Read this scenario and let me know if you can relate…. Is this you?

After a fitful night sleep your alarm goes off around 6. You ‘snooze’ about 3 times before you actually force yourself out of bed. Before you even get in the shower, you stumble down stairs for a cup of coffee. After the caffeine kicks in you start getting ready for work. Yawning every 3 seconds and longing to crawl back in bed.

Next, you sit down for breakfast. It is your ‘usual’, some ‘high fiber’ and ‘low fat’ cereal that isn’t even good despite the dehydrated berries thrown in. You have a glass of OJ and you’re out the door. At work you grab another cup of coffee (skim milk, zero calorie sweetener). It is 10 oclock now and your tummy starts rumbling. You know you aren’t going to make it to lunch so you grab a half a bagel out of the break room or you grab a handful of wheat thins.

For lunch you eat the turkey sandwich you brought. It is on whole wheat bread, low fat cheese, and low cal mayo with a diet coke and pretzels. You are proud of yourself for skipping the trip to Arby’s with the rest of your co-workers. You are feeling pretty good at 12, 1, and even 2pm.

All the sudden 3 o’clock hits and you hit a wall. You grab an iced coffee or another diet drink to get you thru the rest of the day. At home you make another relatively ‘healthy’ choice. You have chicken, and veggies (brocolli and potatoes), and wheat dinner rolls. With low fat milk of course.

You go about your hectic evening, scrambling to get it all done. By the time the kids are in bed at 8 you sit down for the first time and crash. TV, email, etc. At 9pm the pantry is calling your name. You stare at all the food in your house for 15 mins. before you decide against it. You have been working so hard on eating the right things and you don’t want to blow it. You go to bed hungry. You lay there for 45 mins because your mind is racing. You wonder WHY GOD can’t you sleep even though you were exhausted all day. You get a crappy night sleep. Repeat.

You have gained about 10 pounds over the past 2 years even though you are ‘eating healthy’ and you are getting pissed. You re-commit to doing more exercise because that has to be the problem. You also probably have some kind of chronic issue. Maybe it’s seasonal allergies, IBS, bouts of depression/anxiety, or joint pain. Oh well, you chalk it up to ‘getting old’ and this is what happens to everyone, right?

Wrong! It doesn’t need to be. You can literally choose not to feel this way, and eating the right food is your answer.

I have fallen off the wagon with my eating lately and can definitely tell the difference. I have gained weight and, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I got sick and stayed sick. Normally if I get sick it’s for like a day. I swear I was sick for 2 weeks this time around. I needed a little motivation to get back on track so I started reading “It Starts With Food” (Where I got the idea for this post). They do a great job of explaining all of the things I have been trying to say for the last year. They promote the whole30 movement if you’ve heard of that.

My big ‘aha’ moment came when the book laid it out like this: Everything you eat makes you either more healthy or less healthy. Every day we are deciding the kind of life we want to live by choosing what we put in our bodies.

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We need to re-think ‘healthy’. We need to pay attention to the research instead of using out dated food pyramids/guides. We need to stop doing ‘low fat’ and ‘diet’ everything. We need to eat food. If anything that I said above sounds familiar, please consider reading the book. Unless you understand the “WHY” behind the changes, you are likely to fail.

You can’t out train a bad diet in the gym and even though it seems to make sense that less calories= weight loss, it is not that simple. If it were, we wouldn’t struggle so much.

I hope that at least a few of you reading this are inspired to take action and take control of your life. I’m super excited to be back on the wagon! I would be more than happy to answer any questions. I love talking about this stuff!!!!!