As a holistic nutritionist who is all about living gorgeously, there are two critical factors that guarantee my success:  my education and my motivation.  I pride myself on learning from the best so I’m armed and dangerously curved with cutting edge information for my clients.  And, I practice what I preach so my clients trust me as a reliable source. I can honestly say I following the 80/20 rule of eating (80% of the time I eat clean, 20% of the time I indulge).  My mantra is to live a perfectly imperfect life and that pretty much describes who I am from the inside out. 

 

All that said, I do have one secret: I don’t exercise to look good.  I wish I had the dedication and desire to become a fit model or bodybuilding competitor.  But it’s just not me.  Let me be clear, here—I admire the hell out of my colleagues who are so cut I could bounce a quarter of their abs.  I am inspired by their war stories of sparkling clean eating and their twice daily workouts.  There’s a part of me that will always wonder what it feels like to watch my body transform and reduce my body fat to the single digits.  But other than mere curiosity, that’s where my thought process ends.  Make no mistake, I love to exercise and feel strong; but my personal motivations and goals are less about vanity and more about sanity.  What works for me is living in balance—extremes are, I have learned through experience, unsustainable for me.  I am an earth sign, hear me roar!

 

So why, then, do I exercise?  I exercise to exorcise the demons away.  Because I spend way too much time ruminating inside my head, working out clears my head from all the clutter and lets me get the hell out of my own way.  It stops the mental cassette tape that seems to be running on a loop—the one that has me ruminating at night as I toss and turn in the darkness.  Exercising forces me to focus on the task at hand, and completely clears my mind.  With all those brain gigabytes freed up, my creative juices start flowing and the writing begins (I actually jotted down notes for this blog resting between weight sets).  I like to think of it as a mental feng-shui!

Then there’s the nutritional aspect of being fit.  When I die and go to heaven, I’m going to be a smoking alcoholic who lives on bagels and cream cheese and Diet Coke (but enough about my twenties).  But here on earth, it’s a different story.  My naughty ways are rationed and more spread out so I can look myself in the mirror the next morning instead of doing the food walk of shame.  The discipline of putting in three to four sessions a week of intense weight training kicks self-flagellation and guilt right to the curb and just makes me feel like a badass.  So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to meditate with my weights and get my rockin’ self off to the gym! 

 

Live Gorgeously,
Esther