How many times have you told yourself that you are going to start eating healthy?
Never eating cake again! I’m going to start that carrot stick diet on Monday and stick with it for LIFE this time! I’m going low fat, low carb, high fat, level five vegan from now on! If you’re wondering what a level five vegan is.....it’s from an episode of the Simpsons.....it’s someone who doesn’t eat anything that casts a shadow.( Now before you get all riled up and want to have a go, I do not have an issue with anybody who is Vegan. Lets just put that to rest right now.)
How many times have you gone through this with yourself....maybe stuck with whatever BS diet you put yourself on for a week, a month, maybe even longer....than woken up one day, gone to get your morning coffee ( decaf double shot latte with soy milk and a sprinkle of cinnamon because you heard it speeds your metabolism up) that’s if you haven’t already given coffee up. You then lay eyes and nose on the amazing looking Choc lava cakes in the cabinet ( not sure if you saw them or smelt them first), you are so delirious from only eating carrot sticks...or if you went level five vegan you were living off air, you buy every single one of the cakes and devour them all in one sitting! Than you think F it....I’ve stuffed it all up. I’m a failure. I suck. I can’t stick to anything! I may as well give up and just eat what - ever the hell I want. Then you go on a massive binge, eating ALL THE GOD DAMN FOOD INSIGHT!
Yep, I’ve been there too! It gets you back to where you first started... or in an even worse position feeling like an absolute failure and that you may as well not try at all.
I feel so strongly about this topic!
It makes me so mad when I hear trainers talking to their clients about having to live a life sentence of restrictive eating or they will be made to do 10 Burpees for every calorie of food they were not meant to eat! What I say to that....is fuck that!
As a human....I think we can all agree on this...I want to enjoy life, enjoy all the foods I love, and have a well rounded balanced diet so I have the energy to do all the amazing things this life has to offer! And sometimes this includes eating pizza, eating a hamburger, a couple of cocktails with friends and some damn good belly laughs that makes the people sitting next to you in the restaurant get up and leave because having a sense of humour is apparently frowned upon. I believe it’s the level five vegan diet that does this!
I want the people I work with to do the same! To eat foods that fuel their bodies and adds value, but also being able to occasionally enjoy the not so good food that maybe doesn’t add that much value to your body, but you really love the taste and eating it every once in a while is not as bad as eating it every night, or every afternoon when you hit that 3pm slump!
This is where we throw in building healthy Habits! There’s a lot of research out there now about the power of building habits into your life! We lose the restrictive mindset of cutting all the ‘bad foods’ out of our lives and start practicing a new way of thinking. Adding all the ‘better for you’ foods in so there’s no room for the not so good stuff! And if we are going to occasionally have a not so good meal we still use all the healthy Habits I use myself and with the people I work with.
We don’t feel guilty or shame ourselves for eating something that may not have been the best choice! We acknowledge that it happened, show ourselves some compassion, then we hop back up and keep moving! The amazing thing is, when we start to implement this into our life, it starts to show up in other areas of our life too! We build resilience to get back up, dust ourselves off, and move forward.
Join me over the next few weeks and find out why building healthy habits is so important, why I really dislike restrictive diets, and some of the habits I teach people and also use in my every day life.