There is no One Right Way.

When it comes to food, diet and exercise, there is no “one right way” to do things. Our metabolic makeup is as diverse as our eye colors! What works well for me may not work well for you, thus making it difficult to prescribe any one set diet that everyone should follow.

What I can say about all people is this: we all have to eat and we all have to exercise. When it comes to choosing food, home cooked, real food is always better than packaged, processed or restaurant prepared foods. After these basics, it is a matter of discovering through trial and error what works best for you.

Simply put, learning to eat well and be healthy will take some work.

So many people tell me this is too difficult for them, that they need to be told what to eat and how much to eat and, best of all, they want this miracle food in a form that takes 10 minutes or less to prepare!! To these people I say, get over it. It doesn’t exist. And as long as you continue to believe it does, you will be either yo-yo dieting for the rest of your life, or eventually become nutritionally unhealthy. Maybe even both.

This may sound harsh, but it’s the truth! I really believe we need to get over the idea that healthy food can come complete in a package.  Learning what to eat and learning how to cook can be done, as can finding time in a busy life to do this cooking. You just have to decide that your health and the health of your family is very important!

Misinformation: Your Nutritional Enemy

It is astonishing how much BAD information abounds in the world of “Fad Diets.” The onset of what I call the “Get Skinny Era” has completely over shadowed what should be the true purpose of eating well and exercising - Your Health!

So many of us want so desperately to be skinny that we cling on to these “fad diets” without ever realizing what they are actually doing to our bodies. For example, did you know that severely low caloric diets are one of the biggest scams on the market? Here’s how it works: you go on the pre-set diet, you eat exactly what “they” tell you to eat, not really knowing why you may or may not want to eat it from a nutritional stand point, only from a weight stand point. Then you literally starve yourself thin. You feel great about it at first because you’re getting what you wanted - to be thin! But then the weight loss starts to slow down. You blame yourself for going off of the diet (which you were destined to do because no healthy person can stick with these “starvation diets,” as I call them. We’re not built to starve!). The weight starts to creep back on - this time you gain weight until you are heavier than when you started! You think, “That diet worked for me before. I’m going to go back on it.” You do. You start to lose weight again, but this time it isn’t as much or as fast as you did the first time. But you blame age or bad exercise habits or some other explanation, never guessing that the true reason is that when you went on the diet the first time, your body, which is built for survival, doesn’t understand that you’re starving it to make it get skinny. It only understands that it’s starving. So it slows down your metabolism, causing your weight loss to slow. This, in turn, causes you to start gaining weight rapidly as soon as you set even a tiny toe outside that starvation level. So here you are, starving yourself again, only this time, your body knows it’s starving and slows the metabolism further quicker. So you starve yourself and lose the weight eventually. And eventually you go off the diet again and put the weight back on AGAIN. And AGAIN, you go back to where you started - with the diet that ruined your metabolism in the first place!

Is there a better way? Of course there is. You can repair your slowed metabolism and recreate a healthy body by learning how to eat food for it’s proper use - to nourish your body! For many, the prospect of learning about nutrition as opposed to having a pre-planned, pre-packaged “diet” seems like a lot of work. You think “I don’t have time, I’m too busy!” or “There’s so much information, I’ll never know it all, and I don’t really understand it to begin with!”

I say RUBBISH! There are GREAT online resources at your fingertips that make researching any nutritional question a quest that takes approximately only the effort of typing the words into the computer. And as for the vast amounts of information, yes, there is a lot out there. It is impossible to know it all. But I suggest trying this approach. Start small. Pick one thing to learn about. My favorite starter is to tell people to research the words “Partially Hydrogenated.” That typically changes people’s food choices overnight! Become a label reader. Start to ask yourself questions and then find the answers online. Soon you will discover that you know A LOT! Couple that ever growing knowledge with a good nutritionist and you will find the permanent successes you’ve only dreamed of in your Yo-Yo Fad Diets!