The IMFIT Kitchen

Greetings! As usual it's been a long time between posts for me. With the addition of our new four legged mascot Charlie a little over a month ago I've been finding it hard to set aside the time to commit my thoughts to page. But, we all seem to be into a nice little routine now, so here I am.
And as a nice little segue, I want to talk a little about finding time for the things that are important for our health, happiness and performance.


I've been wanting to do something along the lines of the IMFIT Kitchen for awhile now and finally got motivated to get it started after seeing a Facebook post from one of my "friends". She was both congratulating and mocking herself for actually having had the time to cook a real meal with real food for herself and her two kids. It bothered me, this should not be news. Cooking, preparing and consuming real foods should not be a milestone in someone's life. Especially someone who makes a living promoting a healthy lifestyle as this person does.

Sadly it's not the first time I've heard this though. I think we as a society have been tricked by some very slick marketing from the fast food and packaged food industries into believing that we don't have the time in our day to prepare and consume healthy, real food. One of my goals with the IMFIT Kitchen is to show that it can be done, and it can be done on a tight "time budget".

It's true that I now have the luxury of working primarily from home which does allow me more time than most to prepare healthy meals, but that wasn't always the case. Last year at this time I was living on my own with my dog, working a full time job that started at 8:30 in the morning and ended at 4:30, with a 45min commute on either end. After getting home I would typically have to feed and walk the dog, feed myself and then head back out to see a client or work one of the part time evening jobs I was holding then. And I would say that at least 80% of the time, I ate real food cooked and prepared by me and packed healthy, real food lunches and snacks to have while at work.

As the IMFIT Kitchen progresses I hope not only to share what I'm eating, but how I'm preparing and how long that preparation takes. I'll be doing this with a mix of written FB and Twitter posts and some video blog of actual preparation as time goes on. (As a side note, anybody have a used Go-Pro camera they want to unload? I'm looking for something hands free to aid in the video department.)

For the athletically inclined who are reading this, you know that food is fuel. What you eat has a direct impact on how you feel, how you sleep and how you perform in training and racing. I think those sound like pretty good reasons for making real food a priority in your daily and weekly timeline.

My other purpose with the IMFIT Kitchen is to answer in detail over time a question that I get from many of my clients..."what should I eat?" or the similar "what do you eat?" Now, I'm not saying I'm perfect. Far from it. I try to live by the 80-20 rule every week. 80% good and 20% "bad". I'm a firm believer in balance and the 80-20 rule has served me fairly well. It's when I allow that to slip to more of a 60-40 rule that I end up in trouble! There are plenty of healthy, real food options out there and quite a few that I still think the masses haven't really caught on to or just don't know what to do with. My aim is to hopefully catch you on to some new things and maybe some new ways of preparing some old things in healthy and delicious ways. I'm also hoping to break through the confusion of all the different diet labels that are floating around out there. Paleo, vegan, vegetarian, Zone, Paleo-Zone...blah, blah, blah. Why does what we eat have to have a label in order to make sense? Simply eat real foods, organic when and where possible, local when and where possible and stay away from the stuff you know doesn't agree with you. Now, if I could just come up with a label for that I could make a million dollars with a book! LOL

Seriously though, eating well doesn't have to take exorbitant amounts of time, thought and energy. And what little extra time it may take could very well be added back to you in both quality and quantity of life down the road. It's your body and your life. You've only got one. Don't put better fuel into your car than you do into yourself and your children.

So stay tuned for more from the IMFIT Kitchen and if you have any recipes or ideas you'd like to share please feel free to post them on my FB page.