National Junk Food Day!!! LOL

July 21st is National Junk Food day according to Yahoo. A day we can take a break from all the hard dietary work we put in on a daily basis. A day we can finally let go of the rigors of packing our lunch, slaving over our whole wheat sandwiches, our brown rice, chicken and broccoli. Finally, the time has come in where just for one day, we forsake our ruthless standards of health and let it all go. Nothing is off limits for us:
Fiery hot Cheetos? check.
Big mac with a whopper on the side? Definitely.
Ice cream with extra sprinkles? Oh yeah.
Non-diet soda? Holla!
Twinkies, ho-ho's moon pies, and snowballs? well, I guess I could have just one (of each)
Tacos, pizza, and cheese steaks? Gotta eat something...

Sometimes it can be so refreshing to cheat a little and let loose right? But we as Americans live a lifestyle of cheating. There is literally no occasion when we're not stuffing our faces with EVERYTHING WE WANT. Think back on the last time you showed moderation during a meal when you didn't have to. The dinner where you take clients out for drinks at the french restaurant and only order hors d'ouvres doesn't count. Abstaining from the 4th brownie doesn't count. I'm talking about the time you order a full pizza and a 6 pack when you're at home alone watching Gilmore Girl reruns. Did you call it quits at 2 slices that night? Probably not.


Right now, my main goal in life is to establish a gag reflex for when I hear terrible excuses, so that I just begin vomiting uncontrollably all over the floor and the guilty party, so that they can feel my pain. Since I haven't been able to accomplish that feat yet, right now what I do is make a list of every time a morally bankrupt excuse offends me on a physical level, and when I go home at night, I slam my hand in the oven door repeatedly. Not a perfect system by any means, but it gets me through the day.

When we go out to eat, it becomes an 'occasion' where we're granted more leniency for eating quantities of food that would put a mongoloid into a food coma. Seriously? How many times do you go out to eat per week. If you're like most Americans, the answer is at least 3.5. Do you just forget what going out is like, and get excited to experience "The Olive Garden" and their real Italian cuisine? If so, God bless you. Life is going to be one fantastic surprise.  If not, you're just looking for another excuse to succumb to your poor eating habits, and it's you who hurt me on a very physical level.

Think about all the times you've made excuses based on very average, most likely mundane events. Nephew's birthday party? Gotta have cake. Aunt Myrtle's funeral? You'd be remiss to not drink 13 beers. It's what she would have wanted! First Friday of the month? Time for funnelcake.  4pm on a Thursday? might as well eat the last doughnut so we can throw away the box. The company should thanks you for this selfless act!

If you wanna look good, just do it. Eat well, and take the stairs. Quit justifying infantile "I see it I want it" behavior, lest I gain control of my gag reflex.

Shelby Starnes

Some AM wisdom from Shelby Starnes; nutritional coach.

If it doesn’t scare you, it’s not heavy enough.

If it’s not a big enough goal (or weight), it won’t force you to become your best.

To accomplish the extraordinary, you must do extraordinary things.

Decide what you want, set your personal code of conduct, and get to work.

Becoming awesome is not something you do from behind a computer screen.

Wrap your mind around that this morning.

Eating Right is Easy.

A lot of stuff I talk about on here is based on stuff that I hear in real life, and want to say, but can't for fear of offending everyone. I even tone it down on here slightly, so that Mom's will let their rambunctious 6 year old's read my articles on the nuances and poetry of a proper deadlift.
However, when I have a client who tells me that they can't eat right because they are going out to dinner, or because they had a hard day at the office, I have to close my eyes, and go into a mental exercise where I visualize myself punching endangered animals until all my rage subsides. When I come back to reality, I can give them a good natured slap on the back and say something to the extent of "Oh you!", instead of destroying them with 1000 years of wall taps.
However, what I would like to say instead goes something like this:
"You're weak. Mentally and physically weak. Like Duke Basketball. Like the TV show Frasier. Like people who shop at Walmart. You most likely don't deserve to eat ever again. It's not hard to not eat donuts. You just don't pick it up. And if you do pick it up, kick yourself in the shin, and throw it in the garbage."
Ok, that could be a little harsh. After all, no one I know is as bad (read boring and meaningless) as Frasier was.
However, there are certain things that people don't realize about food, overeating, and eating processed crap. One of those things is that FOOD IS A DRUG. I don't care if you're Mr. Vegan, or you're on the wall at McDonald's for "Most Fake Animals Consumed in One Session". Food is a drug to both parties. The difference is how you react to that. Do you control your food intake, or does it control you? Are you the Charlie Sheen that is banging 7 gram rocks and finishing them? Or are you the Charlie Sheen that is bi-winning?
Fast food places spend millions of dollars per year chemically designing their food to make you hungry. That's right, it is not designed to fill you up. There are certain combination of sugar, salt and fat that causes a chemical reaction in the human brain which release endorphins to make you happy. That's great and all, but you know what else does that? Cocaine, Charlie Sheen, and morphine.
On top of all that, fast food is designed to be soft. Like baby food. So the good news about that is that you can feed your toddler a Big Mac! The bad news is that it's so soft that you don't need to chew it, which means that your body doesn't recognize itself as being satiated even though you've gorged yourself on a 1680 calorie "lunch". Knock off the drive through people. Your body will thank you. And if you must drive through a place, get the grilled (fake) chicken salad with oil and vinegar. And remember, for every fry you eat, you have to do around 12 pushups to burn off. That roughly correlates to 100 m of horse walks.
Lastly, just make good choices. This is me pleading with you. I don't know about you, but when I look back on my life I have certain regrets. I regret not playing football in high school. I regret the part of my life that I lived for other people's approval. I DO NOT REGRET NOT EATING A PIECE OF CHOCOLATE CAKE 2 WEEKS AGO AT A PARTY. That has never even crossed my mind. Skip the desert, you're sad for what, 3 seconds? Then you move on? Because you're an adult? I hope so.

Fix your eating before I mentally burn down the rainforest because you like eggnog.