What Are You Eating? Diet Is Important!

I was doing a podcast interview about my life as a fitness instructor and trainer and the host asked me “Is it true that you can’t out-exercise a bad diet.”  I 100% support this statement. Changing your diet will always yield much more drastic results than changing your workout plan. This is not to discredit exercising, please don’t think I don’t want you to exercise. I simply want you to be more aware of what you put in your mouth.

Diet & Exercise:

Looking for change in your body? You will see more success on good diet paired with 3 hours of light exercise a week, than on a bad diet paired with 7 hours of intense exercise a week. Really. That’s the truth.

It seems simple. Just remember “A moment on your lips, forever on your hips.” Is that candy bar worth it?

You know what else is silly? The ridiculous belief that someone can get abs by doing endless sit ups, or a “thigh gap” (ugh) by spending hours on the inner thigh machine. Guess what? You can’t spot reduce! Seriously, you can’t, so stop! Yes, magazines post plans that are titled “Get a flat stomach with these core exercises!” or “Blast Back Fat!” they are misleading you and not giving you the full picture. They are doing it to boost sales. If you want a flat stomach or a fat-less back, you need to lose fat and gain muscle. Doing those “spot treatment” muscle exercises will certainly help you build some shapely lean muscle mass, but that’s only half the equation. The next part is losing the layer of fat over your shapely muscle. And unlike muscle, you cannot spot reduce fat. Sorry, it just doesnt’ work like that.  It requires lowering your overall body fat percentage… everywhere.

As far as reducing your overall body fat percentage,

Get your diet under control. This is simultaneously the easiest & most difficult way to cut down on body fat. And getting your diet under control does not necessarily mean eat less, it means eat right. Proper nutrition is hard, even for the most experienced athletes and nutritionists, because it requires consistency. Frankly, eating healthy all day, every day, is more effort than banging out a one-hour workout & being done with it. A good place to start is cutting processed foods out of your diet. And soda. Screw soda.

Get an accountability buddy and find something you like, be consistent, and most of all, be patient. The body is capable of amazing transformations, but it will always take time, and consistency.

• A rockin’ bod is made by a combination of building muscle and reducing fat, you cannot ignore one or the other.