1. Don’t skip meals

2. Drink water between meals

3. Eat medjool dates instead of chocolate, if you’re a chocoholic

4. Eat a wide variety of fruit through the week

5. Eat more vegetables than fruit

6. Eat some of your veg raw (carrots, celery, radishes, baby sweetcorn)

7. Hummus makes a great snack (the low fat one)

8. Ditch the white bread, eat wholemeal

9. Ditch white rice too, eat bulgar wheat or quinoa instead

10. Sweet potatoes are so much more nutritious than just potatoes

11. Restrict red meat to once a week, make it a lean sirloin steak

12. Avoid processed meats like the plague

13. Snack on almonds and pumpkin seeds

14. Breakfast on fat-free plain natural yoghurt with blueberries thrown in

15. Have some lean protein with every meal

16. Don’t cut out all fat, eat good fats like salmon, avocados, olive oil

17. Don’t wolf down your food, chew it thoroughly

18. Put your knife/fork/spoon down between mouthfuls

19. Eat small portions

20. Not all carbs are bad, eat complex carbs (eg- sweet potato, oats, lentils, beans, quinoa, bulgar) and avoid processed carbs (eg- white rice/bread, cakes, pastries, biscuits, fizzy drinks, sweets)

Here’s how you can get back on track:

1. Grab a piece of A4 paper. Do it now! This will only take a couple of minutes.

2. Write  ‘My 2012 Fitness Goal’ at the top and underline it.

3. Now write down your goal, and make it specific. Don’t just write ‘lose weight’, write ‘lose a stone in weight’, or ‘get fit enough to run 5km without stopping to throw up’, or ‘gain half a stone in lean muscular weight’.  Whatever your top goal is, write it down.

4. Now set a deadline, an actual date. So for instance if you want to lose a stone, aim to lose 2 lbs a week if you’re very overweight, and aim for 1 lb a week if you just need to lose a bit. Then calculate how long it will take to lose the weight you want to lose. And write this goal date on the sheet of paper, AND in your diary. Write “by Saturday 23rd June 2012″ or whatever is the target date.

5. Still with me? Ok, now write a sub-heading “Reasons I want to (fill in your goal here)”, underline it, and list 6 reasons. If it’s weight loss you’re after,  the reasons might be to fit into clothes, to feel sexier, to reduce chances of illness or disease, to feel more confident etc etc. The more reasons you can come up with, the more motivated you’ll become.

6. Now write another sub-heading: “Action Plan” and underline it. Write down 6 things you can start putting into action right now, such as join a gym, run 20 minutes every other day, cut out junk food and replace with more fruit and veg. Check out this site for tips on what you can start doing.

Keep this piece of paper with you, add to it, refine it, and every few days write it out afresh. This is your constantly evolving goal sheet, and it will serve as your guide in the days and weeks ahead.

Let me know how you get on, in the comments section below…..

As ever, I’m keen to hear your comments. Tell me which items work for you, which ones you’ll try to add to your current efforts, and which ones you might even disagree with. This list is not exhaustive, so add some of your own in the comments section, things you think are important or particularly effective.

1. Drink plenty of water between meals

2. Eat fruit every day, but no more than 3 portions

3. Eat at least 4 portions of veg a day, ideally more

4. Tell everyone you know that you’re trying to lose weight, and ask them to support you

5. Set a goal for how much you want to lose, and when by, then work out how much weight loss a week this means. You want to aim for 1-2 lbs per week weight loss.

6. Don’t cut out all fats. Some fats are good, and crucial to your health, so eat oily fish, avocados, almonds, pumpkin seeds, olive oil. All in moderation of course.

7. If you have a personal trainer, squeeze maximum value out of them. Keep a food diary and ask them to assess your eating habits.

8. Include resistance exercises to your workout regime, it’s the best form of exercise to lose excess body fat. So pushups, squats, and dumbbell exercises are all good.

9. Get plenty of good quality sleep. Poor sleep habits mess up your hormone balance and thwart your weight-loss efforts.

10. Don’t skip meals. You need to keep your metabolism ticking over with regular feeds, otherwise your body thinks there’s a famine and goes into fat-storage mode.

I look forward to your comments!

Let’s take weight-loss as an example, although it could equally be a goal for muscle growth, or improving your performance in your favourite sport.

Read the three statements below, and see which one sounds most like you.

