Meet Grace.

She’s in her early thirties, with a busy office job. She’s lately been finding she easily gets out of breath just from short walks, and is finding all her clothes feel too small for her. It’s making her lose confidence, and she really wants to start feeling in control of her health again.

Now, imagine a day in the life of Grace…

She wakes up with 30 minutes to get ready for work. She showers, dresses and throws her things into the car. She doesn’t have time to make breakfast or lunch, or even think about dinner. She stops off at a cafe on the way to work and orders a large mocha and a muffin which she eats in the car.

At work she has M&Ms with more coffee, and at lunchtime she ends up buying a large sandwich and coke from the closest cafe with some workmates. To get through the afternoon she buys some snacks from the vending machine, but she’s ravenous by home time.

On her drive home she always passes a MacDonald’s, and has kinda got in the habit of getting takeaways for dinner as she has nothing else prepared.

At home to unwind, she watches Netflix with a couple of glasses of wine, and finishes off the day with a bowl of ice cream.

Now, can you picture…if Grace wants to improve her health and fitness and lose a bit of weight, she will be struggling against her environment?

One of my friends once told me they’d been on a diet for the last ten years.

And they hadn’t lost any weight. In fact they now weighed even more than they did ten years ago.

Basically, they’d just spent ten years agonising over what to eat, feeling guilty when they ate ice cream, judging themselves by the number on the scale, suffering through bouts of overeating and then starving themselves…

And it’s actually a super common problem, that a lot of us deal with.

We haven’t been dieting for ten years though.

We’ve been in the all-or-nothing dieting mindset for ten years.

What is the all-or-nothing diet mindset?

I once helped a CrossFit athlete who was trying to lose weight. Annie had a meal plan from a nutritionist that was full of protein, carbs, lots of vegetables – it looked pretty good!

But she was struggling.

Although she’d lost some weight initially, she found it almost impossible to stick to, always craving sweet food, and worst of all – couldn’t lift anywhere near what she had been, and could hardly even get through a WOD anymore.

At first Annie said she stuck to her plan pretty closely, but the more we talked, she eventually admitted she often didn’t eat the protein portion of her meals. She didn’t like the taste of protein powder, and because she was cooking meals for her whole family (who don’t eat chicken or beef), if her nutrition plan said chicken or steak, she would just leave it out. Since she knew being in a calorie deficit was the “most important” thing, she figured leaving out the protein would put her in an even bigger deficit.

Win-win right?

Wrong! The problem is protein is super important too – especially when you’re trying to lose weight!

My favourite restaurant serves spicy fried chicken with jalapeno and chipotle mayo. They also serve bbq pork belly soft tacos. And strawberry guava margaritas. (Yes, I’m obsessed with Mexican food).

If I’m going out to this restaurant, I’m going to enjoy it, without guilt!

But often, going out to restaurants can get in the way of our other goals in life. It sometimes makes you feel like you’ve “ruined” all your progress and often makes you feel demoralised to the point you think “screw it, I’ll eat everything this weekend and start again on Monday!”

But going out to restaurants doesn’t have to mean you’re going to ruin all your progress or set yourself back in your journey to your goals.