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“I Want it All, and I Want it Now”
21st century life is fast paced, and everyone wants to see results……. yesterday. This is true of our working environments, and we also bring the same expectations into our personal lives. We want to get fit and slim fast, and sometimes with minimal effort, which just isn’t realistic or healthy.
As a Personal Trainer, I help my clients to get fit with a phased and bespoke exercise programme; and, within the bounds of what my client wants, I also look at their lifestyle and diet to help them achieve their goals.
But I’ve had some worrying conversations with clients and friends alike about the best way to lose weight. In many magazines and newspapers there are adverts which purport to have unlocked the secret of ‘easy’ weight loss in the form a tablet. Alternatively some people will opt to drastically reduce their food intake, or even cut out whole food groups for a period of time – options like these leave me feeling very uneasy.
I concede that they may be ways of losing weight in the short term, but they are ‘quick fixes’, and we all know that a quick fix for anything in life is not necessarily desirable, sustainable, or to be recommended over the long term. More importantly, when it’s our bodies we’re talking about, are any of them a healthy choice? I think not.
My attitude to any ‘quick fix’ weight loss solution is that it may appear to do what it says on the tin, and the number on the scales may, indeed, go down, but there is so much more to it than that; what is the nature of the weight you are losing? Our aim should be to lose excess fat but, in the case of drastic food reduction, the body perceives potential famine, and so its first priority is to preserve our life support systems and functions. And the presence of fat in our bodies is crucial to so many processes that, during prolonged periods of severe calorie deprivation, the body will also let go of muscle and leach calcium from bones……I could go on and on detailing the detrimental effects but, sufficeth to say, that it’s not a healthy or sustainable way to live over the long term.
Where tablets are involved as a weight loss aid, I’m also not comfortable unless they have been carefully evaluated, are of a high quality and taken in the correct dosage under the direction of a nutritionist or dietician.
For the sake of physical, and mental, wellbeing (think of the havoc wreaked by years of so called ‘yo-yo’ diets), I advocate making the choice to change your life for good. Speak to diet and nutrition experts http://www.janeplan.com/ and start to reap the benefits of incorporating a delicious, healthy and nutritionally balanced diet into your daily life.
Having an exercise plan which is tailored to you, augmented by a nutritionally sound diet is not a ‘quick fix’ solution to either weight loss or fitness – it is phased and gradual, but it is the only way to ensure your health and well-being over long term.
So you want to be slim and fit? You can be, but put in some work and be patient. Here endeth the lesson 