“Are you beach body ready?” the ad asks, with a picture of a woman in a yellow bikini next to those words. You may remember this ad getting a lot of bad press about a year or so ago when a supplement company rolled out their summer campaign. I won’t be going into that but I do want to focus on the being “beach ready” part.
I’m a member of a group on Facebook called Did You Run Today? (DYRT) As the name suggests it’s full of enthusiastic runners who share their running stories, log their routes and ‘got soaked in the rain’ photos. It’s nice to see the support given to beginners just starting out confused about footwear or tracking devices as the old timers dive in with lots of helpful tips and advice. There’s families running together and even the dogs are getting involved. The group has a fantastic energy and super friendly atmosphere that serves to motivate and support it’s members on their running journey, but what if you didn’t run today?
I posted on Facebook a while back that perhaps there's a little too much effort going on when it comes to fat loss and people might be missing some quick wins which could be achieved by kicking back a little and simplifying things. When an individual decides they want to change their body composition and focus on getting healthy it often starts off all guns blazing. There are plans to eat boat loads of steamed kale, smash HIIT sessions daily and answer to no one but the weighing scales.
When working with clients who’s primary goal is to lose body fat we often discover that its not through lack of trying but more so because they become confused with the vast amount of information that is available out there. This says that and that says this. Well it can all get a bit mind boggling but I want to share 3 common reasons I feel most people are not achieving the fat loss results they desire and what you can do to change that shizzle.
I recently posted in our membership site Fitter 365 about the importance of individuality when it comes to your nutrition and training. We can all be guilty at times of constantly comparing ourselves; our physique, our training achievements, the 'cleanness' of our eating regimes, the number of steps we've taken and it can all get a bit out of hand. Changes you once felt proud of suddenly don’t seem enough and you’re racked with guilt about not putting in enough time, effort and energy. You need to try harder!
I’m a self confessed exercise addict and I’ve touched on this subject in a previous blog on body image because that’s where my training journey started out. I felt miserable, tired and my trousers were too tight. I started jogging (if you can call it that, I only lasted 10 minutes on my first few attempts) and immediately felt happier, full of energy and my trousers finally fitted again. For me exercise was the solution to EVERYTHING. Over the years I came to rely on endorphins every single day as they transformed my outlook, personality and sense of positivity, to the point you really wouldn’t want to meet me on a rest day.
It’s that time of year again when many of us renew our resolutions for the year. The easy thing to do here (and most common in our experience) is to come up with a fat loss goal; drop a dress size, get a six pack, fit into my skinny jeans again, blah blah. We always aim to steer people away from these goals as they're based upon a negative relationship with your body for a start, plus it’s no fun weighing and measuring your food and your waistline day in day out. In fact the harder people pursue this goal the more likely they are to fail at it.
Probably one of the most popular questions we come across this time of year is how to have your Xmas cake and eat it without piling on the pounds. This is completely understandable as there's so much more temptation around the festive period, a greater desire to let your hair down, not to mentioned some added stressors to cope with as we tackle the xmas shopping in the gloomy, wet weather etc, etc. One thing to emphasis here is that we are just like you. We have a few more treats than we usually do around December, crave comfort foods with the darker mornings and shorter days and it is Christmas after all!
Does that title confuse you? I thought it might, so I will explain. You see many people are always looking for the best exercises for fat loss and we have always said that the one you can stick with will always get the best results. When you can find something you really enjoy it almost doesn't feel like “training” because you love it, time flies by but you get a killer workout at the same time. Winning combo, right?
You've probably gathered by now that we're a massive pair of foodies, but we also love training and something we're huge fans of and include in our own workouts and programs is HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). You've likely heard of it by now but in case you haven’t it involves switching between short bursts of high intensity exercise and periods of rest at a lower intensity. For example, sprinting full pace for 20 seconds followed by walking for 40 seconds and repeating say 8-12 times, that is interval training. HIIT is a great fat loss tool that gets fantastic results, in case you need a little more convincing here are my 4 reasons to get involved in HIIT today.
It's been a pretty busy couple of months at Fitter Food headquarters (aka Matt's teenage bedroom since we moved back in with his Mum). We've been running on adrenalin, coffee and Quest bars for a few weeks to make sure our book is ready for Christmas and we also ran our final Fitter Food Academy this weekend. We are fully aware of the damaging effects chronic stress has on our body, so now our biggest projects are done and dusted it's time for both of us to thank our bodies for powering us through and invest back a little TLC.
This week is certainly up there as one of the most stressful I've had all year. The deadline to get our book to the printers is this Friday. With recipe testing, editing, referencing, macronutrient information and image design to finish, my 'to do' list went way beyond overwhelming at times. Running a business I've been here before and luckily I've made time to develop coping mechanisms that enable me to nail these projects without letting my health suffer in the process. I thought I would share with you 3 things that really helped me over the last few days when the going got really tough.