Like a lot of exercise freaks, I am, shall we say, an enthusiastic eater.  If I’m coming to your barbeque, you can safely count on me to clean up the extra few burgers that are lying around after everyone has eased into the ‘talking and hanging out’ portion of the afternoon.  I’ll even eat the ones that have flies on them, maybe even that one that fell on the ground and have grass stuck on them if I get really desperate.  Once food has been served—particularly if it includes large slabs of animal protein—I tend to let the wife hold up our end of the polite conversation.  Just put me in the corner with a trough and I’ll do just fine. 

One of the reasons I got into working out in the first place, back in the Paleolithic era, is that I knew I enjoyed the hell out of eating and I wanted to avoid turning into a whale in the process.  Regardless of what I was eating, as long as I was hitting the gym, I always liked to think it was helping me build muscle and not store fat.

I’ve since refined my sense of what Good Eating entails.  Now I try to eat smaller meals more often, emphasizing clean foods and high-quality proteins.  But I still work out in part so I can enjoy a good, and sometimes not particularly well-balanced or well-thought out meal once in a while.

All right, let’s face it, I’m a huge glutton.

My friend Holly Burrell’s new website, “Why Can’t I Speak French?” is perhaps the embodiment of the human being’s ideal relationship to food in blog form.  I look at the amazing photos that Holly has snapped of the culinary creations she’s lovingly putting together—for nothing else but the sheer joy of making great food—and I think, ‘Here’s a woman who recognizes that preparing, and indeed, eating itself, can be an art.’  I read her blog and realize that, no matter what I may think, the four words All You Can Eat don’t represent the apotheosis of gastronomy. 

This isn’t low-cal, low-carb, low-sodium, raw-food, tofu-only nonsense either (Did I just inadvertently reveal how I feel about food like that?  Oops…).  On the Fourth of July, as you’ll see, Holly made a pie with lots of butter and flour and clearly just doesn’t care:  that’s how you make a pie, and from the look and description, I would have dug in quite happily.  No way that pie would have been safe around this guy.

Look, I’m all for discipline when it comes to both diet and exercise.  No one’s going to get anywhere in their health/appearance improvement efforts without a hefty dose of dedication and consistency.  And anyone who knows me will tell you I personally am near-fanatical in my devotion to working out.  But I also do it because I love it, not simply because I feel guilty if I don’t exercise.  I eat reasonably well (though very heartily, as I readily admit above)—and encourage my clients to do likewise—but I don’t feel the need to say a hundred mea culpas if I have a piece of cake.  Feeling overly guilty about every little “transgression” just leads to an all-or-nothing binge-purge cycle that ultimately is far more damaging than the occasional exuberant and much-enjoyed indulgence.

As geeky as I and the zillion other online fitness cognoscenti can get about the finer points of lifting technique, protein supplementation, and the VO2 max, I have to admit that the minutia are just that:  tiny and relatively insignificant details.  Enjoying your exercise program—and enjoying what you eat, which “Why Can’t I Speak French?” eloquently encourages us to do—is far more important than doing either one a hundred percent “right.”