I did copious amounts of exercise. I counted my calories. I divided my macros. I did the plain old chicken and broccoli diet (and then binged because I couldn’t stick to it).

I did everything. And yet no matter what I did, I just kept getting fatter.

Nothing worked for Jenna until she applied just one important principle on herself!

Looking back, I laugh now at how silly I was. Sure, I was trying really hard, but the answer was glaringly obvious.

You see, it’s not what I did when I was dieting and detoxing that made me fat. It’s all the stuff I did in-between. And it’s the stuff you do in-between that matters most.

Let me take you back to an important moment in my life…

I had a snap point. I was sick of working hard and achieving nothing. I didn’t want to do it anymore.

So I stopped working hard and just started keeping data. I wrote down everything I was doing (the good and the bad). I decided to make a record of my life and see what I could learn about myself.

It was a terribly confronting process to be honest, because for the first time ever, I was admitting to myself over and over again WHY I was doing all those diets and detoxes in the first place.

I was eating way too much junk food. I was drinking way too much alcohol. I was skipping meals and then over-eating the wrongs foods out of hunger. I went weeks without doing any consistent exercise. And then before I knew it, summer had rolled around again, and I was trying to make up for all the things I had done by being perfect for 3-6 weeks.

But every time it backfired. 

It probably sounds obvious, but you can’t make up for 9 months of bad habits by flogging yourself for 3-6 weeks. The math just doesn’t add up. All you end up doing is burning yourself out and doing nothing again for another 9 months. And so the cycle continues.

But this year, I changed all that. I finally got real with myself.  I was sick of feeling like a fraud. So I wrote it all down. I didn’t change, I just got real with myself.

People talk about deciding to change, but I didn’t decide to change. Instead I just decided to be real and just write stuff down. I documented my food. I documented my training. I documented my feelings and how my body was changing. And as I did it, I realised how many habits I had that needed to be addressed.

Sure I was still eating junk, but there were very strong reasons for reaching for the junk food, alcohol etc. So instead of telling myself not to have it, which I had done in the past and then ended up bingeing on it, I decided to address the real reasons why I wanted it in the first place:

1. Sleep deprivation - staying up too late, looking at social media on my phone

2. Stress - being busy at work and not productive.

3. Loneliness - missing my boyfriend who lives in interstate, and

4. Self-doubt it won’t work anyway, so why try!

And I didn’t like what I could see on paper.

It’s a confronting process to admit you’re struggling, but I also made an amazing discovery. As I slowly started to address each problem one by one, my body started changing with it. Getting results actually became incredibly easy once I stopped trying to get results, and simply confronted the reason why I was struggling in the first place.

In fact, once the real problems had been addressed (re-prioritising my week so I felt less stressed, planning more trips to visit my boyfriend in QLD), the weight literally started to fall off me. It no longer felt like a sacrifice to abstain from junk food because my reasons for craving it in the first place had disappeared.

But I still wasn’t done. 

Most people keep eating boring and bland food anyway, despite being educated otherwise. They basically just carry on with their old habits and then blame their program when it doesn’t work. And once upon a time, that was me too.

But for anyone that has a history of dieting, you’ll understand when I say that it’s easy to slip back to your old methods, even when you know the old methods don’t work. I knew I could get lean really quick by eating plain old chicken and broccoli, but I’d just be building a body I can’t keep afterwards. So I picked a selection of meals from Shar's Transformation Cookbook that I could live with because I LOVE them.

Here are some of my meal prep favourites

Roasted Italian Pizza-Tatta 
Shar's Vegan Pizza-Tatta is great too! 
Garlic chicken rissoles  with a delicious crunchy salad.  
Lamb & Chickpea Stew 
Asian Greens Stir-fry with Crispy-baked Golden Tofu
Tuna Supreme
Wolfberry Pork Salad
Kangaroo, lentil & beetroot salad

I also loved Shar's liquid meals 
Berrybeet Pitaya Bowls
Mocha Armondo Creme
Mocha Praline Mousse

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