While listening to one of my favourite podcasts, ‘This American Life’, I learned of an interesting theory named “The Dunning–Kruger effect” which is basically a is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is.
I started thinking that this also exists with training goals, weight loss, and sports performance. Its easy to think your doing a fantastic job when in actual fact you are fooling yourself with lame-ass excuses every week. I heard a good saying today; ‘Excuses are like ass holes, everybody has one”. The simple facts of life are the to be healthy human beings or achieve something worthwhile, whether with sporting performance or personal health, we need to eat real gawd-darn food, be sufficiently active everyday, and do these things as the rule as opposed to the exception. It just so happens that if you are trying to reverse the habits of a lifetime/ years/ decades, you need to steel yourself with some mental toughness to keep on going even when the going gets tough. Creating an excuse for yourself to go off track is the path of least resistance, and is simply a way to revert back to old habits while telling yourself you are doing great. Work, social events, sore throat, cold, the weather, ‘busy’, don’t feel like its working etc. These are among the most common excuses (of which I have been guilty of falling back on myself in the past).
The bottom line is that consistency is the key, but consistency in effort and the processes/ habits that bring about results as opposed to consistency in results day in and day out. Things that are hard to achieve are rarely achieved in a linear fashion (i.e. with a small victory every day until you reach the big goal). Real achievement is peppered with ups and downs, victories and defeats. Screw the excuses and prepare yourself to keep moving forward when the going gets tough, and down fall foul of the Dunning-Kruger effect!