How To Manage An Ever-Changing Schedule: Flexibility
By: Michael Beiter
"This month has been crazy! I feel like I haven't had any time for myself. Food logging has been terrible, and I feel like a failure."
It's October, a transitionary time of year for many people. The weather and environment are changing, but so are the demands of kids, work, and husbands.
I used to think the fourth quarter was the most challenging time for people with their fitness and nutrition. The average person gains 5-7 lbs every October through December. With the depressed daylight, cooler temps, and holidays, the last three months of the year have consistently been a recipe for disaster.
Now I know that every quarter presents varying difficulties. While there may not be as many holidays in the second quarter, kids get out of school, and summer activities start.
We can say something similar for quarters one and three. Throughout the year, the only constant is change. However, looking around, we constantly find systems and suggestions that don't accommodate change. Work schedules are rigid, like school and sports, lunch breaks, vacations, meal plans, supplement programs, and exercise routines. They are all missing the one ingredient that can keep us on track in a world of constant change: flexibility.
"I used to have a flexible work schedule and could exercise over my lunch break. Since switching jobs, I have had to do it in the morning, and everything has been off," a 40-year-old mother and career woman said.
There is a big problem with rigidity; it teaches us there's only one track to success. In reality, there are an infinite number of ways to get there. That's why flexible dieting leads us to think that as long as we hit specific objective markers daily/weekly, how and when we do so is up to us.
The psychological effect of flexibility is enormous. Flexibility is an antidote to perfectionism and the belief that if you don't stick to a rigid schedule, meal plan, or whatever, you've failed. Dichotomous thinking leads us to see things in black-and-white categories, and it's not fair because we live life in the gray. Everything about our world exists on a continuum or scale that allows for variation.
We will always have to deal with changing circumstances; the best way is with flexibility.
The woman I met with who is struggling had to move her workouts to the morning and change her meal tracking to be preemptive rather than reflective. She also had to manage her time in a way that afforded her time to take care of herself BEFORE caring for kids, work, and her husband. The schedule and solutions she came up with for this fourth quarter will change again and again throughout next year. Rigidity and dichotomous thinking don't work in these cases; the only thing that does is flexibility.
