This might be the reason your good eating habits don’t stick

The reason you don’t stick to a diet is NOT the reason you think it is.

You’re busy!

I know you are. Who isn’t?

Your mental to-do list includes healthy meal prepping and taking a walk after dinner.

What else?

• pry open the bedroom window that’s been painted stuck since you redid the trim last spring
• pack enticing lunches for each member of the family. Remember to include their individual favorites and enough ranch dip to get the younger ones eat their veggies.
• take your car in for an oil change

But what gets your attention?

• the ringing phone – yes, another request for money!
• the ding-dong of the doorbell – no, you still don’t need new windows or siding or professional landscaping with a fish pond!
• an email from your sister
• an email from your co-worker sharing a lousy boss meme
• your oil change

No wonder you don’t stick to a diet

You’re crazy busy with all the tiny, urgent matters that you’ve got no bandwidth for the truly important things. Things like meal prepping, taking a walk, sitting alone for 10 minutes to think your own thoughts.

When you confuse urgent with important, you get more stressed out and less efficient. I’ve been there.

These days, I try to follow Stephen Covey’s advice in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey told us to examine the urgent, unimportant tasks we spend time on and the non-urgent, important tasks we don’t spend enough time on.

Another reason you don’t stick to a diet might be because you think you can’t. But you can learn how to fix that limited mindset.

The Urgent/Important Matrix can help you stick to a diet

Urgent & Important: The top left quadrant holds the important tasks that you need to tend to quickly. If you don’t get your oil changed in a reasonable time, you can ruin your engine, get stranded on the side of a hot and busy road, and spend lots and lots of money. If your child spikes a fever or if you cut your hand slicing carrots, you need to drop everything and tend to these medical issues.

Not Urgent but Important: These to-dos in the upper right quadrant are the ones we put off. They can wait until tomorrow or next week or next year, right? And putting them off for days or months or years is why we don’t stick to a diet, learn another language or earn that degree.

There’s always tomorrow.

Urgent but Not Important: All those annoying interruptions go in this quadrant on the lower left. Phone calls, emails, barking dogs. I have an abundance of all three.

Not Urgent & Not Important: Our biggest time-wasters fit snugly in the lower right quadrant. Social media scrolling, paging through a boring magazine, checking email every 10 minutes. UGH! Yeah, that’s me too 😕

What should you do?

Covey suggested we re-prioritize our tasks to spend more time in the second quadrant (Not Urgent but Important). And I agree. Some of my busiest clients skip exercise class or resort to takeout because they were inundated with non-urgent phone calls and emails as well as truly urgent matters that arose because they failed to plan and keep up with routine maintenance at work, home and in relationships.

If you don’t take your car in when the warning light turns red, you might have a much bigger problem very soon. But even better is to keep up with regular maintenance.

Time is a limited commodity, but here’s one strategy to make better use of it.

Take action in 4 steps

This is not just for health, but for all areas of your life.

1. Consider what’s on your Not Urgent but Important list. Things like meal planning, meal prepping, finding new recipes, packing your lunch, scheduling your exercise time, buying new running shoes, organizing your pantry, starting a meditation practice.
2. Elevate at least one of those things to high priority. Schedule it. Do it. Be proud of it. 👏
3. Each morning, look at your to-do list. Prioritize the important tasks and devote adequate time to them.
4. Each month, consider those important, non-urgent tasks that never found space on your to-do list. Schedule at least one of them. Then celebrate your organized pantry, your beautiful Warrior 3 or your chef-like knife skills.

Struggling to stick to a diet? You might be making 1 of these super common mistakes.

Download the free guide. Stop making these 5 common mistakes and stick to that diet! Click HERE