How to overcome that mental tug-of-war

Sometimes you’ll experience a point during your plan where you just feel like throwing in the towel because you don’t feel like prepping and measuring your food anymore despite the fact that you’ve had great progress.

But at the same time you don’t want to quit because you don’t want to lose the progress you’ve made up until that point.

What you are actually experiencing in a situation like this is something that science-talking nerds like me like to call ambivalence.

That basically means that you want two things that are pulling you in opposite directions. Essentially, you don’t want to gain back the fat you’ve lost, but at the same time you don’t want to have to measure and prep everything all the time.

When you’re ambivalent about something you basically have a mental tug-of-war going on. If you’ve been sticking to your plan thus far, your rational brain has been on the winning side of that tug-of-war long enough for you to have chosen to stick to our plan.

However, sometimes it can feel like the emotional side of your brain basically wants to do what it wants and starts to take over the tug-of-war. If you pay attention to that, you could easily decide to quit.

The bad news is that I can’t say that this battle will go away (you’re always going to have to make choices), but what I can say is that if you just stick it out and keep following your plan (despite the fact that you don’t FEEL like it) you’ll generally reach a point where logic eventually starts to win the tug-of-war again and it becomes a bit easier to stick to your plan.

When it does, you’ll be glad you never quit.