I want you to picture your goal physique. Maybe it’s someone you know or someone you follow on the gram or it could even be a movie star. But most of us have a picture that comes to mind when we think goal body or goal physique.

Picture that person.

I guarantee if we were to sit them down and get them to list the things they were unhappy with about their physique, 99% of them would have a list just as long as yours..

There might be different things on the list. But the number of things on the list is going to be similar. Why? As humans we want to progress and improve and move forward – it’s one of the keys to how we came from living in caves to living in buildings that are higher than the clouds.

Now this isn’t a bad thing. But there’s a critical mindset shift that we can make that will help you personally with your body confidence and fitness obsession..

It’s about adjusting what we’re tying our happiness to. Because if you’re not happy now, you’re not going to be happy if / when you have your goal physique – and if anyone that is reading this has dieted down to the point of having visible abs, you may actually find that you’ll be less happy when you have that goal physique.

I want you to consider the journey rather than the destination – and a little analogy that I once heard called the Jungle Effect. I can’t for the life of me remember where I heard this, so it may be slightly different to the original – but the message is the same.

In life we have a goal or destination in mind. And while if we were to look at it on paper, it would be as simple as drawing a line from A to B – with A being on one side of the paper and B being on the other, it rarely turns out that way.

What generally happens is we find ourselves zig-zagging up and down across the paper like a print-out from a lie detector test.

And what’s the end result? If we eventually do get to that destination on the other side of the paper, we’ll find that the journey there was actually the best part. And even bigger than that – sometimes we end up in a totally different destination as our goal shifts along the way. Which is fine.

Unless the journey sucks.

I talk a lot about doing what brings you JOY. And this couldn’t be more true than with your health and fitness journey. If you love carbs for example, but you’re eating low carb in an attempt to hit your goal – you’re never going to get there.. And if you do, you’re never going to stay there.

The same goes for your training style, daily habits, relationships, food choices – basically everything.

We spent so long seeing Instagram posts about the grind and only being able to achieve our goal by giving up the things we love that it’s now something that a lot of us subconsciously believe is true.

And while yes, there will be hurdles and challenges and obstacles and tough days along the way – they should be rewarding, not draining.

If the thought of training or eating brings sadness – maybe that’s not the right type of eating or training for you..?

So here’s a few tips that can help get you on the right track;

• Don’t focus on your end goal, focus on being better than yesterday. It won’t ALWAYS happen, but if the AIM is to be better than yesterday, then you’re going to 100% be moving forward
• Don’t compare your journey to someone else’s (comparisonitis). We’re all different. Be you. And if you want to improve, focus on being a better version of you, not a version of someone else
• Consistency is the one single thing that will move you forward more than ANYTHING else in the world. So pick a way of eating and training that is sustainable year round.
• What it takes to get there is what it will take to stay there. So if you’ve had to halve your calories and double your training to lose that 5 or 10 or more KG’s – that’s what you’re going to have to continue to do to stay there. So pick a sustainable strategy.

And lastly – this is my biggest takeaway and this is the thing that helps my girls continue to succeed and head towards their goal after we finish working together.

Your scale weight, measurements, photos – basically the way you measure whether you’re improving, these things can fluctuate. A lot. So rather than making daily changes based off a bad photo of you or a bad scale day – simply aim to hit these 3 things every single day, and you’ll guarantee to be getting closer to your goal.

✅ Daily Protein – make sure you hit your daily protein goal every day

✅  Weekly calorie budget – whether you’re in a fat loss phase or not, you should have a weekly calorie budget and you’ll need to stick to it.

✅  Train with progressive overload. Better than yesterday! Our bodies adapt to the stimulus we put them under, so make sure you’re aiming to improve every single time you train. It doesn’t have to be much, but without this you’re going to become stagnant.

And my very last tip. The one thing that will tie all of this together.

Einstein said the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.. So be honest with yourself – if your diet worked for you and you lost that 5kg or 10kg or more, but you fell off the wagon and gained it back – then your diet didn’t work for you. Because it wasn’t sustainable.

Pick something that’s sustainable, something you can consistently do year round, and something that you can measurably do better than yesterday.