By: Keanna Marquez
Are you making progress with your current levels of consistency or do you need to be doing more?
Challenge: I challenge you to read this entire blog post (should take you less than 10 minutes) AND complete the action steps at the end!
Think about the healthy habits that you currently perform; maybe it’s drinking a glass of water when you first wake up in the morning, going on a walk after work or during your lunch break, taking time out of your day to read, meditate or pray. Whatever the habits are, I want you to think about how you feel during and after performing them. During your workout you might feel tired, but afterwards you probably feel great. After reading and praying you probably feel hopeful and uplifted! These healthy habits bring so many positive attributes along with them! Now think about how often you’re performing these habits and about how consistent you’re really being with them.
During this reflection, you’re likely to be uncertain about exactly how consistent you’re being. You’re probably saying things like, “I’m pretty consistent,” or “I perform my healthy habits most of the time.”
Is this level of awareness enough? What does “pretty consistent” and “most of the time” mean? Are you making progress with your current levels of consistency or do you need to be doing more? This knowledge and awareness of how consistent we’re really being with our healthy habits is imperative because it will tell us whether or not we’re doing enough. Therefore, it’s time to shed a light on how we’re really doing.
No more uncertainty, no more using phrases like, “I think I’m doing enough.” It’s time to put a number on things, time to grade ourselves, time to use scales and numbers and percentages. Going forward, we’re going to start using a percentage to help us measure how consistent we’re really being with our healthy habits! This percentage will be called our “consistency rate.”
In this blog, we’re going to learn more about what this “consistency rate” is, why it matters, how to calculate it, and how to utilize it to help you reach your goals!
Consistency = progress. Consistency = growth. Consistency leads to real change!
I started working out and eating healthy at the early age of 18 and after about ten years into this healthy lifestyle I realized that I wasn’t where I wanted to be mentally or physically so I decided to take some time, dig a little deeper, and analyze my current situation.
Here’s how my routine went and how it probably flows for a lot of you: perform my healthy habits, “most of the time,” especially Monday through Friday, healthy habits completely stopped on Friday evening, didn’t exist over the weekend and would pick back up on Monday morning. I was sleeping in over the weekend, eating poorly, not exercising, staying up late, and drinking alcohol. Then, I would report feeling sluggish, sick, and definitely living with a lot of guilt and regret the following days. No wonder I wasn’t making any real progress towards my goals!
When referring to my gym consistency, at the time, I was going to the gym “consistently” four days a week, every week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Looking at the week as a whole, if I was going to the gym four days a week, that’s only four out of seven days, which equals a 57% consistency rate! When you look at it like this instead of labeling it as “most of the time,” you realize this is actually a pretty horrible consistency rate! Getting a 57% on an exam in school is failing, showing up to work 57% of the time will likely get you fired, it simply isn’t an acceptable consistency rate, especially if you want to see any progress or growth!
After taking time to do this reflection I realized, I didn’t want to live my life this way; working hard during the week, letting it all go to waste over the weekend, and then starting all over again on Monday morning. It was a vicious cycle that would get me nowhere and I knew the only solution would be to increase the rate at which I was consistently performing my healthy habits.
In the graph and chart below you’ll see that my exercise consistency rate has increased quite a bit and now fluctuates between 75-100% and with this increase, I have definitely started to see results!
Below is a bar graph and a chart that another analyst and I created to help me visualize how consistent I’m really being with all of my healthy habits:
- Consistency Tracker
- Consistency Tracker by Month
Now, below is a chart that shows the progress of my health journey:
| 2023 | WEIGHT | BODY FAT |
| JAN | 148.8 | 19.4 |
| FEB | 150.8 | 19.7 |
| MAR | 147.4 | 19.2 |
| APRIL | 149.2 | 19.5 |
| MAY | 144.8 | 18.8 |
| JUNE | 146.2 | 19 |
| JULY | 144 | 18.7 |
| AUG | 141.4 | 18.3 |
| SEPT | 138.2 | 17.8 |
| OCT | 134 | 17.2 |
| NOV | 131 | 16.7 |
| DEC | 134.4 | 17.2 |
As my consistency rates increased I began to see real, incredible results in my health journey! With consistency rates around 79%-100% I was able to lose over 16 pounds and over 2% body fat, that’s incredible!!!
What’s an acceptable consistency rate?
Studies show that performing healthy habits are likely to give you more energy, help you feel better mentally by releasing stress and anxiety, help you feel stronger and healthier, and can even increase your life expectancy! If this is true, if performing your healthy habits truly makes you feel this incredible, then why wouldn’t we want to feel like this all of the time by performing our healthy habits with higher consistency rates?
Is it OK to perform your healthy habits 75% of the time, 80-90% of the time? Healthy habits performed six days a week with one day off would put you at an 85% consistency rate, is that enough?
Well, it all depends on your lifestyle and your goals, right? Decide what’s realistic for you; at what rate can you perform your healthy habits that will allow you to make and see progress without burning out?
“One common mistake (we make) when it comes to defining consistency is equating it with intensity.”
Realize that while my goal is to exercise with higher consistency rates, my goal isn’t to kill myself or to over do it. Sometimes my exercise for the day is a walk around my neighborhood with my family. The goal is to perform these healthy habits at higher consistency rates, not necessarily higher intensity rates, so we can work consistently without burning out!
The easier something is and the more you enjoy doing it the more likely you are to stick with it. So pick habits that aren’t only healthy, but that are also practical and bring you joy! It may be coloring or drawing for an hour a day, playing outside with your kids or with friends, playing sports, I don’t care what it is, I just want you doing more of it!
Time to take action!!!
Make a list of your healthy habit(s) and your goal(s) and calculate your consistency rates for each habit (how to calculate this percentage explained below). Now that you have this percentage, based on your goal(s) and the current progress you’ve made (or lack there of), are you doing enough? If not, let’s increase that rate, start doing more, and experience some real growth and change!
How to calculate your consistency rate:
Make a quick list of your healthy habits and take a moment to calculate how consistent you’re really being with each one:
(# of days you are performing your healthy habit / 7) * 100 = your weekly consistency rate.
Now that you have this number, are you doing enough? If not, how can we grow?
Leave a Reply