Some of the most frequent questions I get asked is what or how am I eating, do I follow the HELP guides? Another one that has popped up with some surprising consistency is something along the lines of “I don’t have any issues with working out but I can’t control my diet, I am a picky eater, and I don’t cook at home!”
Every time I read that question in my inbox I immediately think these girls must think I have uncovered some magic algorithm that allowed me to get my results and not eat well and they want to know how they can too!
The brutal truth is you can’t and if you are one who has asked me that, you can attest to that being my response. I want to be able to tell them I have some magical work around, but I don’t. You can’t eat junk and get the results you’re looking for. I suppose maybe out there in the world is that one magical unicorn who can, but for us average, normal ladies, you simply cannot. 
Because I get the question with some regularity and it always has those 3 points in it, I figured I would go ahead and answer it here and expand on it with what I have come to know about diet in these past two years. PS- I am not referring to a diet like a crash course 3 week plan to lose 10 pounds, I am referring to diet as in what you eat day in and day out.
My Instagram bio says I’ve been doing Kayla Itsines, BBG workouts for a year and a half, but that is just the time I have been serious about it. I really started the 12 week program in January of 2015 and it took me 6 months to complete with no visible progress. Why? Diet.
Because I didn’t have my diet in order I wasn’t seeing any results, to prove to you here is the photo I took in Jan 2015 and the one I took again in July 2015 which is what I use as my start image in all my transformation posts. As you can see, I actually got bigger!
I was working out with semi-consistency, if you asked me then I would say oh yes I work out! Because I was, I was getting up in the morning and running or doing BBG workouts. Sure I would miss a day or maybe a full week and restart but I was working out!
What I wasn’t doing, I wasn’t eating in balance.
I was drinking a lot, probably 5 days a week and with that I was eating a lot of junk foods. “Healthy” freezer foods, not healthy freezer foods, lots of eating out and lots of bread and cheese. I would eat ok for most of the day and then binge on a ton junk at night and call it balance. 
I am a huge fan of the Whole30 program. It taught me balance and what eating right can really do for your body. I went into it a little more in this past post but I will highlight it again here because it is what I credit most of my learning how to eat right.
Whole30 is a totally body reset where you feed your body real, whole foods and eliminate the processed foods, sugars, and inflammatory foods (such as dairy, wheat, corn, soy and alcohol). You might not know what these foods are doing to your body because you have been eating them for so long. Once you eliminate them and reintroduce them, you really see how they affect you.
While I am not gluten or dairy intolerant, I definitely see and feel the bloat and lethargy they create in me now that I have seen what it’s like without them. Not only did I lose some weight on it (about 6 pounds with every 30 day round) but my face cleared up and my skin was glowing! Having problem skin since youth, I wish I had known about this back then.
Here is what else Whole30 taught me, cooking at home is not hard. It just takes planning. I know you may not like to cook at home or don’t think you’re good at it but it’s not as hard as your head might make it out to be. Cooking at home is one of the key reasons I have been able to lose weight and keep it off since beginning this journey. I wasn’t doing it in the beginning before I got serious, and it showed. Here is my progress once I began to get my diet in check.
Making dinners and lunches for the week can be as easy as a crock pot and roasting vegetable and chicken in the over on Sundays. Then when you get home and are tired instead of eating a frozen meal with tons of additives, you can just reach for a premade meal. Try it for one week and you’ll see what I mean. Here
Because you are controlling what you are eating the majority of the time by preparing your own meals, you don’t have to feel bad when you splurge and enjoy yourself out with friends or family! That’s balance!
So, I’m sorry to break it to you, I don’t have some magical secret to my weight loss, but there just is no secret! It’s the same as it has always been, diet and exercise. But here is a tip, diet is so much more important than exercise. If you’re struggling with doing them both I suggest starting with just diet for a few weeks until you get the hang of that and then start to incorporate exercise. If you are serious and want to see just what eating clean can do, I like the Whole30.
All the sayings are true: you cannot out exercise a bad diet, abs are made in the kitchen, weight loss is 90% diet and 10% exercise.
