Half Time! Is Your Search for the perfect diet a waste of time?

Well here we are getting ready to go into the last half of 2015?  Where did the time go?  I have to ask where are you right now?  Are you better or worse off than when you started the year or are you in the same place?

For me, I'm in a really strange place.  I'm heavier than I've been in a while but I feel amazing and a sense of peace.  My weight doesn't define who I am as a person.  It doesn't mean anything unless I give it a specific meaning. 



 I've decided to consciously put on muscle mass for the next few months and that means eating more and lifting heavier.  In order to do this though, I have to EAT and that means gaining weight which I am okay with.  I'm not eating crap mind you...I'm still adhering to my principles:

1. Fresh Food is best/Minimal Processed Foods
2. Plenty of Water
3. Minimizing Sugar Intake
4. Eat Breakfast
5.Minimizing Alcohol Intake

This is not a diet plan.  Those are my principles for living better and maintenance.  If you follow these principles, then guaranteed your health will improve and you will feel better.  My thing is this:  I don't want to get stuck having to eat 1500 calories or less because my metabolism has down regulated to the point where that's all my metabolism can handle.  After being in a caloric deficit for a year or more, I have to work on improving my metabolic adaptation.  Therefore I am eating more, no cardio, and strength training.  It will make it that much easier when I enter a fat loss phase.

So right now I am getting back into the weight room after focusing on Movement Training for the past 2 months.  I still have my movement training using different tools such as this resistance band.  but now I am incorporating Total Body Weight Workouts 2x per week.  

My Current Workout Schedule Looks like this

Monday:  Total Body Strength Training
Tuesday:  Loaded Movement Training
Wednesday:  Pi-Yo Fitness (Movement and Core Training)
Thursday:  Total Body Strength Training
Friday:  Dynamic Flexibility/Core
Saturday:  Bootcamp Style Circuits w/Treadmill Intervals

The purpose is to continue to work on my range of motion and core strength before going back into a Strength Program so that i can get the most out of my strength workouts and minimize injury.  I have become an advocate of periodizing workouts.  Range of Motion, Movement, Strength, and Fat Loss /Conditioning should all have their seasons in your programs.  It helps to avoid plateaus, boredom, and minimizing injury.  I am going to have resources available that explains all of this in more detail.

Is the Search for the Perfect Diet a waste of time?

Yes.

I see it on social media all the time.  All these gurus and coaches have the perfect diets and perfect meal plans that are going to get you results.  My thing is always...okay I want to see receipts after ONE YEAR.  Here's the thing:  Diets DO work.  You will get results on many of these plans but can you sustain those results long term?  Will your body keep responding or get stuck?

What we know about diets are that most people cannot sustain the results.  They gain the weight back and many times gain back even more.   There's a lot of reasons for this and many of them have nothing to do with food.  A lot of it is environment and most of it is mindset.  Stay tuned people.  I'm bringing the heat in the second half of 2015.

Yes your search for the perfect diet is a waste of time because there is no perfect.  People keep coming up with these rules and restrictions disguised as the perfect diet, but all they are doing is eliminating calories from the diet and giving people something else to focus and feel they have control over.

Control

I'm going to drop this right here and Ill be talking more about this but if you feel like you need to have control and rules over your food, then you have zero control and you are just adding to your anxiety and you will eventually crash and burn.  Eating disorders are not about food but about the need to have some type of CONTROL over one's life and sadly that's becoming a mainstream norm.

Do you know what control is?  Going into the store and seeing Justin's Peanut Butter cups and saying "Nah I'm good.  I don't want those so I'm not buying them." It's not sitting there saying to myself "I can't do this because it's against the rules and I will get fat."  

It's going out to eat and saying I'm getting the grilled chicken and rice because that's what I want tonight and giving ZERO effs about it.  It's also going out for a meal, enjoying  it, moving on with my life, and on to the next one.  If you have control, then you have the freedom to make your own choices because that's what YOU want to do...not because of restrictions and self imposed rules.

What should you do?

I'm glad you asked.  I will have resources available (Hopefully by next month) that helps people really get to the ROOT of the problem.  It's not your food, it's not your meal plan, it's not the perfect coach or guru, it's none of that!  It's your deeply ingrained attitudes and mindsets about food.  It's about where you are in your life right now.  It's about your environment, relationships with people (or lack thereof), it's about your MINDSET.

Stay tuned Friends....It's time to Say Something Different.

How I am learning to let go of Perfection

Yesterday I went to a nutrition seminar and it basically read the entire last year of my life.  It resonated so strongly with me that I signed up for a private session afterward to explore the issues further.  I have become so passionate about women, self love, body image, and living better that it's all I can do to learn about myself  and explore these things so that I can help others on their journeys. You have got to LIVE IT to be able to GIVE IT!

