What's up?!! It's Wednesday and we are halfway through the first week of 2014. Congrats, you've made it. The weekend is just around the corner. You just need to make it through one more day and then it's FRIDAY!

But before you get carried away thinking about the upcoming weekend, let's take a minute and talk about "dieting." What's up with dieting? Well, if you're one of my clients or you've spent any time talking to me about health and fitness, you know my answer is "Dieting sucks and nobody should go on a diet".

Yes, I really said that, DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT- GO ON A DIET.

You know why? Well, for one, once you go off of your "diet", chances are, you are going to go right back to your old ways and gain back any weight you may have lost in the first place. Another reason you shouldn't diet is because it's restricting. The minute you tell yourself you can't have something, the more you're just going to want it. You know the story of Pandora's Box right? How's that working for all of us?

I get requests all the time from people wanting to be "put on a diet". In fact, just the other day someone I am very close to asked me to put them on a "diet" and I said, "No". There are tons of diets out there. There are the popular "fad" diets like Atkins, South Beach, Paleo, The Baby Food, The Blood Type, The French Woman, etc. The list goes on. I have even seen people turn a Gluten Free food into a fad diet  when they don't even have a gluten allergy or any other health issues. (By the way, Celiac disease is a serious condition and I have friends and family members who suffer from it. It's not fun.)

Despite your opinion/experience with them, fad diets can have results. And at one point in my life, I've even tried many of these myself. You can see and feel the results rapidly often. That's one of the reasons why they are popular. But those results are often temporary and in some cases, these diets can be doing more damage than good. 

So what do I say? I say EAT REAL FOOD and enjoy all the other stuff in moderation. I believe in keeping it simple. If you can grow it, hunt it, find it in nature, kill it, reproduce it, then it's most likely a smart food choice. If it came from a box, was processed and engineered and you cannot pronounce the first three ingredients, then you might want to rethink eating that food in large quantities.

Just be smart. Try something like Monday - Friday eating meals and foods that you prepare yourself or that you know where they came from ( use the hunt, grow, kill mentality). Think fruits, veggies, lean proteins and whole grains. And then on the weekends or when the spirit moves you, feel free to enjoy whatever you want and don’t give it a second thought.. For me its M&M's & those little Goldfish crackers. See I'm a normal person too. I eat chocolate and carbs. And I don't have a problem doing it.

When you make better choices about the foods you put into your body,  you feel better and your body performs betters. If you're totally stuck on "the diet" thing, then try writing down what you're eating and keeping track of it if you must. You'll be surprised, when you see it written down on paper.