I was visiting my good friend, Sara in Colorado this past week and we were reminiscing about years ago when we both were a lot more obsessed with dieting. In fact, our friendship started at the gym, when she was trying to get into my fitness center for free and I had to throw her out. Lol. But we have always bonded over a mutual love for exercise and a love/hate relationship with our thighs ;)

Sara lived in NC for a time, and then moved with her hubby to Colorado after grad school and started working. But after she moved in 2007, we still kept in touch, mainly via email and exchanged stories from the gym, shared what new cardio routines we were doing (“This hour of incline walking 7 days a week is really helping my cellulite!” Lol. #idie) and we certainly exchanged plenty of body woes.

One thing that we often wrote to one another was, “Ugh, I just WISH I could just eat clean and do it forever!”

And I know you have voiced that frustration too, because I read it dozens of times a week in the emails you send me.

Today, I want to deconstruct that statement.

The term “clean eating” has been getting a lot of flack lately. I think people are taking it too literally: “Clean eating? What’s that? Do you have to wash all your food??” 

I think we all know what ‘clean eating’ is. It’s not literally washing your food with soap. It’s a way of eating that includes non-processed, whole foods: vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, hypoallergenic carbs, nuts, seeds, etc.

The concept has been around for a long time in the bodybuilding community (it’s pretty much 90% of the bodybuilder’s diet), and then Tosca Reno, along with her late husband Bob, former Oxygen magazine publisher, brought it more mainstream with her books and the magazine, Clean Eating.

Clean eating sounds amazing, doesn’t it? It makes you feel like your literal insides will be clean. How healthy! And it even rhymes with lean! It’s irresistible.

But while the definition of clean eating is up for debate, I don’t really want to talk about that. I want to talk about expectations and why we keep trying to fit a circular peg into a square hole.

Because here’s the thing: you are human. You are not getting up on stage to compete against Nicole Wilkins. You don’t have all day every day to spend buying, prepping, cooking, and eating food. You have other priorities besides your physique, and lawwwdy, sometimes you just want something fast and convenient! And that tastes effing good!

This is fine.

Wanting to find healthier workarounds for your eating, including yes, prepackaged foods, prepared foods, precooked and cut foods, a protein bar or two, some protein shakes, whatever, is not bad. It doesn’t make you less-than or not good enough.

And whether or not those things actually count as “clean” doesn’t matter. What matters is a program’s do-ability—your ability to implement it. The reason you feel frustrated and judge yourself as weak or bad is because you are holding yourself to some arbitrary standard of what you think you should be able to do.

I wouldn’t be able to “eat clean forever” if you held a gun to my head. I just value my convenience and my enjoyment too much. To me, there is no better or worse, it's just about choices.

Remember, when it comes to #moderation365, the goal is not to eat clean. The goal is to eat for satisfaction. Remember the #SatisfactionFactor? This is the level of satisfaction of your meal on a scale from 1 to 10. You should always aim to get as close to a 10 as possible.

And what is satisfying? How do you know if you are eating for satisfaction? Contrary to what you might immediately think, eating everything to your heart’s desire is not satisfying. It’s not satisfying to feel stuffed and physically uncomfortable. Likewise, it’s also not satisfying to scarf down something that tastes like chalk in 30 seconds straight out of a Tupperware. That feels depriving and restrictive and like, "Now what?"

And the reason you set out trying to “eat clean forever” and end up wanting to eat things that taste good/better is because you are missing the one key component to sustainability: enjoyment.

You increase the satisfaction of your meals one of two ways:

Trying to force yourself into liking bland chicken and broccoli with lemon pepper on it, and then expecting to be able to eat it every day for the rest of your life is madness. It’s practically masochism.

And the expectation that you can and should eat food that you don’t really enjoy for the rest of your life is a huge trap. And the reason you can’t “eat clean forever” is because on some level you are not satisfied enough by it.

That doesn’t make you weak-willed or lazy or not good enough. It makes you you. And human. And just like the rest of us. Believe me, Nicole Wilkins is trying to find ways to enjoy her food more, I guarantee it.

So when you start a new plan or go back to an old one that you’ve had success with in the past, and find yourself falling off the wagon, not being able to follow it (yes, even if you have been able to follow it in the past!), realize it’s not because you suck. It’s because you don’t like eating that way. And that’s fine. Work to find a way you do like to eat by increasing your meals’ #SatisfactionFactor.

Increasing your satisfaction doesn’t mean going in the complete opposite direction either, to the point of binging. I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to increase the palatability of your foods without gaining a thousand pounds.

If you follow the #moderation365 hashtag on Instagram, you can see some awesome ways that many ladies are increasing the satisfaction of their meals. Here are some ideas:

Those are just a few ways. I would still say that all those things are healthy. And yes, can all be part of a sustainable way of eating that over time, gets results.

The only way to sustainable results is through sustainable eating. And if you can’t “eat clean forever” then it means it’s not sustainable for you (it’s not for me and that’s fine!). Add some elements to make it easier to stick with. It doesn’t make you weak, it makes you smart.

Let me know what you think! And if you are not sharing your satisfying eats on IG with the #moderation365 hashtag, please start! I love seeing your choices and getting some new ideas!

Until next time!

Xo,

Jill