There is No Perfect

Despite what the diet and fitness community tries to sell you there is no such thing as Perfect.  There is no coach, no guru, no diet, no exercise routine that is going to get you to the perfect body.  Even when you have the perfect body you will find something to complain about.

There ARE strategies to help you improve and get better but there is no perfect.   The most miserable people are the ones who claim they are striving for perfectionism.  They don't have any time to enjoy their journeys or take note of improvements because they are too busy self loathing and picking themselves apart.  Their battle is in vain because what they are striving for doesn't exist.  All you can do is seek to improve where you are and become the best version of yourself.  Sometimes you will succeed and sometime you will fail.  Failing is okay because it provides valuable feedback on how to continue your quest to get better.

The more the fitness industry tries to tell people that their goal is to have a perfect body, the more discouraged, self loathing, and defeated they will become.  That's part of the reason why only 17% of people are active and  the other 83% of people have given up and said Forget it.  My motto:  Let's celebrate every little success and enjoy the ride of getting better"

At this moment on my journey, I am seeking to improve my Range of Motion, Conditioning, and Core Strength.  I no longer worry about being the perfect weight.   Do I have a number where I'd like to be?  Of course but I'm not going to sit up here and beat myself up for not being there in this moment. The perfect weight is the one I'm at right now because I am alive.  Can I improve upon where I am at this moment?  Yes I can but stressing myself out to get to that improved place isn't worth it and will only hinder me from improving because stress plays a critical role in metabolism.

If I could tell people just one thing it is that there is no perfect: No perfect diet, no perfect exercise routine, no perfect coach, no perfect body.  There will always be SOMETHING that can be improved so why not ENJOY your life while you are on the journey to improve your condition.

Perfect is Unsustainable

One thing that drives me nuts about the diet and fitness industry is the lie that there is a perfect diet and exercise routine that will get everyone to their perfect body.  ALL LIES!  Not true.  Everyone metabolizes food differently due to genetics, medications, stress levels, hormones, etc.  There is no such thing as a perfect diet for everyone.  You must find what works best for you.  I've heard of people who go on the Zone diet and they lose tons of weight only to have their partner try it and the partner gains weight!  Nutrition is HIGHLY individual and soon I will have resources available that will help people dial into their OWN individual nutritional needs.  I cannot write out a meal plan for you because I don't live in your body.  All I can do is help you to use YOUR answers to help YOU design your OWN meal plans and we will have the tools available to help you with that.

Let's say you DID do the perfect diet and got the perfect diet.  Will you sustain it?  My guess is no.  I didn't and most people I know don't.  Here is a diet truth

The most Predictable outcome of a diet is that you will gain the weight back and 40% of us will gain even more weight.

Many of us can testify to this truth.  Perfect is Unsustainable and you will just make yourself miserable trying to sustain.  There comes a time when you must give up the ghost and commit to doing the best you can.

This past weekend I went to a seminar at the Fit Expo conducted by two Mr. Olympias, Phil Heath and Jay Cutler.  Admittedly I went because I was nosy and I thought it would be comedy. I also went because you could sit down I came away super impressed with both of those guys.  It wasn't about "dem weights and dem gains" at all.  The main message they gave was that enjoy where you are now because it will be over one day and you need to put your time and energy into that which will last: Family, Friends, etc.  Yeah trying to get the "perfect" body in the eyes of the judges takes A LOT of time but it's only temporary.  In bodybuilding, you diet for 3-5 months to have the perfect body and It's for ONE DAY.  Jay even said, "I didn't have the perfect body.  It was an illusion with lights and posing". 

I hoped the crowd was listening because unlike a lot of these sham trainers and coaches, those guys were telling the truth.  THIS IDEA OF PERFECT ISN'T GOING TO LAST and neither will your money if you keep throwing it away trying to find the perfect solution.

A call to Give Yourself a Break and Let Go of Perfect

This week I want to encourage you to give yourself a break.  Let go of these restrictions and this futile quest for perfectionism.  Instead enjoy the journey of getting better and improving yourself.  Enjoy the fruits (literally) of making better food choices,  Enjoy the energy you get from real food. Enjoy feeling alive and moving when so many people do not have that luxury.  Enjoy setting new goals and benchmarks for yourself and enjoy the ride of getting there because there is always more to strive for and higher peaks to climb.

The people who decide to start a program by saying:  I am going to be perfect.  I will never mess up are setting themselves up for failure and those are the people that meltdown, quit and give up, or even worse become even more obsessive and self loathing when they do not measure up to impossible standards of perfection.  No athlete goes into a game saying I'm going to make every shot.  Not even my boy Steph Curry,  (How bout them Warriors!! BAY AREA STAND UP!)  Can you imagine how horrible they would play if that was the expectation?  That is way too much pressure and they would likely take themselves out of the game mentally by that point. So don't do that to yourself.

