Take a look inside your kitchen. What type of foods do you see? In your freezer do you see microwave meals, ice cream and chocolate cake? Is there soda, ranch dressing and cookie dough in your refrigerator? What’s in your cupboards? Do you have fruit snacks, pop-tarts and granola bars?
Let’s go in the other direction.
In your freezer do you have frozen veggies, individually wrapped chicken breasts and fish? In your refrigerator do you have cottage cheese, apples and oranges, green peppers and Greek yogurt? In your cupboards is there quinoa, almond butter and canned albacore? Which situation best sounds like you? Ok. Now take a look at your body? Are you slightly overweight, always looking for the next trick to finally get you ripped up and in shape, or are you already there, with a schedule of eating down to a “T”? What is in your kitchen says a lot about you. It tells you pretty much, whether you are going to be a lean machine or a junk food queen.
Let’s look at this from a very simple point of view. Not everyone knows how to eat healthy, nutritious food, because not everyone knows what it is. But as a general rule, the cleaner, less processed foods you eat, the more nutritious they are. With that being said, re-assess your kitchen. How much of the products that are in your fridge have more than a couple ingredients? The more processed a food, the less a “food” it really is. If your body is being filled up with chemical after chemical. How do you expect to get in shape? While supplementation DOES have a role in achieving that body that you want, of REAL, WHOLE foods and supplementation, you need to find balance. That is really why they are called supplements. If you fill yourself up with supplements, how WHOLE will you really be? Think whole foods first, and then think supplementation.
It’s a lot easier to eat poorly than to eat purely, I’ll give you that. Food preparation is a huge battle for my clients, who are strapped for time usually. But if you think about it, eating purely can be VERY simple and quick. They actually make organic canned chicken breast now. Stores like Trader Joe’s and Fresh and Easy make instant individually wrapped organic brown rice, and every grocery store I’ve ever been to has bell peppers. That’s three items right there which are extremely healthy and can make a great whole food meal in less than 5 minutes. Protein shakes are even easier to make. Put the protein powder in a shaker, add water or milk, and shake! Now you’ve got a delicious Infinite Pro™ 100% Whey protein shake in less than 30 seconds. The reason of not having time to eat healthy has just been thrown out the door. To get in your car, drive to a fast food place, order your food, take it back to your place, and then eat it I bet it takes longer than 5 minutes. With frozen dinners this is also the case. There is no reason to not eat healthy.
Filling your body with cookies, donuts, instant meals, and soda, will get you a whole lot of good feelings in your mouth, but none in your body. After you eat these things just think of how you feel. Both mentally and physically, you become guilty, and let’s face it, lazy. Because now you feel bad about what you ate your whole stress level changes. So you exercise. And now thinking of exercising as punishment for eating poorly, you want to take away the guilt. And now because you associate your workout with punishment, you don’t get a great feeling, which, no one wants. See how this cycle starts? On the other hand, how do you feel when you eat a spinach salad with chicken breast and raspberries, an orange, and some whole wheat toast; pretty good right? And when you eat this way, because you are doing the right things outside of the gym, the gym and workouts seem effortless, painless, and actually enjoyable. These are the two different ends of the spectrum,
So when you realize what you are eating, you will figure out, what you are. You are what you eat.
