As stated in our nutrition plan overview we do our best to avoid comparative planning while using current nutrition science. This involves a deep dive into your history with food.
“Authors, nutritionists and doctors want to prescribe cookie cutter programs because it means way less work. If you throw ideas out that work for the average person then it will inevitably hit enough people and stick for long enough to make it seem legitimate.” In order to get around this unfortunate truth is that we ask you a s@#* ton of questions. Food is both metabolic and psychological, to treat it like metabolic math is to undermine the real and important subjective values it holds. Our questionnaire is mostly open ended questions, like; what was your favourite food growing up and why? If you could eat any meal, every day, what would it be? What foods do you eat that are linked to your family background? These questions get into emotional value of foods, they also tend to bring out life stories that give us an idea as to how you think about meals and food in general.
These are examples of how we individualize our plans to the person in front of us. Whenever we assign a new behaviour we ask, are you at least 90% sure that you are willing and able to do this for the allotted period? If it is any lower, then we make it easier. We never ever set you up to fail. Though failing is also fine, adjustments are inevitable and part of the process. Failure and adjustment is what got us to a point where we have found the Slow Progressive Method – which appears to work for almost everyone.
This is where we veer away from the individual and look at common human behaviour patterns. On average, we as humans stink at making drastic changes. We can easily get hyped for a big change – the spark you need to get a fire going is the easy part But maintaining that fire for months takes consistent, thoughtful effort and with very little immediate gratification. We are NOT here to hype you up, that is just a poor replacement for bad methodology. In my opinion this is also true for personal trainers, if you depend on militant style bootcampery or a feverish Flava’ Flav hype-man assault on your psyche, you are missing the point of giving your clients the ability to motivate themselves (If you don’t know who Flava’ Flave, look him up…now you know I’m in my 40s)..
The optimists often site 6 weeks as the time needed to form a new habit. I used to use this data as well. The truth is it can take up to 9 months to actually change behaviour, especially if it is something big. I’m talking about only changing one habit. One! Like flossing your teeth. Or maybe more like something that you experience a significant amount of resistance to….Still might be flossing…
So this is what the slow progressive method tries to avoid: resistance. As mentioned above, we continually ask what you are fully prepared and willing to do. This might boil down to one very simple task for a trial period of 1 week. If this works then we can add something or just stay the course to reinforce this one thing. Is this beginning to sound like a never ending pile up of mini tasks, with no big goal accomplishment in sight? This is rarely the case and I’ll explain why. The vast majority of time, the proper set up, including a deep understanding of our method, our understanding of your life and the trust that comes with that makes way for capacity to perform. People tend to be able to take on more things. You know we have your back and that both of us believe that it will work. That kind of working relationship builds towers of accomplishment. The other thing is that even the smallest goal achieved builds the literal neural network of generalized ability. This is important – every time you accomplish something with intent and then follow it up with purposeful attention of the accomplishment: your brain begins to wire-in the ability to accomplish more things. Its a tiny bit more complicated than it sounds but that is our secret (not secret) ingredient. How we weave this into our planning and our follow-ups. It all adds up to major success.
So what works for most people is a slow, progressive approach to change. What that looks like is still very much individual. Again, we never ever want to set you up for failure, not on purpose and especially not while knowing what tends to lead to it. I don’t think most nutritionists want their clients to fail but I do think they overestimate the individuals ability to maintain motivation.
For more info on our programs you can contact us by email –
info@b-fitstudio.com
or call/text us at 514-730-6764