Every day the mission is to get 1% better.  

Say Goodbye to Perfect Misery and Hello to LIVING BETTER.

Transformation Tuesday: Dealing Honestly with Body Image and letting go of unrealistic standards

Something strange is happening.

My weight keeps climbing upwards but my body image and self esteem is not heading in the opposite direction.  In fact both seem to be at a high point.  

Both are intentional

Current Fitness Goals

 I am going to be taking a group fitness boot camp this week so my immediate goal is not to die during that so I've been training for that but I would say my Fitness Goals for the next 3 months are as follows:

Weekly Trips to Farmers Market

• Get my body back to being able to function on higher calories again
• Improve conditioning and endurance so circuit training and metabolic work.
• Eat a holistic diet centered around Lean Proteins, Fruits, and Veggies.  
• Continue to improve my body image and not focus so much on cosmetic goals

For the next 3 months I will not be tracking my food.  I need to learn to eat intuitively again and also to make good choices.  I would say that I am getting there.  I don't like junk food like chips, cookies, and such.  I just found that when I was in deprivation mode I thought about these things a lot.  That's not happening anymore and I am glad.

I understand that my metabolism regulated downward and from a lot of the research I've read it will take me a little time to get things humming along again.  After my holiday free for all when I ate ALL THE THINGS, I went back to eating my normal food plan, my weight was at the lowest of the year and then slowly creeped back upward as I was in a deficit.  That let me know that my body had adapted to lower calories and just that two week period followed by a cutback helped to speed things along.

So for the past two weeks I didn't do a free for all but I definitely ate more healthy foods.  Now I am back on what I would call a maintenance plan.  No tracking, just eating intuitively, and seeing what happens.

I will not start a formal fat loss program until September at least.

Dealing Honestly with My Body Image

I was scared to death of gaining weight and getting fat after I decided to quit training for the competition  I was worried that things would spiral out of control and then I wouldn't be taken seriously as a health and fitness coach. For the first two weeks, I put myself in a small deficit and tracked everything and wouldn't you know I stayed the same?  I figured that maybe it would be best for my sanity to stop tracking for a while and just relax. 

I've also decided to take a realistic look at my body image.  As I mentioned in previous posts, I am done with that fit fam stuff on social media.  I do not follow people who post pictures of themselves naked every day.  For one thing it gets old and tired and secondly I was comparing myself to them and then feeling negative about my own body.  

As I have gone back to a more holistic health paradigm these past few weeks,  looks are not the main focus.  Feeling good is and I will tell you that I  feel alive.  I am conscious of my pants feeling a little more snug but I figure that's my reality right now.  It doesn't mean that I'm not a good fitness coach or that I am a horrible person.  It just means that right now as my body adjusts we're having a little fluctuation upwards but as Debarge says I wear it well.

Women (and men too) are bombarded daily with unrealistic images of perfection.  Even those people in those images don't look like that and so what is the point?  Here's another shocker:  It doesn't matter.  What good is it if everyone around you is telling you how good you look but all you can do is pick yourself apart?  

One of the missions of my business is to get people to love the bodies that they are in and to live better in those bodies!  I am tired of people (women in particular) beating themselves up for no longer being a size 4 and feeling lower than dirt if they don't have a flat stomach. or have cellulite  Haven't you noticed most women don't have a flat stomach and have cellulite?  it's normal.  Perfection is abnormal.  Let it go.

Letting Go of Unrealistic Standards

My Transformation Tuesday is  about mindset:  I have decided to let go of unrealistic standards and just focus on being the best version of myself that I can be.  I don't need to feel like I have to be at the perfect weight or have the perfect body in order to be credible or win approval.  As long as I'm doing my best and preaching what I practice, then I feel that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing.

Rihanna Roc Me Out Face

My confidence is not coming from whether or not my clothes are a size 4 but my confidence is coming from getting stronger, improving my endurance, and range of motion.  Oh and for single people, that confidence is what is going to draw them in.  Looks may draw in the shallow and surface level folks but confidence is going to be what keeps em intrigued.

Rather than spending my workout time obsessing about flaws, I'm out there training for longevity and to not look or feel my age. I am out there having a great time and I am proud that I can move better than I did and I am stronger than I was in my 20's. That feels so much better than constantly picking myself apart and working out as some sort of punishment.

Today I would like to encourage you to ditch all of the negative self talk, tell yourself that you are FABULOUS, forget about all of your "flaws" ,put on whatever music gets you going (Today was Rihanna),  enjoy moving your body and feeling ALIVE.  Be intentional about loving your body.  Transform your mindset.

LIVE BETTER