Behavior #4: Prefer consistency to intensity
There is no zealotry like that of the recently converted.
Learn to eat nutritiously, and you may find yourself attempting to make ever tighter daily circles around your micronutrient intake and macronutrient balance, raising your bar to success rapidly. Train yourself to run regularly, and you may attempt to progress from mile to 5k to ultramarathon in a single year, substituting distance for sense.
Realize that this is a trap, the pursuit of more health in less time, and nothing will derail your efforts at healthspan faster. The sheer intensity of your efforts at ideal eating will likely result in a flameout into an ongoing bacchanal of Ben and Jerry’s and takeout, and the heaped mileage of your ever-longer running workouts on an untrained body will likely result in catastrophic injury, putting you on the couch instead of the trail.
Instead, aim first for consistency — the slow and steady creation of habit. It is better to have a salad each day for a year than to attempt perfect measured nutrition for 30 days and then to revert to the standard American diet for the next 11 months. It is better to run 2 miles a day, 2 days a week forever than to run a half-marathon this month and no miles the next.
Understand that the danger is “too much, too soon”, and that actively hedging toward “too little, very often” will get you where you need to go without the bane of whiplash reversion or habit-crushing injury — and you’ll enjoy the process more as well, stacking up daily achievement with manageable effort.
