It Is SO All About The Diet!

How did we ever come up with the idea that the winning formula to the body we’ve always wanted is: 

“exercise for ‘x’ number of minutes per day (possibly hating every minute of it )+ eat ‘healthfully’ but ‘with everything in moderation”?

It is not.

What you eat is far more than half the equation.  The exact percentage, I cannot tell you, however  it’s nonsense to think that grinding away on the elliptical for an hour means one can eat whatever they want as as much as they want of it for the rest of the day.

It gets even worse within the athlete population, due to the misconception that if you’re ‘out there burning all those calories; it doesn’t matter what you eat, you just need fuel from any source’.

I will use myself as an example here.

Years before I knew what the Paleo diet was, I was racing triathlon, following a typical training schedule, eating well (in the context that I didn’t know yet about the harm I was causing my guts by eating gluten, soy and dairy along with my veggies, fruits and protein), and constantly stressed out and irritated that I never looked the way I wanted to look.  

Sure, I was healthy, not overweight, but not as lean as I wanted to be and I just always looked the same.  I looked the same before I began racing triathlon and I was hitting the stair master and the weights; I looked the same even before that as a teenager before I could drive and I was exercising in the living room with mom’s Jane Fonda VHS tapes.

And this was without eating fast food, junk food, sweets or any of the other foods that, all Paleo-ness aside, we know aren’t a good choice of things to put in our bodies.

I raced Ironman triathlon for four years and I looked the same. 

It was not until I began following the True Paleo approach that I finally began to shed weight, slowly but surely, and over the course of my first year and a half, settle comfortably into the lean physique I’d always worked so hard towards, but had never been able to realize and have remained there ever since.

And it did not ever, once, feel like any of the restrictive diets I’d tried, including but not limited to Gluten-Free, The Zone, The Blood Type and a Vegan Diet.

So even if you’re someone who never splurges on foods that may be tempting to some, whether it’s sweets like ice cream and cookies or savory choices like pizza and nachos, goes to the gym religiously five days per week and follows what is perceived to be a healthy diet, changes are better than not that you’ve still got some hidden dietary demons that are preventing you from reaching your goals.

Making the change to begin to integrate Paleo into your diet can be your ticket to a healthy approach to not only eating, but an entire lifestyle, where you have fresh, local veggies at every meal along with a healthy dose of natural fat and wild protein, and have that meal often, in order to have soaring energy levels, a balanced blood sugar reading, improved mental clarity and… a lean body.

There are no tricks and it is not going to happen overnight.  If you have a lot of weight to lose, it may come off quite a bit initially and then taper off, but remember that slow and steady is the way to go.

If it took you five years to put on fifty pounds, remember that when you’re beating yourself up that you ‘only lost two pounds in two weeks’.

That is progress, and those two pounds will become five, then ten and so on, until you’re once again wearing those favorite skinny jeans or having to buy new belts because the ones you have now are too big.

Here is the formula:

• Cut the grains, the beans, the dairy and the sugar.
• Make plenty of veggies, wild protein and good, real fat (avocado, coconut and olive oil) the components of every meal.
• Move.

Now all you need to do is be patient and believe that eating real food will be your ticket to a body that exudes all the benefits of what you’re putting inside of it!