Style: September 01, 2017

STYLE | wellbeing 49
The 80-20 principle means
that you won’t feel like
you’re depriving yourself
of things by saying, “I can
never eat that.”
The 80-20 principle is talked about in
health and fitness circles in a couple
of contexts, the first being that 80% of your
efforts should be focused on nutrition, with the
other 20% concentrated upon exercise. This is
not necessarily a principle I personally follow,
because I believe that additional factors such
as stress levels, sleep, psychological balance,
and relationships need to be considered when
optimal health is your goal.
The second way that we talk about the 80-20
principle in health and fitness is the one that
resonates with me. There is a lot of evidence
of unhealthy food behaviours in modern
society, ranging on a spectrum from poor or
restrictive food choices, to food obsessions. Both
extremes are unhealthy, as fixating on food is
not conducive to sustainable, long-term results.
These habits are generally not enjoyable and can
make for a constrictive lifestyle that is difficult
to maintain.
The 80-20 principle that I like to follow for
long-term results is as follows: put in top-notch
effort 80% of the time in order to obtain the
health and fitness results you desire, and for the
remaining 20%, don’t sweat it.
It may seem at first as though allowing yourself
to relax 20% of the time won’t enable you to
achieve the results you’re after, although, in fact,
the opposite is true. Once you begin following
the principle, you’ll find that 80% is a surprisingly
large, yet manageable, proportion of your time.
For every 10 meals that you have, aim for eight
of them to be as nourishing as possible. This
means consuming meals made from whole (real!)
foods such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds,
legumes, whole grains, lean meats, and eggs.
For the remaining 20%, you can allow yourself
to relax a bit, which will both allow you to treat
yourself, and prevent you from becoming too
self-critical when it comes to your eating habits.
When you are a healthy person who eats a very
balanced diet most of the time, the 20% won’t
be a full slip-up.
When you sufficiently change your lifestyle
so that you eat healthily the majority of the
time, you are not going to be drawn to gorging
yourself on an unhealthy fast-food meal or
eating a full block of chocolate. If you are getting
cravings to this degree, just keep working on
making nutritious choices and eventually these
unhealthy binges will become a thing of the past.
For healthy eaters, the 20% might include eating
an appropriate-sized portion of dark chocolate,
rather than a whole block of Dairy Milk. It could
involve not worrying about what you will be
served when you go to a friend’s house for a
meal, or choosing to have a glass of wine with
dinner. And when you go to lunch, you’ll make
an effort to select a healthy option, but won’t
stress if it’s not quite as wholesome as what
you’d make at home.
The 80-20 principle means that you won’t
feel like you’re depriving yourself of things by
saying, “I can never eat that.” In small, infrequent
amounts, most foods are not going to disrupt
your goals. Instead, it is the person who tells
themselves they can’t have something that
later feels deprived and binges in a way that
will hinder their progress. Remember that your
results come from what you do most often, not
what you do occasionally.
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