My entire life, I’ve struggled with balance. This program has been instrumental with helping me find balance and moderation for the first time ever. Don’t get me wrong, I still slip up on the reg, but I don’t sprial out of control like I used to. Showing up for my Accountability Group makes me get my shit back together every time. With all my weird patterns and history with disordered eating, I think about my little girls and how to not mess them up. EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. I’m so careful about what I say and how I talk about food and fitness around them. I mean, I even get pissed at Christmas when all the books use the “f word” when describing Santa. I want to expose them to healthy delicious food and not chemical-filled processed shit, but I don’t want to restrict them. I used to even get worked up about what they were feeding my kids at preschool. But here’s the thing, I can’t be in control all the time. Now that I’ve figured out a good balance for me, it’s so important that I find a good balance for them.
And then, the CEO of the company I work for, Carl Daikler, came to Charleston to give a speech and he said the most genius thing of all time and it made everything click. HOME IS WHERE THE HEALTH IS. It’s totally acceptable to feed them pizza, fries, juice boxes when we are out and about at dinner or at birthday parties or wherever, but at home we eat healthy. Home is where I teach them about balanced nutrition and eating real, non-processed foods and trying new things. It’s where they see their Mommy and Daddy work out every single day and know that is a part of daily life. This was seriously an epiphany for me, and it really lets me off the hook. When we are out and they want a bag of chips, the answer is YES. If they want to go out for ice cream, the answer is YES. I love the idea of the 80/20 rule, and this is a manageable way for me to handle this. 80 percent of their food, I have total control over and it’s going to be high quality, not processed, clean and delicious. And then the other 20 percent, we are going to go with the flow. Home is where the health is.
