The Pie Chart of Life | E27

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Hello team and welcome back to Train Like a Girl. You might have noticed if you're a regular listener that I'm dropping an episode on a Thursday today, and that is because my brain is overwhelmed with ideas and thoughts, and you know, there's always conversations to be had around health and fitness, and so I've decided to trial bringing to bringing you two episodes a week. So usually Tuesday is my big podcast day, and on Thursdays, I'm considering trialing, bringing you just uh tidbits and tips and tricks and analogies and methods that I use with my clients that help them in the hope that it will help you too. And today's episode, I wanted to start with one of the on paper simplest concepts I've ever shared or lived by. Um, and I say lived by because honestly, it's one of it's one of the biggest things that has changed my own life more than anything else. And it's something I think about a lot, and I it's something that I've started to implement with clients, and it's a concept that's helped so many women let go of all or nothing thinking around specifically around health and fitness and dieting. Now, before we dive in, I do want to give credit where it's due. I cannot take full credit for this anal analogy. Um I once worked with a coach who introduced me to this idea, and I've genuinely tried to live by it ever since. I say tried to because none of us are perfect, and it's evolved a little bit in the time that I've used it, I've adapted it to my own coaching, but the original concept still came from that coach. And that actually brings me on to a little tiny tangent. I think people are sometimes surprised to hear that I once had a coach or have had coaches, but just wanted to say tangent, but good coaches have coaches. I've worked with mentors, therapists, you know, um coaches throughout my career, and honestly, I think that is how it should be because just because I coach other people doesn't mean that I don't have my own blind spots. Sometimes someone says one sentence or one analogy, like this one I'm gonna share with you today, and it completely changes how you see things. And this was one of those moments for you for me. So I want to share it with you. And this is the concept: imagining your life as a pie chart. So, like a typical pie chart that you'll have seen in school or whatever, um, each slice of the pie chart represents something in your life that is of importance to you. It might be family, one might be your relationship, one might be work and career and growth, one might be friends, one might be hobbies like reading, one might be travel, um adventure, um, volunteering, whatever. But also, a lot of the time when people come to work with me, a slice of the pie chart becomes fitness, health, nutrition, strength training, and maybe a slice for dieting specifically, if that is something that you're currently working towards. Whatever matters to you makes up your pie. But here's the important bit that pie chart can only ever equal 100%. That is literally how pie charts work. So if one slice gets bigger, another slice has to get smaller. And I think this is where so many of us accidentally make life really bloody difficult for ourselves because we somehow, and I think it's because of like the hustle culture that we live in, we somehow expect most slices to be at or close to 100% all of the time. We want to absolutely smash work. We want to train five out of seven days a week, we want to hit 10,000 steps, track all of our calories, get great sleep, be an amazing partner, see our friends, call our parents, do meal prep, get keep the house tidy, journal, meditate, drink three litres of water, like whatever, all of these things. And it's no wonder, therefore, that we feel so overwhelmed and struggle to fit stuff in or get stuff quote unquote right. We're trying to fit about 180 million percent into a 100% pie chart. It literally does not fit. And instead of recognizing that, what I see with a lot of the women I work with, and myself included, is we blame ourselves. We think that it's us, we think that it's a motivation problem, or we think that we're failing. But maybe, maybe if we think about this analogy, we have just forgotten how pie charts work. So let's make this quite practical. Imagine you are dieting and you've got a holiday coming up, or a wedding, or Christmas, or your best friend's hen do. What usually happens? Panic. Oh my god, I can't stick to it. I'm not gonna be, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna go off track, I'm gonna ruin my progress, or even like during it, oh my god, I'm in the middle of ruining my progress, I'm gonna have to start again next week. I've gone off track. But have you though? Or has your pie chart just changed? Because when you're on holiday, naturally the holiday slice becomes a bit bigger. Experiences, adventure, memories, spontaneity, social, like it depends who you're with on holiday, maybe showing up as a as a really good partner, being present with your family. That takes up a bigger chunk of the pie chart at that time, which means your perfectly structured gym routine might have to become a bit smaller, or counting calories might have to become a bit smaller. Meal prep might have to disappear completely. But you know what? Good. That's what should happen because if those slices didn't adjust or change or adapt or get smaller, you wouldn't actually be present on holiday, would you? You'd just be trying to do all of these difficult things in somewhere with better weather, maybe. And what is the point in that? I think where so many people get stuck is that they think they've only got two choices. So option one, whilst you're on holiday, you still track everything. You take your tupperware, you stress out about every restaurant, you feel guilty about the cocktails, you think about calories all day, your food noise is crazy, and you're just trying so hard to like be the perfect version of your fitness self whilst you're on holiday. Or they fall into option two, fuck it, eat, I'll just eat everything. The buffet's there, I want to try a bit of everything, I'm not gonna do any movement, I'm gonna actually come away feeling sh even more rubbish about myself and feel like I need to go into damage control next Monday, start planning my diet on the flight back home. Can you see how black and white that is? We've forgotten the middle ground because the truth is with this pie chart, your health slice or your dieting slice, whatever, doesn't