You Wear What You Eat

With the Thanksgiving holiday come and gone everyone seems to be diet/weight concentrated. Once a year most of us gather with family/friends, people we like and those we tolerate, to gorge on food and sip our favorite brew. This usually leaves us feeling bloated, lethargic, and we retreat to the couch in the hopes of a quick and painless digestion. Our poor bodies. Even being a vegetarian I couldn't help but sample all of the carb-overloaded potatoes, stuffing and pies, swearing to myself that I will work it off next week in the gym.

Several weeks before the holiday I noticed a surplus of articles and discussions come out on the different social media sites geared towards athletes: "What will you do to avoid holiday weight gain?" or "8 ways to avoid stuffing your face until you puke". Really? There's probably only one, not doing it, but I'm sure someone could come up with 7 others to make for a full article, and I'd still read it :)
Any who, the day after Thanksgiving I was having a conversation with my aunt about diet and how it effects our exercise....since 80% of it is what we put in our mouths. We gabbed a bit more about the impossible task of giving up diet coke and then she had mentioned that her sodium intake was up and that it was making her feel bloated. This got me to thinking....


In the past month I have been trying to keep consistent with a food journal but I was concentrating on the wrong things. I was focused primarily on the calories I was taking in when really I should have been looking at the sodium. Leading a busy lifestyle can put us in a vulnerable position, where we are all too quick to indulge in frozen, packaged and processed foods. I do. I love the Kashi meals in the frozen food aisle, but when I actually looked at the sodium content I was floored! No wonder I can't get rid of that last little bit of body fat! Sodium really is a secret killer to your diet, even if you're eating healthy, doesn't mean you're eating smart. So instead of getting worked up about one day of binge eating, we really should be more focused on the day to day intake. My aunt put it perfectly, "You wear what you eat". Maybe you are working out consistently, for an hour or two a day, but if you go home and feed your body crap you should probably expect it to stay there. If we could all physically see food sit on us or how much sodium we're really taking in, maybe we'd think twice before putting the last bite in our mouths. Food for thought friends