Beyond the Finish Line: How to Approach Your Nutrition After a Fitness Challenge 

Beyond the Finish Line: How to Approach Your Nutrition After a Fitness Challenge

 

Congratulations! You’re likely here because you’ve recently completed a fitness or health challenge or achieved a goal. We hope you feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in stepping outside your comfort zone to cross the finish line. You may now be asking yourself, “What comes next?” After pouring your energy and time into this goal or challenge, the post-achievement phase can feel uncertain and slightly rocky. While it’s encouraged to celebrate your accomplishments, thinking about new benchmarks you want to set for yourself and how you can apply some of the habits you implemented moving forward is also essential. This will help you make the most of your achievements to continue to grow and sustain your success.

It can be easy to fall back into old patterns that slow down or reverse your progress. This often happens when the habits that led to achieving your goal in the first place become inconsistent or are stopped completely. You’ll likely want to continue with many of the same habits you developed, just in a little more relaxed way. This is also an important period that’s often overlooked but can set the stage for what’s next. 

Avoiding Common Nutrition Pitfalls

When it comes to nutrition, there are common pitfalls you want to be aware of so you can maintain a healthy balance and prevent setbacks. Here are a few:

Neglecting Nutrient Balance

During this time, when you were super focused on your goals, you were likely tracking your food or at least paying very close attention to what you were eating. As you move into a more relaxed approach, staying aware of your food and eating habits is still beneficial. If you completely stop paying attention, it can be easy to start unintentionally overeating or undereating overall or even for specific foods (looking at you, peanut butter!). Maintaining a balanced calorie, protein, fat, carbohydrate, and fiber intake is crucial to support overall health. You can maintain the proper balance without tracking every morsel of food, but you should still pay attention. 

Stronger U Tip: Continue to remain aware of the food you are eating, even if you aren’t tracking. If you begin to feel like you are falling off track with maintaining your progress, you may want to start tracking your food intake for at least a few days or weeks. It’s healthy to plan breaks from tracking but to return to it whenever that’s needed!

Lack of Planning

Developing a structured routine, including meal planning and preparation, is common when working toward a goal. Once the goal is met, however, there may be a tendency to abandon these habits, leading to inconsistent meals, choosing food options “on the fly,” and an increased likelihood of making less nutritious alternatives.

Stronger U Tip: Schedule a day or two each week to plan your meals, grocery shop (online shopping can help avoid impulse purchases in the store), and prep your meals for that week.

Skipping Meals

Skipping meals can be caused by insufficient awareness of your daily nutrient intake or a lack of planning. It’s a misconception that skipping meals will automatically save calories. Maintaining a proper daily energy balance has less to do with the number of meals you have and more to do with the number of calories and macronutrients you consume collectively throughout the day to support your energy expenditure (which goes back to why tracking may be a good option for some.) Skipping meals can lead to lowered daily diet quality (Zeballos et al., 2020).

Stronger U Tip: Prioritize meal planning and preparation. Research shows that individuals who plan and prepare their meals are more likely to adhere to healthier dietary habits (Monsivais et al., 2014).

Less Movement

If your exercise routine has changed or you’re moving less overall, this can reduce your daily energy expenditure. So, while your diet may be the same as during the challenge, you may need to adjust your nutrition accordingly if you move less.

Stronger U Tip: Working with a Stronger U Coach to develop a plan based on your current needs can be beneficial in maintaining progress.

Determining Next Steps After A Fitness Challenge

What you pursue post-challenge will be based on how you feel now, and what you’d like to accomplish. We’ve outlined a simple framework to help you be intentional about your next steps. Before you begin, grab a notepad and pen or pull up your Notes app on your phone and follow the prompts.

1. Reflect on your recent journey to achieve your goal. Then ask yourself these questions based on the following categories:

• Progress
  • Are your actions getting you closer to your fat loss or muscle-building goals?
• Daily Habits
  • What are habits you implemented to help you in your success?
  • Have you ceased to continue any of those habits post-challenge/post-goal?
  • Can you maintain any of those habits or tweak them to suit your future goals better?
  • Are there any new habits you didn’t do before but would like to start now?
• Feelings
  • How do you feel about your efforts in the challenge? Are they aligned with your desired results, or do you feel you could push harder or take it easier?

2. Choose Your Next Step:

Continue
You may want to continue with your current plan if adherence and motivation is high and you’re happy with your progress but need more time to achieve your goal.

Pause
If you physically or psychologically need a break after the challenge, then it’s a good time to pause. This can look like taking a 2–4-week break depending on how you feel.

Maintain
If you’ve hit your goal, are feeling energized and happy with your results, entering a maintenance phase is a good option. Maintenance marks the continuation of the same habits that led to success but with a bit more flexibility in your eating! This phase is a great opportunity to work with a coach who can help you keep the right habits in place to maintain your progress.

Shift
If you’ve hit your initial goal and are ready to strive for a new body composition or performance goal, it may be a good time to shift your focus. This is an especially good time to work with a coach to get clear on what you want to accomplish and build a strategy to reach this new milestone.

Completing a challenge or achieving a goal you worked hard for is an exciting feat (and one you should be proud of!), but the journey doesn’t end there. Whether you want to use where you’re at as a jumping-off point for your next goal or to maintain your progress, the power lies in the consistency of your daily actions. Working with a coach through any post-challenge phase can be an effective strategy for continued progress and will help you avoid some of the common pitfalls we discussed. 

If you want to define a clear plan tailored to your unique needs as you embark on this next phase of your journey, schedule a free consultation to get matched with a dedicated Stronger U Coach. Having a coach takes the guesswork out of what steps to take next.

 

REFERENCES

Zeballos, E., & Todd, J. E. (2020). The effects of skipping a meal on daily energy intake and diet quality. Public health nutrition, 23(18), 3346–3355. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980020000683

Monsivais, P., Aggarwal, A., & Drewnowski, A. (2014). Time spent on home food preparation and indicators of healthy eating. American journal of preventive medicine, 47(6), 796–802. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2014.07.033