A New Take on “Consistency”

In the world of fitness, nutrition, and health, we have a difficult relationship with the concept of “consistency.” It’s often quantified as a streak – doing something with unbroken, daily adherence. For example, going to the gym every day. Or not having refined sugar, ever, using a day count to keep track. Or hitting 10,000 steps a day (on the dot) without fail.

There are a few problems with streaks, when it comes to consistency, however…

• Although they are powerful motivators and are fun to keep track of and celebrate – they are extremely vulnerable to getting broken, and then staying broken. People often have trouble getting back on track once a streak is over, because it’s not as exciting anymore to start over on Day 1 when before you had 50. The motivation can really die along with the streak itself.
• Streaks can also encourage black-and-white thinking about health behaviors. For example, if you swear off sugar, this can end up demonizing foods that – in all honesty – are not that bad for you in the big picture. Having a cupcake at a party or ice cream with your kids can feel like you are doing something “bad.”
• Goals that are oriented around perfect adherence can be arbitrary and create meaningless burnout. For example, is going to the gym or going for a run seven days a week better than five days a week? Arguably, no. Streaks overlook the fact that life has natural ups and downs (and that training needs recovery), and being overly literal about consistency can backfire.

In my work with clients, I reframe consistency not as perfection, but as accumulation. It’s a simple concept, but it can be difficult to internalize after a lifetime of perfectionistic programming. Here’s what I mean by “accumulation”:

Accumulation vs. Streaks

Instead of counting your success in consecutive days (or behaviors), mark your progress by total days (or behaviors).

In other words, if in one month you go to the gym 25 times and then the next month you go to the gym 28 times, and the next month you go to the gym 24 times, that is better than if you have a 27-day streak that completely peters out and you struggle to get back on track for the next three months.

The same thing happens with nutrition. If someone is trying to lose weight with a calorie goal of 1400-1600 calories, eating an average of 1550 calories over 90 days is going to be extremely impactful, even if some days are individually higher. Similarly, if someone struggles with binge snacking, having 85 out of 90 days with no binge episodes is going to have a pretty huge effect on both health and on habit formation (as well as self-worth). It doesn’t really matter if all of the days are in a row.

Plus, accumulation is much more realistic because of how life actually works! Not every day is exactly the same, and life changes from week to week and season to season. Goals can be resilient if they take these changes into account, rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole once the context has changed.

Planned Interruptions

This leads me to the next aspect of accumulation that is incredibly effective – planning ahead for days (or weeks) where things will be different. Often, if you give yourself permission to “break” your own rules, you have an easier time both maintaining control of yourself during the “break,” as well as getting back on track when it’s time.

A classic example of this is the famous (in the nutrition world) “diet break study.” When breaks are built into diets, they don’t necessarily change someone’s overall results (i.e., they don’t necessarily lose more weight), but they often have a better experience of losing weight because their mindset is more flexible. When the breaks are built in, they don’t feel like a departure or a problem or a mistake – they’re part of the consistency. And this creates much less black-and-white thinking, and usually solves issues with “disinhibition” (when you feel like you’ve broken your diet anyway, so you go totally nuts with food).

So let’s talk about how this applies to accumulation.

Let’s say you look at your calendar, and you know that you will have a relatively easy time being adherent 5 days this week – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. Instead of trying to force Thursday and Saturday into the same mold, you allow them to be different. This could mean intentionally restoring calories to maintenance, for example, instead of being in a deficit.

When you do this, the great likelihood is that you will have five (or even six) very “on-track” days, instead of a three-day streak that, once broken, stays broken the rest of the week. Five or six days is better than three, even with interruptions in the middle. This is the idea of accumulation in action. Planning ahead empowers you to accrue more days “on plan,” even with interruptions.

Translating vs. Pausing

Finally, the last concept to think about with accumulating consistency is “translating” instead of “pausing.”

This means that when you run into a roadblock with your goal (i.e., it would normally break a streak of perfection), think about how you can “translate” your normal behaviors into a different context, instead of hitting pause. Interruptions are inevitable, but how we handle them can define success.

Let’s use the example again of a week where Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday don’t present many obstacles, but you know that Thursday and Saturday hold challenges – specifically, meals out in restaurants, maybe even more than once a day. The key strategy of “translating” means that you take what you normally do on a highly adherent day, and you tweak it to fit a day that doesn’t have the same resources or environments. It’s like translating into a different language – you’re not using the same words, but you are doing/meaning roughly the same thing. Just like sometimes languages have approximations of certain words or phrases (because they’re difficult to translate from language to language), your behaviors will have similar “non-literal” transfers.

For example, maybe on Thursday you can’t have your usual high-protein lunch salad because you’re having a work lunch, and you can’t have a home-cooked dinner because you’re going out with your family for a relative’s birthday. The magic of translation is that you think about what strategies work well for you normally, and how you could realistically simulate them even in more challenging environments. Perhaps at the work lunch you have a salad (even if it’s not great) and bring high-protein shakes as your snacks for the day to off-set the difference in protein. Then at the birthday dinner you make reasonably good choices, but you know you’re going to have a little bit of dessert, too. The result is that at the end of the day, you’re probably not that far off your original goals. And because you feel good about your planning, then you are not “thrown off” for the rest of the week, and Friday and Sunday are recaptured into the healthier trend of eating that was originally planned.

So by the end of the week, perhaps you have five days of being highly on-target, with two days that were a little higher in calories… but you don’t have the “streak” model of three super low-calorie days followed by four days of self-shaming chaos.

In other words, even the days that are planned interruptions are more under control and more positive-feeling than they would be otherwise. Again, this is accumulation in action!

How Could Accumulation Work for You to Improve Consistency?

Think about a goal you want to work on – maybe you want to work out more, or walk more, or cook at home more. Instead of trying to reboot your habits into perfection, make yourself a chart (even if it’s just in “Notes” on your phone) where you keep track of how many days you actually do the behavior in one week. It doesn’t matter if there are breaks. What is the total number of days?

Then, take it a step further. Can you increase the volume of days that you are demonstrating the behavior, but over two weeks this time? Again, it’s ok if you skip a day or two here and there. It’s about the total number.

Over time, you’ll start getting a sense of average. I do this with my clients, with the help of my app (which runs the numbers for me) – I know the percentage of their workout and nutrition adherence, and as long as the number is above 80%, I don’t see a reason to push for higher adherence.

When you do this, you’ll often start to see patterns – that certain days of the week are harder than others, for example. Or you’ll see monthly patterns that reflect your menstrual cycle. All of this self-knowledge is incredibly helpful, because you can start to exercise the planned interruptions and the translation of habits. You can budget in more snacks for your PMS week, for example, or plan your rest days for weekends if you regularly find it unrealistic to get to the gym on those days.

The two main keys of success for the accumulation strategy are positivity (you are mainly focusing on your successes, not on your lapses) and realism (you are planning for real life, instead of depending on perfect circumstances).

To review, here are the three steps to using accumulation to increase your overall consistency:

• Switch your mindset from streaks (consecutive days) to accumulation (total days) 
• Plan that some days will not be as “good” as others, and accept – crucially – that this is not a problem 
• Think about how to “translate” your habits into more challenging situations, so that even your planned interruptions feel less fractured and more “on track” overall 

Want to talk more about successful lifestyle and habit change that gets real results? Need a compassionate coach who sets goals up for you with realistic, evidence-based behavioral psychology systems in place? Set up a free consultation here to chat with me one-on-one for 30 minutes.