Adam Reynolds Is Going to Teach Us How to Live Healthier, Fitter, and Hotter

Introducing The Healthy Boy, a living well series from Adam Reynolds. We’ll be following along as Adam eats and exercises his way through a healthier lifestyle, providing fitness tips, delicious recipes, and nutritional advice.

Enjoy eating junk food? Yep, we all do. Do you search out your favorite fried food like a one-legged seagull searches out a hot french fry? Pretending to only have one leg and squawking out loud until you get what you want? Does your mouth begin to water like Carrie Bradshaw in a Manolo Blahnik store, in anticipation of the weekend after you have been eating healthy all week? We have all been there. Including me!

Growing up as a young kid in Australia, I was never too far away from something sugary or loaded with chocolate. My sweet tooth developed early and it developed larger than the ice berg that sunk the Titanic. You see I, like so may children, was a picky eater. I refused to eat or even look at vegetables or anything healthy and immediately squished up my face or shed a tear at the thought of consuming anything green.

I developed a hatred for eating dinner, the kind of hatred that only develops amongst members of a girl band pop group after too many years of singing together. I often would not finish my meals and my mother would not let me leave the table until I did. So most nights read like an over-hyped Vegas boxing match – my mother in one corner, insisting that I could not leave the table until I ate all of my food, and me in the other corner, sitting there in complete insubordination and using any mind game tactics I could to get the hell away from that dinner table; including, but not limited to, convulsively crying or sitting in complete silence for hours upon end.

Discovering at that early age that stubbornness was one of my stronger attributes, I would often win. Walking away from that table with a complete KO to my mother. Leaving her to wash up the dishes and except defeat.

And whilst I hated dinner, I found enjoyment an hour or so later (and throughout all of the day for that matter) by going into the cupboard or refrigerator and grabbing a handful of chocolate coated cookies or candy bars and washing it all down with coca cola. Thus at an early age began my relationship with chocolate and junk food, or as I like to call it “naughty food”.

Growing up through my teenage years, my mother started to chip away at my picky eating habits by introducing different types of food, cooking the food differently, or disguising vegetables in my favorite foods. Suddenly my mashed potatoes started changing color, and my mother insisted they were just “Orange potatoes”. Little did I know I was consuming pumpkin. Nice one mom.

Then I hit my 20′s. I moved out from home, moved away from my childhood place of birth to the big city, and got my first job in a corporate environment. All of a sudden I was thrust into a world of food and social settings I was by no means prepared for. I was invited to staff and client lunches as well as dinners to restaurants that served types of food I didn’t even know how to pronounce let alone what it tasted like, or how to master the utensils needed to eat such food (cut to me at a client lunch staring at chopsticks in complete horror until my colleague sneakily passed me a fork under the table). I would go through the supermarket isles looking for anything I can microwave for dinner, and spend my lunch breaks at McDonald’s eating chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce.