This week was a very emotionally challenging week because I had to work through the emotional obstacles to resuming my pole dancing workout AND I had to iron out my eating plan.

The emotional obstacles were a big one because it not only tied into doing my physical exercises and pole moves, it also tied into my resistance to eating healthy.

As I have said many times before, learning how to overcome the underlying emotional obstacles is THE MOST critical step to getting back on track to making significant real and lasting changes.

One of my biggest underlying obstacles with my eating plan is that I really don’t like to cook and I don’t want to take the time and do it.  That’s just how I honestly feel on the inside.  I love shopping for healthy food, researching and understanding the best way to eat healthy, get lean, and physically fit, but I hate the cooking part.  This one obstacle can actually sabotage my good eating efforts because eating clean actually takes some planning and work.  Eating out all the time is easier (for me).  If you love to cook, please give yourself a big pat on the back right now because it’s just not the case for all of us!!!!

To make a long story short, I am working to overcome these obstacles by spending only one day a week pre-cooking food for the entire week rather than cooking every day.  I also keep a quick list of acceptable foods on my fridge so that when I am hungry, my inner resistance to cooking doesn’t cause me to forget all the EASY healthy options that are already in my fridge, hence preventing me from going out to eat again.

Another underlying obstacle was time to exercise.  I have a very busy lifestyle and even though I love pole dancing, the bottom line is that sometimes I only have 10-20 minutes to exercise.  My ego tells me that 10 minutes won’t make a difference in my body so why do it?  I had to just learn not to listen to that lie.  So I created a 5-minute workout routine that I can do anywhere, even in a hotel so I never skip a workout again.

The goal for me is consistency rather than perfection.  I want to be consistent on my workout days.  I prefer to pole dance and workout for about an hour but if I can’t do that, I am not going to quite.

Here is a quick and short little workout that will work your abs, arms, and legs that I do and you don’t even need a pole to do it:

Finally, in this week I ironed out all my eating guidelines for my diet plan. I hate to call it a “diet plan” because I am not a fan of fad diets, but everyone does need to plan a course of action in terms of eating to be fit.

Pole dancing is challenging and the body needs better nutrition and fuel to have enough energy to execute the move, especially the more advanced pole dancing tricks.

You also need to be eating clean if you expect to see the physical changes in your body to get that lean appearance.  Research has shown that your diet is about 80% of your success in re-shaping your body.    You can’t eat junk food and expect exercise to change your body, it doesn’t work like that.

Your body needs to have increased energy, be an efficient detoxing machine (this prevents per-mature aging too), and it needs to burn fat as fuel, not sugar.

I generally do have a pretty clean eating lifestyle that I stick to but when I fell off the wagon, my diet slipped too, I’m not going to lie.  Sometimes when you get off track far enough, you have to remind yourself of the “plan”.

I have an under-active thyroid and take medications for hypothyroidism so I have a unique (but very common problem in America) health problem.

Addressing adrenal fatigue and supporting the thyroid is important for every woman, but especially for me since I have already been diagnosed with thyroid problems.

My eating lifestyle consists of the following:

• Eating organic food every chance I can.
• Eating Lean Protein Sources
• Eating vegetables with every meal.
• Controlling Blood Sugar spikes my monitoring the timing of when and how I eat carbohydrates.
• Avoiding simple carbohydrates like sugar, white flour, most bread (yes even whole wheat), toxic beverages like soda pop, and not over eating fruit, etc.  Yes, I still love dessert!  I am a sucker for pancakes and pastries, here is a healthy way to have desserts guilt free everyday >>
• Taking good quality supplements to control cortisol (the fat storing hormone, especially in the mid-section) and compensate for nutritional deficiencies.
• Reducing my stress levels. (this is HUGE)
• Eating every 2-3 hours.
• And monitoring my protein intake through my body’s hunger signals.
• Limiting Dairy.

I plan to talk a lot more about why I have made the dietary choices above throughout the weekly recovering series.  You can use the subscribe form at the bottom of this page to receive future article updates to this series if you aren’t already on my subscriber list.

Please leave me a comment below and let me know what you challenges are.  Future comments affect the future articles posted in this blog.

I would love to hear from you!

Until then, treat your body with the love and respect it deserves >>

Feed it with care and love, get regular exercise, and lower your stress levels because if you don’t, nobody else will do it for you and your will pay the price!!