A couple of years ago when I started getting serious about this whole Paleo/CrossFit thing, I remember venting to Robb Wolf and I said to him, “You know Robb, I’m just trying to figure out how to achieve some balance in my life.”  His response was, “No, I don’t know, because I don’t even know what the F*@# balance is!”   This one statement by Robb did more for me then any amount of time I could have spent with a psychologist.  This one statement yanked me out of my own damn head where I was pitifully stuck trying to achieve “balance.”  That very evening, I sat down and thought about what ”balance” really is.  I came to the conclusion that balancing is difficult.  I have never attempted to walk a tightrope but I have spent a fair amount of time on a balance beam (my worst gymnastic skill) and many of you know how much work and practice it takes to hold a handstand.  Being firmly on the ground is much dang easier.  So, with that said, I immediately threw out the idea of achieving balance and instead, took a giant leap off my proverbial tightrope and landed on solid ground.  I was trying so hard to achieve balance because I was afraid that somehow, if I couldn’t do it all, I would be missing out on something great, or really important.  And doing it all meant compromising my health, not just with my food, but with all the other choices that we are constantly faced with.  I was stressing SO much about eating Paleo – stressing to the point that I would MAKE it a point to leave aside one day a week that I wasn’t eating Paleo and I would eat a bunch of crap and feel insanely guilty and disgustingly ill.  I was also doing way too much, and ultimately, trying to find balance was slowly killing me.  Life is too short to live on a tightrope, so I jumped off and instead of achieving balance, I found life.  Fast forward two years later, I eat Paleo, and now and then I’ll eat some nachos.  This is not scheduled.  It just happens now and then, and I know if I eat gluten or too much sugar I will feel awful, and it will likely kill me, so I don’t.  Once I stopped worrying, fretting, and reaching for some sort of balance in this crazy nutso life, it stopped being hard.  I stopped freaking out about losing the rest of the weight, and then I lost the rest of the weight.  I sleep better – maybe not more because if you know the rest of the Fragoso clan, it’s not really possible to get to bed on time, but when I do lay my head on the pillow, my brain shuts off and I really sleep.   I no longer care about balance.  I am who I am, I eat Paleo, I am a CrossFit trainer, and I am PASSOINATE about seeing other folks achieve healthiness, happiness, and finding their way off the damn tightrope.  So, the moral of the story is: know who you are, what you can achieve, set your goals, but don’t make yourself crazy. You CAN CHOOSE to live your life on solid ground.   Life is hard enough as it is, don’t make what’s supposed to make you healthy the hardest part…