Balanced diet: the new revolution
Extreme diets, exclusion diets, fad diets these are what fill the airwaves and buzz around social media in a whirl of tantalizing promises. Promises to get that body you have always wanted, boost your energy, create the happy healthy life you have been searching for. I have to pause and wonder why extreme and exclusion are the selling points of creating a happy and healthy life. Why not adding in, balance, enjoyment, having fun; why can’t these be the selling points of the new diet craze.
I propose the new diet revolution is all about balance and finding the right balance for you as an individual, eating yummy food and creating a fun, enjoyable, effortless lifestyle that is not about deprivation, calorie counting or numbers on a scale.
What are some steps to take towards creating this lifestyle?
1. 1. Start with Metabolic Type™: Metabolic Typing™ is a tool I use with my clients to find a baseline for nutrition and diet. I work with my clients to fine tune their unique dietary needs to their ever changing and dynamic energy and nutrition needs. Through this process, my clients become keenly aware of their body, how it reacts to foods and what they need on a daily basis. To learn more about Metabolic Typing™ and how I use it with my clients visit Diet by Design.
Sometimes it is easier to make change when you are away from your daily life, join me on Monhegan Island for my retreat, Diet by Design for Health and Vitality, to learn more about your personal diet and energy needs.
2. Local, Organic, Clean: When you are connected to where your food comes from and the people who grow it, the food nourishes your body and soul. You may pay a little more for your meat from a local farmer, but when that farmer can now pay her bills and raise her family, you are helping to nourish your community as well as your body. Grass-fed animals are more nutritious than conventionally farmed animals. They are especially high in trace minerals and healthy fats.
Here on Monhegan Island, we have been working towards growing more of our own food, you can partake in the Fall Abundance and join in the harvest of lobster and the Island Farm Project vegetables.
3. Balance: Extreme diets that emphasize high-carbs, low-carbs, high-fat, low-fat, high-protein, low-protein can work in the short term, but long-term a balanced diet is really where it’s at. Extreme diets can be difficult to maintain and aren’t teaching you good lifestyle habits. By finding balance in your physical body through yoga alignment, balanced eating will follow. Emotional eating is another sign of imbalance. If you have ever eaten a pint of ice cream because you had a bad fight with your partner or indulged a craving because you were afraid to ask your boss for a raise, then learning these tools for balance is exactly what you need.
4. Activity: There are a lot of different ways to be healthy, what is an activity that you could incorporate into your life that will get you moving and bring you joy? It may be running, biking or kayaking; or it could be dancing or hula-hooping; or it could be yoga or Pilates. There are exercises that are more intensive than others, find the intensity that you can perform comfortably. The old mantra ‘no pain, no gain’ is completely outdated. Try this new mantra ‘fun and joy will move me to have the healthy body I need’.
5. Relaxation and Meditation: Rest gives the body the time and space to grow and heal. When we sleep at night, we incorporate all that we learned throughout the day. When we rest after a workout, our muscles have a chance to get bigger, longer and leaner. Meditation is a form of relaxation and rest that is mindful and aids in the body’s ability to recover and incorporate all the exercise and learning that we have asked it to do each day.
There is a lot of information on the internet and through the airwaves these days. Cultivating your inner wisdom about health, diet and nutrition will place you on the right track to creating the happy, healthy life you are looking for.

Written by Tara Hire: Tara Hire is a Certified Health Coach, Yoga Instructor and Chef. Why sort through the mass of information out there, try to do it all, or get overwhelmed and don’t do anything at all. Working with me a trained a professional will fast track the whole experience and put you on the right track quickly and easily. By making simple, attainable short term goals that will meet your long term goals the changes will be made so you won’t even notice you have made an extreme over haul until you are living your new life and look back and say to yourself was that really me back there? Our lives and habits are shaped over our whole life undoing those patterns of behavior and culture won’t happen overnight but it will happen.