Week seven of the Stay at the Top Summer Reset series focuses on one word that underpins sustainable health and performance in 2026. Consistency.
Consistency is often misunderstood as rigidity. In reality, it is structured flexibility. It is about creating guard rails around the behaviours that matter, while allowing freedom within them.
In this episode, I unpack why the biggest barrier is not inconsistency, but the swing from doing nothing to trying to do everything. When inputs are predictable, energy and recovery become easier to manage. This episode will help you define what consistency looks like for your current season of life, so it actually holds.
In this episode I share:
- Why consistency is often confused with rigidity
- The problem with zero to one hundred behaviour change
- What structured flexibility actually looks like
- Why momentum beats white knuckling every time
- How inconsistency in food drives inconsistent energy
- The guard rails that support steadier energy and clearer thinking
- How to think about meal timing, gaps and composition
- Why diversity matters without sacrificing predictability
- How to define consistency for your current season of life
- Your simple reset task for the week
Key Quotes
“Consistency is not rigidity. It is structured flexibility.”
“You cannot expect consistent energy from inconsistent inputs.”
“When the inputs are stable, the output is more predictable.”
Episode Resources
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess Spendlove (00:09.858)
Welcome to week seven of the summer reset series. Now I don’t know about you, but I love a word of the year. But if I’m honest, there is one word everyone needs to lock into their vocabulary in 2026 when it comes to their health and performance. And that word is consistency. Now, consistency gets really misunderstood.
When people hear it, what they often think is it’s the same food, it’s the same workout, it’s the same routine, and it’s living life like a robot. That is not consistency. That is rigidity. Consistency is really about structured flexibility. In essence, it’s putting four walls around the things that matter and giving yourself freedom within them. You are not doing the same thing every day.
I need to re, you are not doing the same thing every day or eating the same thing every day. But what you were doing are the important things often enough that they shape who you become and how you operate.
Now, the real trap or issue is not inconsistency. It is the swing from zero to a hundred, which particularly happens at this time of year. What that can look like is we haven’t trained in weeks or months. We’ve eaten takeaway most nights or we’ve been Uber Eats best customer. We’ve been having more drinks than normal most nights, if not all nights. Maybe there’s been late nights on the laptop or they’re sure to come across the year.
And then all of a sudden we think we’re going from that version of us, whether it’s all or some of them, to suddenly working out five to seven days a week. And we’re eating clean and we’re cooking at home and we’re tracking our calories and we’re not eating sugar and we’re having no alcohol and we’re exercising every morning and having an ice bath and meditating. Sound familiar? Now, all of those things, when we go from zero to a hundred, they last a week or two at top.
Jess Spendlove (02:19.438)
because life happens and you miss a session and then you feel like you’ve fallen behind and then the whole thing collapses because you’re off the wagon and you start again next week, next Monday, first of January, next insert whatever the thing that we tell ourself is. What this is not is momentum. What this is not is creating an operating system. What this is or what I call it is white knuckling.
And while it’s tempting, it does not work in the long run. It does not deliver you the results that you’re looking for. And if you’re listening to this, I know that what you want is more energy. You want better recovery. You wanna nail it at work and in life. And if you want that, consistency is the name of the game.
Now, when we talk about consistency, while I’m talking high level, it needs to be owned and defined by you. Not what an app says, not what a social media reel or TikTok says, not what your past self used to do in a different season of life. It needs to fit the current season that you’re in, where you’re at. It needs to fit your energy, your workload, where you’re at in your career.
It needs to fit your family life and the capacity you’ve got right now. And I say this as much as I’m saying it to you, as I’m saying it to myself. It’s so easy to think about what we were doing a few years ago. And a few years ago, we might’ve had a different job and not had a baby, or maybe we only had one child instead of two. We really need to think about the current version of us and what consistency is possible.
and how we’re going to define that.
Jess Spendlove (04:15.618)
The truth is, and I say this lovingly with a little bit of a kick in the pants, but you cannot expect more energy or more consistent energy if the main inputs that go into that equation, like your food intake, are inconsistent. When you’re eating rhythm and your movement and all of these behaviors are predictable, your energy is steadier.
And then our reliance on caffeine or alcohol or anything like that, whether we’re using for a pick me up or a wind down is not necessary. What you’re able to do is you’re able to think more clearly and you feel less wired and tired. Consistency with food is not eating the same meals every day. I need to be really clear on this point. And this is a conversation I had.
just a few weeks ago with a strategy session with a CEO where we were talking about this and finding a version of consistency for her, which does not mean the same food and exactly at the same time, but what it means is putting four walls around it. And so for her, it was three meals and one snack, and it was looking at the time in which she started eating and the time she had each of those meals.
And so when I talk about food and I talk about consistency, these are some of the things for you to check in on. What time do you start eating in the morning? Now this guard rail should really be 30 to 60 minutes. So if some days it’s 7 a.m., other days it’s 9 a.m., other days it’s 11 a.m., that is a huge variance, way too big. You need to have a narrow window of 30 to 60 minutes. Start with 60 and if you can bring it to 30, great. Predictability and consistency.
Similarly, what time you stop eating at the end of the day, the same principle, like I’ve said there with the morning. And then when we look across the day, we’re talking about our gaps in time between meals and snacks. So we want to standardize that, ideally around three to four hours, no more than five hours. And the biggest culprit there is lunch to dinner. Breakfast to lunch generally is that kind of four hour window for most people, but lunch to dinner is quite big.
Jess Spendlove (06:30.124)
And so therefore you likely need a strategic afternoon snack. And the last point on the consistency piece with your food is the composition. No, we don’t want to eat the same thing every day. We want diversity. That is actually good for our health and our gut microbiome in particular. But what we want to be doing is making sure that the composition, the protein, the fats, the fiber, the colors, the carbohydrates, these key components,
We want to make sure that they’re always there. And so you want to be able to look at a meal and if you’re swapping a smoothie for eggs or a yogurt bowl, you want to go, okay, I know that’s got about 20 to 30 grams of protein. And I know it’s got about a quarter to a third of the meal is carbohydrates and it’s got some colors and it’s got some healthy fats. These are the things we need to be checking because when the inputs are stable, then the output, which is more energy is more consistent and more elevated.
It’s a game changer. And so your reset this week is simple. If you want to borrow this word of the year or take it as your main word, please do. If not, have to, but have the consistency one ringing in the back of your head when it comes to your health and your performance. And so when you think about consistency, I want you to define it in one clear sentence. Consistency for me this year looks like dot, dot, dot.
fill in the blank if you want to let me know I’d absolutely love to hear either via email, LinkedIn, Instagram, you know where to find me let me know.
because if you can articulate what you are aiming to achieve, then you can build it. And if you can build it, you can sustain it. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. I’ve got one more episode coming for the Recept Summer Series. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and I can’t wait to hear what you’re implementing from a consistency lens in 2026.