Part 23-Festive Fitness
Story Highlights
Tubby Tummies
Kick Starting Your Metabolism
Try Something Different
Eating Vs Exercise
Tubby Tummies
1. The most commonly asked question I get in the gym is: “How can I lose weight around my stomach?” Most people expect me to point at a machine or show them one exercise that will do what they've asked but just like a lot of hard things in life there isn't one answer. The best answer I can offer is don't spend all your time doing stomach intensive exercise and expect to see any difference in your waist measurement. To lose fat from the body as a whole you need to be doing regular and hard exercise - that involves moving as much of your body as possible. The result of this is that more calories are burned, however your body will be the one who decides where the fat disappears from first.
Kick Starting Your Metabolism
2. Results don't have to come from a complete overhaul of your life and even small changes can yield a good result. A great example would be to commit to a healthy breakfast ever morning. Your metabolism is at its slowest when we sleep so you need to get it jump started first thing by making yourself eat. Most people discount the benefit of small changes because the results aren't immediate. Here's one place to start - look up your Base Metabolic Rate (the number of calories you need to live and do the stuff you do each day) and then just eat or burn through exercise, 100 calories less per day. This is 30 minutes of brisk walking or not drinking three quarters of a can of coke. If you continued this every single day for a year, you would burn off 10lbs of fat. Most people would be happy with this amount but they rarely have the patience to wait a whole year.
Try Something Different
3. One of the hardest walls to break down when it comes to training new people is the idea that they should try new things and move out of their comfort zone. Women should lift some weights and guys should try something like Yoga. Women looking to tone up are really looking for muscle and provided it is in the right places and in the right amount most women would be over the moon to get a few pounds of muscle. On the flip side a lot of men could really benefit from the preventative and rehabilitative powers of what they normally dismiss as women's classes. If you've been doing the same thing every time you visit the gym and it isn't getting you the results you want after a fair trial then it's time to do something else. Working harder in some respects is a potential answer but if you are sweating away every day at the gym for extended times, without results then maybe you are working too hard.
Eating Vs Exercise
4. This is the last and most important insider tip. What you eat will always be more important that how much exercise you do. Training hour after hour, day after day will get you results but not if you sabotage this by eating horribly - every second you are out of the gym. The average fast food burger and chips will add up to about 1000 calories (not including the coke and dessert) to your regular intake. To burn off that number of calories you would have to do a brisk walk for more than 5 hours. So basically there aren't enough hours in the day to out train a bad diet. As mentioned earlier your metabolism is driven by food consumption so if you can eat more, your metabolism will be higher. However the real challenge is to consume healthy, lower calorie, higher volume foods. Try replacing the three quarters of a can of coke with two cups of strawberries and two servings of salad. While we don't expect everyone to eat like a rabbit all the time - even getting it 50 to 60% right will make a big difference to your health. Hopefully being consistent with your nutrition will give you enough gains to see why you should keep it up all the time. Simply put there is no food out there that will taste as good as how you will feel - when you finally reach one of your goals.
For those of you planning to implement some significant changes in the New Year I'll be focussing my January column on how to create and fulfil realistic goals for health and fitness.
- James
If there are any topics on health, nutrition and fitness that you would like to see addressed or you have any questions, please contact me at healthy.living@st-christophers.co.uk or go to www.fireinsidefitness.com.You can also read my online Blog at www.FireInsideFitness.blogspot.com.
James McDonald is a St Christopher's Manager and fully certified personal trainer, working in Edinburgh.