have to totally disappear. It just doesn't have to be the biggest slice for a few days. So maybe it looks something like this. Maybe instead of tracking calories, you look at prioritizing protein where you can. Maybe instead of your usual gym sessions, you walk around this new city and get some decent steps in by accident. Maybe you have a dessert because you genuinely fancy it, because it's going to elevate your experience whilst you're on holiday with your partner or whatever or your friends. And then you move on with your life. Health hasn't disappeared, it has just adapted a little bit. And I think that is such an important mindset shift because health and fitness are supposed to add to your life. The reason you're dieting is to enrich your life, get healthier, feel better about yourself. It shouldn't be taking away from your life. If your pursuit of health or dieting or whatever is stopping you from living, is it actually really health? If you're saying no to absolutely everything on holiday, every meal out because you're scared of the calories, or if you if you're missing memories because you're so worried about your macros, or if you're standing at a wedding, for example, thinking about whether you've hit your protein target instead of watching your best mate get married, I think we've missed the point. Because yes, looking after your body matters, of course it does. I literally coach women to do exactly that, but we're made up of so much more than our physique and our body fat percentage. We are friends, we're parents, we're colleagues, we're travelers, we're dog mums, we're creative, we're funny, we're kind people, all of these things matter as well. And I think sometimes the fitness industry, especially, accidentally convinces us that our entire identity should revolve around eating well and exercising, i.e., 100% of your pie chart. But unless you're a professional athlete or a bodybuilder preparing for a competition or something like that, why would you want 95 plus of your pie chart to be health and fitness? Think about it another way. If I said to you, I think your career should take up 95% of your life, you'd probably say, Hang on a minute, what about my family? What about my friends? What about my traveling? What about my hobbies? What about actually bloody enjoying my life? You'd immediately recognize that. I don't know, maybe if you're a workaholic, you won't. But most of us would recognize that, Christ, that's actually unhealthy. So why is it then that we try and applaud that when it comes to health and fitness? Balance isn't giving everything equal attention, it's actually just giving the right things the attention that they need in that time of your life or even that day of your life or that season of your life. You know, sometimes work needs more of you, sometimes family needs more of you, sometimes health does, sometimes your mental health needs a bit more support. Sometimes, you know, if you're training for a marathon, fitness is naturally gonna become a bigger slice for you for a while. Sometimes you've just had a baby, sometimes you're recovering from surgery. I can take myself as an example there. I've just gone through surgery, I'm not training at the moment. My training, my strength training has had to become 0% because I'm because a bigger slice of my pie chart is recovery. So the pie chart changes. But it doesn't mean you're failing. It just means that that's life. And one of my favorite sayings is, and that we need to remember this, we are a product of what we do most of the time, not all of the time. One meal off plan is not going to make you healthy, uh, sorry, unhealthy, just like one healthy meal is not gonna make you healthy immediately. One missed workout doesn't make you unfit, one holiday doesn't ruin your progress, one weekend doesn't undo your consistency. It's the averages that matter. So we need to zoom out. And I honestly think if more people understood that, they'd enjoy their life so much more and understand that fitness and health should add to your life, not take from it. And sometimes it just needs adjustment. And that's exactly how I like to coach people how to because you know it's one thing saying just adjust it, and it's another thing actually applying that to your life. Like, how do we adjust it? You know, I talked earlier about maybe we stopped tracking calories on holiday, but maybe we can prioritize protein. That's the sort of stuff that I help my clients to do. So it's it's it's living in that gray area and understanding that there is so much more to life than just dieting. A nice little task that I get some of my clients to do is actually write down all of the things that would fill their pie chart and you know, write them all down, career, health, whatever means a lot to you, and then ask yourself like look at that pie chart and think, does my current life actually reflect those things? Does my current life actually reflect my values essentially? Because sometimes our pie chart tells a different story. Maybe work has swallowed up everything else, or maybe fitness has become so dominant for you or dieting that saying yes to life and other things has deteriorated. Maybe you've neglected your health completely because another slice of has taken over. And there isn't a perfect pie chart, there isn't one right answer. The pie chart is different for everyone, and it will also adapt across your life because life has different seasons and your priorities are allowed to change with them. So next time you go away for a weekend or or something, instead of asking, How do I keep every slice of my pie chart exactly the same? It's about asking yourself, how can I let this other slices kind of grow whilst keeping health as part of the pie, but maybe not the whole pie, just part of it. Maybe it just needs a bit of adapting. Um this is what leads to sustainable, healthy lives. It's not we don't get results long-term living in perfection, living in extremes, but in creating a life where health supports the life you're trying to build, not where your life sorry, not where your life revolves around being healthy. That's everything for today. The pie chart of life. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope this was helpful, and I will catch you again next Tuesday in next week's episode. If you want any help finding what your pie chart of life looks like and, you know, navigating things when life gets a bit busy or what have you, you can find details in the show notes on how to work with me. Lots of love.