How Do You Eat an Elephant?

How Do You Eat An Elephant

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I have always heard this question asked when patience is required. During a tough time, or a part of my life when the gratification of my actions weren’t as instant as I would like. Usually, however, I was asked this question when I had a big goal ahead of me and the only real way to accomplish it was through what seemed like a million tiny actions. The answer, as most of us know, is one bite at a time. That answer leaves me with a smile on my face, and another question; Is there another any other way to eat anything other than one bite at a time?

Not really. No matter how big of a bite you take, it still only equals one bite. It might take you a hundred tiny bites, or two huge ones, but you still ate whatever you ate one bite at a time. As you probably guessed, this blog is about food, but probably not in the sense that you would assume. I am not focusing on eating this or eating that, and I am absolutely not promoting that we go out and eat elephants! What I want to break down is the big picture of our eating habits and the misconceptions of the changes necessary to achieve our health goals.

Most of my clients go into our first few conversations with the expectation that I am going to flip their diet upside down and change everything they eat. Almost always, they are pleasantly surprised when the opposite is true. I don’t believe that radical changes are always sustainable. In rare cases they can be, but for most people it isn’t feasible. I lean more towards the one bite at a time philosophy. Instead of changing everything today, let’s change little things over the course of many more days so that the overall outcome is a sustainable lifestyle change in our eating habits.

In the case of the elephant if we tried to eat the whole thing at once we would ultimately see it was entirely too difficult and give up after a very short period of time. Failure. If we eat it one bite at a time over the course of many days then our odds of success increase dramatically. It seems simple, but most people want results fast and this method doesn’t cater to their expectations. If we can alter our expectations of the process we are pursuing then our plan seems much more realistic.

My challenge to you this week is to re-evaluate your process and see how realistic it is. Is it something you can accomplish, or are you setting yourself up for failure? I want everyone to be healthier and do it in their own way, on their own terms. Slow and steady may take longer, but it percentage of success is much higher than the faster, more radical alternative.

A final sidenote, we will be updating our website over the next few weeks to make it easier to navigate through and help you find information that will help you on your own journey. As always, please reach out to us if you have any questions or would like to go deeper on any issues that you are struggling with.

Have a great week!

Nick