Throughout the last 5 years of losing weight, competing, and helping others lose weight, I’ve begun to see a trend. Making the transition to “clean” eating, healthy habits and lifestyle changes is a lot like potty training! So much so, I can usually tell where a person is at in their journey by their questions and responses to things….and it’s very intriguing!! I thought this would be a fun blog topic to explore.

A true healthy lifestyles needs to involve many things – nutrition, cardio, resistance training, stretching, relaxation/rest, emotional health, etc. For a moment, lets take nutrition and exercise. Lifting heavy weights is extremely physically challenging, but mentally, fairly easy. Most people don’t leave the gym mentally exhausted. They may be crawling out after a leg day, but their minds are usually still strong (relatively speaking!!) It also only takes approximately 2 hours of one’s day to “check the exercise box off”.

Nutrition….now here’s the fun part! It doesn’t take much strength or effort at all to lift your hand to your mouth. VOILA! You’ve eaten! The problem lies in what am I supposed to eat? How much? How often? What diet plan should I follow? Are carbs bad? How much salt am I supposed to have? Are almonds a good snack? What portion size?………UGH!! Sooooo much information to gather and know! Now you’re probably mentally drained! Add to that you also have 16 hours of the day that you’re faced with eating or not and all of the food choices that come with that! Most people don’t think, “oh good! I don’t have to worry about eating for at least another 6 hours!” In fact, do you find yourself planning your next meal while eating the current one?

This is the problem. As my friend and coach Bobby put it, people “live to eat” instead of “eat to live”. And there are many reasons why. I recently asked my clients and Facebook contacts this question: “What is the #1 reason you think people are afraid to make healthy changes to their diets?” Each response was unique, as each person is unique.

I’m very excited to explore this with you! I would love your feedback and input as we go. One should never stop learning, and I believe we learn the most from sharing in each others experiences. I hope you will take the time to look at your nutrition from several different approaches and learn something you can apply to your healthy lifestyle goal.

So how, exactly, is learning how to eat better like potty training? You’ll have to check back and see! More to come!