Tag / precision nutrition

by Nathan Coumbe

Perfectionism hinders progress

We all have a tendency to strive for perfection. But it’s often a trap that keeps us from reaping any rewards at all.

Case in point:

I used to write morning pages each day to clear my mental clutter and get ideas flowing for the day. And, like their creator, Julia Cameron prescribed, I did them longhand on 8.5″ x 11″ sheets of paper first thing upon waking.

But doing it this way took me nearly an hour each morning. Not a problem when I was laid off and unemployed, but quite difficult on a regular, full day when I also needed to cook breakfast, help my wife get ready for work at 5 am, and squeeze in a workout.

That was hard enough, but life made it harder.

After I left my two-week ICU stay in 2020 and went home to recover from COVID-19, I found myself dealing with horrible inflammatory issues all throughout my body, including my hands and wrists. This made it difficult, if not impossible, to do much writing by hand.

So I stopped writing morning pages. And as a result, I lost all the benefits of that wonderful mental decluttering each morning and the ease with which new ideas flowed.

I tried here and there to dive back into morning pages—the right way, by hand—for years, but never managed more than a few days before I quit. Frustration, or pain, stopped me from continuing.

But in the back of my mind, I always knew there was a simple solution to this: just type your morning pages out on your computer! Rather than mangle my hands or suffer through a slow hour of writing I didn’t have, I could just type them.

But I resisted, because it wasn’t the right way to do morning pages. Julia was very explicit.

I let perfection prevent me from doing anything at all, when something, however imperfect, would have been better than nothing. By refusing to do them any way other than “perfectly,” I was missing out on 100% of the benefits of the process itself.

Doing no morning pages guaranteed that I got 0% of the benefits of morning pages—no mental declutter and no new ideas to work with during the day.

Doing anything, however imperfectly, had to be better than nothing, right? 25% better? 50%?

In fact, it would have been infinitely better! Because a 1% benefit is infinitely better than a 0% benefit.

Interestingly, I found that writing out my pages by typing them up on my computer not only let me do them on days when time was limited and with no physical pain, but I still got all the benefits that I received when writing them by hand.

I delayed doing a less-than-perfect version of something and missed out on all the benefits of that something rather than doing a “good enough” version of it and getting at least some of the benefits.

We’re all guilty of this.

We do it with our health: if we can’t do the extreme workout perfectly, we just don’t do anything at all. But going for a 15-minute walk is literally infinitely better than vegging out on the couch.

If we can’t stick to our meal plan perfectly (and no one ever can), we say “f–k it,” and eat an entire 18″ pizza. But eating 3 slices of pizza with a little salad is infinitely better than binge eating out of frustration.

We do it with our hobbies: if we can’t set aside two hours to practice our guitar, we let it languish on the stand in the corner. But spending 15 minutes learning a small section of a song is infinitely better than doing nothing.

This all-or-nothing mindset is all too common and the enemy of progress in everything we do. We’re trained in school to live by an A+ mindset: how far away am I from 100%?

But we’d be so much better off if we reversed it and asked, “how far away from 0% am I, and what decision would let me move a notch or two higher?”

I use this tactic all the time with my coaching clients when trying to make behavior changes stick, and it works wonders.

The next time you find yourself battling perfectionism, stop and take a breath. Then ask yourself, “What is 0% on this thing I’m trying to do?” Then figure out what a tiny notch higher on that scale is for you and do that.

Those little points, day after day, add up.

by Nathan Coumbe

Start from 0, not 100

Thanks to our school systems, our parents, and our bosses, we tend to default to a “100” mindset. We look at everything we should or have done from this framing: “how far from 100 am I?”

How far from perfect is my effort or my attempt?

It’s incredibly unhealthy and unhelpful for making progress or creating change.

So you didn’t attend the protests yesterday? What have you done instead?

Maybe you’ve written tons of letters, made dozens of phone calls to your representatives, and encouraged others to do the same. That’s more than most, so you can comfortably give yourself at least a 75/100.

You didn’t eat perfectly cooked meals that align with your macros to the thousandth decimal place or get in your intensive, tactical workout to help you look like Thor?

Who cares? Did you eat some vegetables? Did you go for a walk or do yoga? You did a lot more than nothing.

Instead of looking at everything starting from 100, why not consider how far away you are from 0?

It’s not just incrementally better, it’s infinitely better!

