This week ADOFitness trainers will be addressing their perceptions and relationships with food prior to implementing flexible dieting methods. Coach Tara shares her story.

Throughout my life I have never really “dieted”. I pole vaulted in college and tried to eat what I thought was relatively healthy with the knowledge I had. I could literally eat anything and everything I wanted and my body would never really change. I would say my diet was about 80% whole foods and 20% anything and everything you can imagine. I mean if I gave you a dollar for every bagel and cream cheese I had then I would be rich! (insert laughing crying face emoji) Anyways little did I know, there was a lot more going on in my body that I was not aware of. Later that year after the season was over I got diagnosed with Lupus and my perspective of food began to change.

I started to realize the importance of eating good wholesome foods and the negative affects of all the processed garbage I was eating. With lupus you feel very very tired all the time as your immune system is working overtime causing a lot of inflammation. Now I am not going to lie to you, that year really sucked. I laid in bed for a lot of it and had very little energy for work let alone hanging out with friends which started to become very lonely. This made me want to eat better and provide my body with food that would help restore my energy and reduce the inflammation, anything to get my butt out of bed and moving again.
That year I lost a lot of muscle and any curves I had sort of just disappeared along with some of my confidence. So I decided enough is enough! If I want to live a certain way and look a certain way, then I am going to have to change a lot of different things in my life starting with my diet. Now this is the part where I found flexible dieting! My boyfriend was good friends with Amber and I had seen her post about flexible dieting. Now I know myself and there was no way I was going to be able to eat the same boring “bro diet” day in and day out so flexible dieting was the way to go. I started researching everything I could and had recently got my Personal Training Cert so I felt I had a decent amount of knowledge to give this a try. Now starting out I was definitely not perfect by any means but I could tell immediately that my body had seriously been lacking a good amount of calories. I started adding more and more food and I started feeling stronger, had more energy, and the more food I ate the leaner I was getting. I started to see little muscles that I never thought I would. This really started motivating me and I started really getting into it. I just couldn’t believe that I was actually eating more food and starting to look better and feel better when my perception had always correlated dieting with starving haha. Since learning about flexible dieting and the importance of providing my body with enough food, I have felt tremendously better. My energy level is manageable, my confidence is better, and I am able to live a sustainable life by incorporating more food into my daily routine. Being able to find balance with food and exercise to counteract the negative aspects in your life is really an amazing thing!