Eloise Head Of Fitwaffle Discusses How Sweets Can Be Part Of A Healthy Lifestyle - Exclusive

For many of us, a lifestyle focused on physical fitness brings to mind dietary deprivation. According to a lot of conventional thinking, you can either keep yourself in optimal shape or you can enjoy dessert every night, but not both. This has resulted in some fitness aficionados giving up their favorite treats altogether — while others decide this is too high a price to pay for fitness, so they forgo any pretense of healthy living.

But Eloise Head, the creator behind the wildly popular Instagram page Fitwaffle Kitchen, manages to have her cake and eat it too while maintaining a fitness-focused lifestyle. A former personal trainer who continues to embrace fitness and good nutrition, she's also an enthusiastic home baker known for creating unapologetically sweet and decadent treats and sharing her recipes with her millions of online followers. 

Yes, she does eat her own creations, and no, she doesn't consider this hypocritical in any way. In an exclusive interview with our sister site The List, she shared how she manages to enjoy sweets while maintaining a fitness-focused lifestyle.

Eloise Head didn't always have such a positive attitude towards desserts — or her diet in general. "When I was in college, I had quite a poor relationship with food, and I was restricted with what I ate. I would give foods such a moral value," she said. "Some foods I would put on a pedestal, and others I would demonize, which is not a very healthy way of looking at food. It definitely wasn't for me. It put me in quite a bad place with food and [with] my body."

Over time, however, she developed a more tolerant view of food, and she gives herself permission to enjoy a little bit of everything. "Now, my message is balance and moderation," she said. "I don't think that we should give foods a moral value and to view them as good or bad. That's subjective to each individual. It's important to be able to enjoy high-calorie foods such as desserts and sweets in moderation, alongside a highly nutritious diet, without any feelings of guilt around these certain foods."

Diet and nutrition are important to Eloise Head, and her daily diet is built around simple, protein-heavy meals. A typical breakfast for her, for example, would be Greek yogurt with fruit and honey, while her other meals involve a combination of food groups. "For lunch, I'll generally have something like a sandwich, with some sort of protein filling, whether that's chicken, or ham, or tuna, or something like that. I also might have a salad or some fruit on the side," she said. She added that she also enjoys high-protein snacks like chicken or protein bars. "I try and get my protein in as much as possible," she said.

But she still makes room in her diet for sweets. "I'll also usually — almost always — have some sort of dessert after my main meal, as in my dinner," she said. "That will be something small, sometimes a couple of chunks of chocolate, or it'll be a bake from today, or yesterday, or whatever I baked. I might have a small ice cream or something like that. I do tend to snack on what I'm baking throughout the day as well." Still, she makes sure not to overdo it, and she often gives away or freezes her sweet treats to enjoy another day.

Follow Eloise Head and Fitwaffle Kitchen on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, and pre-order "Baking It Easy" here.