Doing something, however small or seemingly insignificant, is uncalculably better than doing nothing at all.

by Nathan Coumbe

You don’t get time, you make it

You don’t get time—to read, eat well, love your spouse, exercise, or whatever.

You have to make time. This applies to anything important to you. If it matters, you must carve out time in your day to ensure it happens.

Otherwise, life will ensure it doesn’t.

by Nathan Coumbe

It’s not about discipline

Having all the discipline in the world won’t help you eat better if the candy is the first thing you see on the counter.

Being disciplined with your time is useless if your phone is set up to make social media easy to access.

Discipline, like motivation, is fleeting and finite. Better to rely on systems and environments that support you instead.

Take social media off your phone. Make it hard to access on your computer by not saving your password and manually typing it in each time.

Keep candy hidden in the back of the cupboard (or if you’re like me, out of the house completely). And keep fresh fruits and easy protein at the front of the fridge.

It’s much easier to build things that support what you want to do rather than trying to muscle your way through.

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by Nathan Coumbe

“I can’t eat fries, right?”

Do French fries and pizza have a place in a “healthy” diet?

Well, I’m sad to say…

They absolutely DO!

I’m sad to say it because I’ll get a ton of hate from people who disagree. Or tell me that’s irresponsible advice. 

But what’s truly irresponsible is causing people to deprive themselves and triggering disordered eating patterns. 

If you tell yourself you can’t eat something, that’s a surefire guarantee that you absolutely will eat it at some point in the near future. Often in extreme, and gastric-distressing, amounts. 

You should absolutely eat French fries. And pepperoni pizza. And chocolate ice cream.

AND…

You should also eat lots of:

  • lean protein
  • colorful fruits and veggies
  • Healthy fats
  • Slower-digesting, higher-fiber carbs

One of my favorite meals is a grilled chicken caesar salad… with a side of hot, delicious, salty, crispy fries (dipped in ketchup, of course). And I can be strong, healthy, and happy doing so. 

So there you go. You now have complete, unconditional permission to eat whatever you want. 

Now, there are ways to do it so that you still hit your physical health goals. But that’s a discussion for another day. 

As my coach, Scott Quick, likes to remind me: 

“For the love of God, order the fries!”

by Nathan Coumbe

Every day is New Year’s

Today starts a new year for me.

A new year of Precision Nutrition coaching, that is. 

I’ve done it three times now, and each time I’ve had a different (yet fantastic) experience.

But as I was completing my lesson for today, I realized that it isn’t a New Year in the normal sense. It’s the middle of 2023. 

The thought hit me: you can have that New Year feeling any day you decide to commit to something or make a new decision about how you want your life to look.

But there’s an added benefit to starting something new in the middle of the year: it doesn’t feel new.

It doesn’t feel like a New Year’s resolution—that feeling of anticipation mingled with dread. Because you know those resolutions only work for 3% of the people who set them. 

Instead, starting something BIG in the middle of the year (or on a random Wednesday in April) feels like… just another day. 

That overwhelming feeling of, “I don’t know if I can do this,” shrinks a bit. Or goes away entirely. 

Because it’s not a New Year. It’s just a different day, and you’ve decided to try something new. 

How can you make a new year for yourself starting today?

by Nathan Coumbe

Fix your complaining

I learned a great technique from Dr. John Berardi which has really helped improve my outlook on life. 

Here’s what I learned from him:

“It feels silly, but every time I find myself complaining, I immediately stop and list off three good things about my day.”

Read the article about this gratitude technique here, then try it for yourself and let me know how it goes.

by Nathan Coumbe

Consistency is key

“If you want to change your body, being consistent is more important than anything else.”

—Precision Nutrition, “Prepare for liftoff”

This is wonderful advice. But it doesn’t just apply to your body.

With anything you pursue, consistency is the key factor that will determine success or failure, change or stagnation.

If you want to be a writer, showing up to the page consistently—upon waking for Morning Pages or each evening on a blog—is the most important thing you can do.

If you want to start a business, showing up to work on it every day—writing copy, sending emails, building an offer—is the way to do it.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” To be the thing you want to be, you have to do it day after day.

What do you want to become? What do you need to do consistently to become that?

by Nathan Coumbe

Overcome Overwhelm with One Tiny Step

I’m sure you’ve experienced this before: you’re tired, exhausted, stressed out… You have too much on your plate and feel like you’ll never get everything done.

You’re staring at the car keys to drive to the gym…

Or at the blinking cursor on your keyboard where you’re writing your next post…

Or maybe it’s the pile of stuff in the corner you’ve been meaning to organize and put away…

Or that stack of books you want to read but just never get around to…

And every time you look at it, you get hit with a wave of anxiety. You just don’t see how you can do it all. 

And because you can’t do it all, or you can’t do it all perfectly, you don’t do ANY of it.

I’ve been there. There have been days where I just didn’t feel like dragging myself to the gym. Days when I had no desire to write another blog post…

But I learned from my Precision Nutrition coaches how to get out of the f*** it mentality and make steady progress. The secret?

Just do 1% of whatever it is.

If I don’t feel like exercising, I tell myself “I’ll just do my warm-up and that’s it.” I don’t even tell myself “I’ll see how I feel.” I just do the warm-up. 

I’d say 80-90% of the time, I end up doing the whole workout. But there have been times when I just did the warm-up. And you know what? That’s okay.

It’s so much better to do 1% of something every single day than it is to do 100% of something 3 days in a row… And then burn out, not doing ANYTHING for the next two weeks (or two years in the case of me exercising at one point…)

It’s the Kaizen method, the Japanese practice of tiny improvements over a long period of time that lead to massive gains in effectiveness.

You can do this with anything that’s overwhelming you. Just take the next right step.

  • Have a book you need to read but don’t have the motivation to tackle it? Just tell yourself you’ll read one page… Or one paragraph… Or one sentence
  • Need to declutter or clean? Put away exactly one thing or sweep one corner
  • Just write one sentence instead of feeling obligated to write an entire blog post

Doing that small step is better than nothing at all. And if that’s all you do, you still did better than zero. 

But chances are, you’ll do that one thing and feel motivated to keep going. If you do, then run with it! 

But if you don’t, feel satisfied knowing you did something. And that you’ll do something again tomorrow. 

(H/t to James Clear for reminding me about this practice. Read his post on the subject here.)

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by Nathan Coumbe

What Successful People Do Differently

You’ve probably looked at someone who was in great shape and thought to yourself, “Man, I wish I could be like him.” 

Maybe this thought crossed your mind soon after: “If I really enjoyed hours at the gym and grilled chicken and broccoli every night for dinner, I’d be fit too.”

Here’s the thing – fit people don’t necessarily enjoy spending 3-4 hours a week at the gym or eating simple, similar meals over and over again. It’s not a matter of enjoyment. 

What they do is subordinate their cravings, emotions, and desires to a higher value system they establish for themselves. 

People who are successful at anything do the same thing. Albert E. Gray said it best when he wrote:

“The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.”

–Albert E. Gray

“Whoever said this was going to be easy?”

One of the most important lessons I learned from Dr. John Berardi of Precision Nutrition is that when making change for your health and fitness goals, you are going to be tired; you are going to be hungry sometimes; you are going to be in a crabby mood and not want to do what is good for you. His response: “whoever said this was going to be easy?”

Successful people, whether they are successful in health or fitness, or successful in their families and careers, are just like you and me. They have the same cravings, the same desire to say “screw it all” or “I don’t want to do that” or “I’m scared I might fail/they might laugh at me/they might say no.” The only difference is they make the choice to act anyway. 

They are able to do this because they want something more than the resistance is telling them they want in this very moment. They begin with the end in mind and act proactively, rather than living in and for the moment, reacting to whatever whim, craving, or feeling comes their way during any given moment. 

This way of living–of choosing to do things that failures don’t want to do–can all be traced back to fundamental principles of effective living. They are embodied clearly and coherently in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. Successful people subordinate their fears and momentary desires to values, principles, and a desired end-goal. They “begin with the end in mind” as Dr. Covey writes in the chapter about Habit 2. 

They don’t WANT to do it either.

A successful sales person probably doesn’t want to make another cold call and face the very real possibility of rejection. But she does it anyway because the end she has in mind might be a full sales pipeline, a good income to support her family, or the growth of her business (perhaps all three and more). She’s just as scared as anyone else; she still feels the butterflies in her stomach when she dials the number; but she chooses to act rather than react to the feelings of the moment. 

You are a successful person already because you have the ability to do this with every task, project, and goal in your life. Realize that it’s all a matter of choice based on the end-result you desire. Envision the end you want to achieve, hold it in your mind in the moment of choice, and make decisions based on which outcomes get you closer to the end you want.

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