You don’t have to do it all .. all the time 🙏🏻

As we approach what is traditionally a busy and hectic time of year I think this is an important reminder. The all or nothing mindset is one of the biggest issues which keeps people from making meaningful progress towards their weight loss and fitness goals. Your health and your approach to nutrition and fitness don’t need to be all or nothing. It’s about learning when to do what, how to do things, when to accelerate, and when to put on the brakes and not beating yourself up about it.

When life is going to plan maybe you will workout 5 times a week, track all your meals, eat ‘healthy’ and stick to your calories, hit your steps, prioritise 8hrs of sleep etc. But then life happens, you get busy, or ill or work takes over and you miss a few workouts, or overeat or eat something you don’t deem as ‘healthy’ and suddenly everything seems to go to pot. Your motivation disappears and you feel defeated, frustrated and discouraged. Somehow one meal or day overrides weeks of progress. You’re hard on yourself and start to fall back to old habits and progress stalls. You think ‘f*ck it’ and don’t even bother trying to be ‘good’. Then after a while, you are unhappy with your weight and the whole process starts again.

It doesn’t need to be like this – it’s not black and white. It’s not a very healthy mindset to have for long-term, sustainable progress. Think about why you want to improve your fitness or lose weight. Ultimately it’s to live a healthier and happier future, so you can enjoy life. That means you’ll have to learn to manage life and all it entails, and incorporate some of that enjoyment into your new habits and weight loss journey. This means you’ll need to accept that sometimes you’ll do things that don’t fit perfectly into your fitness/weight loss goals, and that’s ok! It’s not about perfection, it’s about consistency.

Recognise that sometimes it’s ok to indulge or to not exercise, and dial down your expectations during busy/stressful times. Practice a little self compassion and understand that progress isn’t linear and that being able to incorporate these times is actually progress itself. If you are making things too restrictive then it won’t be a long-term sustainable plan for you. Focus on consistency not perfection and with a little patience you will reach those goals.

🤗

Xx

Shift your focus away from the gym …👀 🏋🏼‍♂️

Whilst it’s obviously important to be active and to exercise for lots of reasons – not least of which is health and well being, too many people are too focused on the gym and what workout’s they’re doing when it comes to weight loss. So often I hear people frustrated that they’re ‘been to the gym every day’ but haven’t lost any weight.

The fact is you it’s very hard to create a meaningful calorie deficit via exercise and activity alone. You have to work extremely hard to burn more than a few hundred calories in a workout. Studies show we usually over estimate cals burnt and how active we are.

If you workout 5 days a week, for an hour a time (which is a substantial amount of exercise) you may feel you should be seeing some weight or fat loss. But that’s 5 hrs out of an entire week… for the average person working a 5 day week they’ll spend 40hrs working, assuming 8hrs sleep a night that’s 56hrs asleep, leaving another 67 hours or so of time when you’re doing everything else. So when you look at it like that those 5 hrs aren’t nearly as important as the other 107 hours (excluding sleep ).

So where do you think the focus should be? On those other hours! Yes the workouts are important for health and well being but they’re not the priority when it comes to fat loss. What you do for the rest of the day and what you eat is. You can’t out-exercise what you eat and diet is king when it comes to fat loss but general activity does help.

We always perceive a workout as burning more calories than it actually does (many studies have proved this). There’s also a tendency after a tough workout to eat more- either because we reward ourselves for the perceived effort or because we’re hungry. There’s also a tendency to be generally less active too if you’re exhausting yourself in workouts. If you spend your working day sat down, and then your evenings watching TV and your weekends fairly sedentary too then that’s what you need to focus on.

The end result is that by being focused on workouts as the only source of calorie expenditure we can end up moving less generally and eating more.

So shift your focus and as think beyond the gym. The calories you burn in a 1 hr workout will be considerably fewer than what you burn being generally active for the rest of the day. So think about how you spend the rest of your day. Do you find yourself sitting more than perhaps you need to? Do you amble instead of walking with purpose? Do you take the lift instead of the stairs? Think beyond the gym and focus instead on making yourself more active – get up, stand instead of sit, walk faster, walk more!

Also don’t be tempted to eat exercise calories back – just treat them as bonus cals rather than something to eat back.

🤗

Xx

The best diet… .. 🥗

There are lots of diets out there that claim to be better than any other. But what do ALL these diets have in common? And why do they work?

It’s nothing to do with any special properties of specific diets. For ANY diet to work it has to result in a calorie deficit. For some people certain diets will enable them to achieve this more easily and therefore that diet will work for them. But behind these diets are the simple maths of calories in vs out. However the issue with many diets is that they don’t educate you on the mechanism behind them and are therefore short term fixes.

Keto / low carb : omits or reduces carbs, which may reduce calories.

5:2 : limits calorie intake for 2 days a week, which may create a calorie deficit on average.

Intermittent fasting/ 16:8 : restricts the window of time you can eat in, which MAY reduce calories.

Diet clubs : assign points or values to certain foods and restrict food types, so MAY reduce calories

Shakes / Supplements : replaces meals or promotes excessive bowel movements etc which result in water loss, and a possible calorie deficit from meal replacement.

Juice cleanse/ detox : replaces whole foods with juices, resulting in fewer calories and rapid initial water loss.

Body type/blood type diet : restricts foods based on blood or body type, which may result in a calorie deficit

Spot the similarities? Many involve omitting food groups which will result in a calorie deficit. Calories can’t tell the time so methods involving not eating on certain days/times only work if you don’t overeat on others. Diet clubs help with accountability (regular weigh ins and rewards) but hide calories behind points or labels which lock you in to their method.

All of these diets can result in fat loss, but how many of them are sustainable long term, educate you on managing energy intake or build new habits? Some are actually damaging; laxative supplements and fasting can cause bowel damage, kidney damage and development of silent acid reflux etc, as well as promoting disordered eating. The best ‘diet’ in my opinion , is one that requires the least amount of restriction and “rules” as possible.That’s why I like tracking calories.

It’s focused less on restriction and more on having restraint.

But it doesn’t matter which ‘diet’ you choose, as long as it works for you – but make sure you understand WHY it works 🙂

xx