And then, something else.
Ultimately, all of these behaviors, if not changed will lead to failure.
How to set your E&P right
It is essential to set right expectations and observe patience to succeed. It is important to understand that fitness is a long game that needs lifestyle changes and not some quick fix solution. Whatever you do has to be sustainable for longer period of time. Which ensures you can do it consistently enough to start seeing the results. The following 3-steps can be helpful to start off
- Lifestyle is built on habits. When I say lifestyle change, it means you have to start building habits which can take you to your goal. Fix your goal, do some research to find out what habits you need to cultivate and start building those habits one by one.
- Keep track of your progress. Like check your weight daily, take body measurements weekly and be consistent with your eating, sleeping and workouts. Though it takes a long time to get visible results, progress can be measured and observed on a weekly basis.
- Analyze the numbers produced by your tracking. Stick to what you are doing if you see progress. Do course corrections if you do not see the results. It is a constant learning curve. You have to do all you can to keep getting the results.There is no single fixed way that works for all. You need to evolve your own way by doing this.