America's Excuse

Americas Excuse

I have to say I’ve been running across a lot of excuses lately. As the weather gets colder more people seem to be getting sick. On top of that the holiday season is getting closer and closer and I keep thinking to myself, how many people are using all of these things as an excuse to be unhealthy, not be 100% in love with yourself and your body, all in the name of “The Holiday Season.”

What I realized is that the “holiday season” is a giant, collective, American excuse to GIVE UP!

I am here to challenge you to NOT GIVE IN! Don’t do it. Don’t give in to this ridiculous excuse to eat like crap and not have time for exercise or being healthy.

There are 8 weeks until thanksgiving and that means that you have 8 weeks to train yourself to be healthy during the busy, crazy, holiday season. It’s never too late to start so start NOW! I think there is a correlation between how out of it people get during the holidays and how they are treating their bodies.

Here are a few pointers to be on top of your game….

1) Find support. Join a workout group; find a friend to keep you accountable. I’ve got some great classes ( see below) to help you with this.

2) Start NOW. Don’t wait till the next time you go to store. Don’t wait until you finish off all the crappy food in your fridge.

3) Find info on clean eating. See my blog for recipes and resources. All your holiday sweets and things don’t have to be totally annihilating. Use alternative sweeteners, find gluten free recipes, use whole foods, do your own cooking!

4) If you have a goal why would you give up for 6 weeks or so? Keep going, keep pushing. Only you can put things in your way.

5) Believe in yourself and don’t let everyone else discourage you when they ask you “why aren’t you eating that…just have a little, it won’t hurt you.”

6) Lead by silent example, while everyone else is eating themselves into a coma over the holidays you will be productive, feel great, and be on track with whatever your goals are.

What is Clean eating?

Clean eating is a broad term to mean that you eat foods that are minimally or not processed at all and are in their purest, most nutritious and whole form. To eat clean you must shop for your own food, cook your own food, and I'm not going to sugar coat it, spend quite a bit of time researcing and educating yourself about what "clean" will mean for you and how you can make it palatable and work for your lifestyle.

Now when I say, "work for your lifestyle" this might be too broad. If you want to eat clean, you will have to change your lifestyle to fit clean eating. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You have to change your habits and your way of thinking if you are going to make clean eating your way of eating because it's not easy. I'm not trying to scare you, I just want you to understand what all this entails and not sugar coat it. The truth is that ingesting most of the food that is available and what we would call "easy" is the same as ingesting a low level poison into your body. Sugar, refined grains, dairy, gluten, soy.... these are all things that are sabotaging your digestive system, hormone regulation, and overall wellness of your body.

So I'm sure by now you are wondering how you eat clean. My simple answer is: Go Paleo. What is paleo? In the shortest possible way paleo is lean meats, fruits and vegetables, and nuts and seeds. If you can't find it and eat it raw, then you aren't eating it(obviously we usually cook out meat nowadays, but we can eat it raw).

"The Paleo Diet is a way of eating in the modern age that best mimics diets of our hunter-gatherer ancestors - combinations of lean meats, seafood, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. By eating the foods that we are genetically adapted to eat, followers of the Paleo Diet are naturally lean, have acne-free skin, improved athletic performance, and are experiencing relief from numerous metabolic-related and autoimmune diseases."


This means NO sugar, NO grains, NO dairy, NO beans, NO alcohol and NO startchy roots or tubers. Having said that, yes I think there is some value in whole grains like quinoa however what I recommend to some clients when beginning a program with me is to just go full paleo for 30 days in order to normalize their insulin levels and just clear their bodies of everything that might be messing with their systems. If you've been eating lots of sugr and grains, refined or not, for a long time you need to increase your insulin sensitivity in order to bring your hormone levels back to normal. That being said, any grain, whole or not, will cause too large of an insulin spike and will just hinder your efforts to normalize insulin sensitivity ( see more on this here). This is definitely situational and it depends on the person and what their stress levels and other medical issues are. Some people find it easier to ease their way into paleo before they begin their 30 days in order to lessen the stress on their bodies.

I can tell you I've already had one client discover a dairy allergy while doing her 30 days. She had had hives for 10 YEARS prior to starting, and was taking an antihistamine to control her internal hives so she could eat comfortably, but still had them on places on her skin. About a week into it, she noticed she had absolutely no hives at all!!! That is a drastic example, but easy to see the benefit. Imagine what is happening inside your body that you can't feel or see?

The bottom line here is eat REAL food. If its processed, it's not real. Look at your labels, if it's got more than 4-5 ingredients and you can't understand any of them it's not real. If you didn't make it yourself, it's probably not real food. Be conscious of what you cook with, make sure there aren't any chemicals and other low level poisons in your food. Find out how gluten, sugar, grains, and dairy, effect your body. Go clean, go paleo. Go all out or start with laying off the sugar and the grains for a week or so and go from there. This is your body, and it's the only one you have. Take care of it!!!!

You can find out more at http://www.thepaleodiet.com/