I don’t talk about nutrition and diet much on my blog and I realized that it’s a huge mistake. You see, 80% of anyone’s success in any fitness regimen is what you eat. As my hair dresser said, “You can’t out work a bad diet”. It’s very true.

I want woman to enjoy pole fitness as a lifestyle and a way to stay in shape for the years to come.

So, that being said, it’s about high time we talked about what it means to eat clean and be healthy.

I’m not a fan of rigid diets, I am a fan of creating a lifestyle where you always eat clean and you are happy about it. There are no feelings of deprivation involved like there is in a “weight loss diet”.

The word diet has a sense of “temporary” to it, like you get a change to “get off” of the diet someday.

A healthy lifestyle is something you never get off of. The dancers, woman, men, people, and athletes that you see in life who always stay fit looking stay that way because what they eat NEVER CHANGES.

Do they eat out? Sure, we all go for McDonald’s sometimes. Do they eat desserts? Sure. Do they drink alcohol or wine? Sure. BUT all in moderation.

The good eating habits drastically outweigh the “bad” snacks and meals that creep back in sometimes.

Now that being said, I do know that an occasional stricter “diet” can give a rapid fat loss boost in the beginning and this serves useful when I am wanting to get in shape quickly, like getting a bikini body for the summer beach fun.   So a short term more rigid diet helps to serve that purpose and then default back to clean eating when the diet is over.

Clean eating also maintains the results from my favorite short term rapid fat loss hacks over the long term, preventing yo-yo results.

The goal is to eat 60% clean or greater. That means that you are always getting better and the scales of health are always tipped in your favor.

Master Healthy Substitutions

Creating a lifestyle of eating clean and healthy is a progressive task.

Many fail by trying to change everything at once. That is difficult because your taste buds and cravings are adjusted to your bad eating habits. Taking those bad foods out of your diet all at once creates a sense of deprivation.

The moment you feel deprived is the moment you could potentially fail.

You must allow your taste buds time to adjust and learn to love healthier foods.

How do you do that?

The best way to go about making permanent healthy changes is to gradually replace once bad food with a healthy substitute at a time. Of course the faster you substitute and replace your unhealthy foods, the quicker you will see the results in your body.

So how do you substitute? Let’s use brownies as an example. I love chocolate and brownies. I am a sucker for the sea salt and milk chocolate bars at Ingles.

The first thing you do is find healthier and more nutritious substitutes for the main ingredients. Chocolate is the main ingredient. So trading milk chocolate for dark organic cocoa powder or cacao nibs is healthier.

Another main ingredient in brownies is flour. Substitute the white flour for a more nutritious flour like coconut flour or almond meal. Finally, switch the eggs to free range organic eggs, the oil or butter to organic cold pressed coconut oil and the white sugar for Swerve and WALLAH! You have a healthy brownie substitute.

Start to think about what is most unhealthy in your current diet. Choose one thing and do a quick Google search on creative ways to substitute or re-create that food in a healthy way that would nutritiously benefit your body.

Making New Clean Eating Habits Stick

Stick to eat new food substitution you chose for 30 days minimum before you give up on it. Studies have shown that habits stick best after 30 days. Makes tweaks to the recipe as necessary to suit you needs as well.   Let the creative juices flow!

After 30 days have passed, then choose a few new foods to substitute and wait for those to stick for another 30 days.   After several months, your whole diet will have changed to clean eating and it won’t feel like a hard diet either.

Habit stacking is also a great trick to getting new lifestyle changes to stick.

Habit stacking means you add one new habit into an existing one.   For example, do all my upper body stretches while I walk my dog daily.

Make new habits SMALL and stack them into something you are already doing and one cool thing that happens, you will naturally want to do more of your new habit IF you only commit to a small amount, like a few minutes at a time.  Crazy sounding I know, but it works.

If you need some help with ideas, please leave me a comment below and I will be glad to share what I do in an attempt to help you along the way.