The question is: Where do we start?
Year in and year out, we almost (or maybe we actually do?) punish ourselves in January for enjoying over the Holidays. With parties and social gatherings happening the entire season, it’s difficult not to feel guilty about our “misbehavior”.
If there’s on thing I always tell clients, friends and followers, it’s not to see indulgence as “cheating”. Enjoying food in the company of people you love IS HEALTHY. The traditional Filipino culture involves bonding over food and that helps keep us emotionally (and socially) healthy. This means you don’t have to overthink your diet. As long as 80% of the time, your health habits involve clean eating and physical activity , you can have your cake and eat it for remaining 20% wink
If one of your 2020 goals looks something like the title I wrote for this post but you can’t seem to drop the pin on a starting point, then here are three important thoughts that can help you shift your perspective on diet and exercise to hopefully get you started.
- YOUR MINDSET. It’s not a game of all or nothing. If you start to accept that you will fall off a hundred, a thousand times, then you’ll have no problem turning things around at the soonest possible opportunity. Had Fast Food for lunch? Have a huge salad or a heaping serving of veggies in your meal for dinner.
- YOUR MOVEMENT ROUTINE. Your workouts don’t have to be “killer” all the time. I’d rather have you training 5 days a week at a moderate intensity than twice a week at an intensity level your body can’t recover from. This is especially true if you are predisposed to stress at work or any other environment you are exposed to. Go with something you are excited to do, not something that you think will get you shredded in x number of days or something you think will work for you just because it did on someone else.
- YOUR NUTRITION. It starts with your relationship and perspective of food. The most common shortcut I’d see people do is to just eliminate Carbohydrates. If the carb we’re talking about are refined, added sugar especially those in ultraprocessed, pre-packaged food, then I’m with you. But if you’re only reading the sweeping headlines that say a high protein or high fat diet is the way to go then this is where it stops being sustainable. The quality of macros is just as, if not more, important than how much of them you’re having. And if you’re adding more whole foods into your diet, your body’s hunger and fullness signals come into balance and there’s just less need for you to obsess over these numbers. I’ve written an article that busts the myth on one of the most demonized whole foods: the innocent potato (I’ll link it at the bottom of this blog post). It’s one of my favorite examples to use because it’s inexpensive, it’s genuinely healthy (it all depends on how it’s prepared) and it’s gotten a bad beating from all the diet fads that have come and gone. When people think of potatoes it’s often the thought of “bad carb” that comes to mind. One other thing that we need to change about the way we see food is how we put them in these categories as if they belonged to a box with a single label. Potatoes (medium-sized, skin left on) are mainly complex carbs, but did you know that they also contained 3g of Protein? The same applies to plenty of other plant-based foods that we’ve been told to take out of our diets. It’s time we learn to go beyond looking at the macros and seeing food as a whole. That’s when our relationship with it changes for the better.
And before I close this off, one more myth I’d like to bust is the idea of salads never filling you up. Well, here’s an Easy Southwest Potato Salad recipe you and your fam just might love. Enjoy!