Ambition Level 1:

“I really want to lose weight, and I’m trying hard to eat less and exercise more, but the weight won’t shift. I’m not sure exactly how much weight I want to lose, and to be honest I can’t really imagine myself as slim, but I’ll keep trying. I’ve only told a couple of people that I’m trying to lose weight, because I don’t want to be regarded as a failure if the weight doesn’t come off. If I don’t manage to lose weight, I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.”

Ambition Level 2:

“I want to lose a stone (around 7 kg) in weight, but I don’t want to put myself under the pressure of setting a date. After all, there are lots of social events coming up, and I’m very busy at work, so there’s no point putting a deadline on it. I’ve taken some advice from a personal trainer at my gym, so I’ve got an workout routine and eating plan to follow, and so far I’m sticking to it whenever I can (about half the time hehe). I’ve told everyone to encourage me to lose the weight, which is helping a lot. I’ll get there eventually (hopefully).”

Ambition Level 3:

“I want to lose a stone (6.4kg) in weight in 14 weeks from today, so that means I’ll lose an average of 1lb a week, and I’ll reach my target weight by Wednesday 30th November. I’ve got a burning desire to get there this time, and I’ve got a workout and eating plan mapped out. Everyone knows I want to lose this stone, and if anyone tries to knock me off course they’ll get an earful. My fitness regime includes lots of thing I like doing, so I won’t get bored. And my eating plan is varied and full of tasty meals and snacks so I won’t feel deprived. Every night before I go to sleep I visualise my new body, and I go through all the reasons why I want to lose this weight (I’ve got 8 reasons, written on a sheet of paper and pinned up on the fridge). I can see myself in my mind’s eye, one stone lighter, and this spurs me on. Once a week I’ll weigh myself and keep track of my progress. No more excuses, I’m going to do it this time.”

Which level of ambition best describes you? Leave a comment in the comments section below…..

The prize for the best comment (the judge’s decision is final!) is a £5 coin, produced by the Royal Mint, to mark the countdown to the London 2012 Olympics. It’s in mint condition, in its original presentation packaging. Comments by the end of June 2011 please.

The most effective set of goals include both short term and long term goals. So for example if you want to lose a stone, your short term goal could be to lose 1lb a week, and your long term goal to reach a certain specific weight by the end of this year.

It also helps to have a mixture of input goals (eg- go to gym 3 times a week) as well as outcome goals (eg – reduce your body fat percentage to 14% if you’re a man, or 24% of you’re a woman, for example).

And make sure you include a nutrition goal, because you can’t out-train a bad diet! It might be to kick the habit of fizzy drinks, or salt in food, or sugar in tea, or drink less alcohol, or a combination of all these things.

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Don’t limit your goals to just weight loss. You might want to change your body shape, become more flexible, be able to run for 20 minutes without difficulty, gain more energy, recover from an injury, reach a certain level in your favourite sport.

Whatever your goals for 2011, share them in the comments below!

personal training in the park

On April Fool’s Day, April 1st, Hammersmith & Fulham Council decided to start charging personal trainers £350 a year to use public parks.

If other councils are crazy enough to follow suit, this will mean that personal trainers will have to pay a separate charge to each and every borough council whose parks they train clients in. That might mean £3,500 slapped on a trainer with park clients across 10 boroughs.

I can’t help thinking this policy is unfair, illogical, and unenforceable. It will discourage Londoners from getting help to get fit, it will force start-up personal trainers out of business, and it goes against the principle of public parks being free for all.

The reasoning behind this charge? Personal trainers make money out of the park, use it as their place of business, so they should make a contribution. And it will enable councils to vet personal trainers, weed out unqualified ones, and protect the public. All these arguments are false.

Personal trainers and their clients are already contributing to the upkeep of the parks through their council tax. They pay tax, national insurance, get no holiday pay or sick pay, and yet councils see fit to impose this additional tax on trainers.

It’s a tax on fitness at a time when Londoners should be encouraged for getting fit, not penalised.

And it’s not as if an individual personal trainer with one client is draining the resources of the park.

Are they causing any obstruction? No! Do they cause any annoyance or excess noise (apart from a few muffled grunts from the client)? No! Do they have a permanent presence, or leave rubbish or cause any wear and tear (apart from a few squashed blades of grass)? No!

It’s worth making a distinction here between individual personal trainers with a single client, and bootcamp organisations which train over a dozen clients at the same time. These bootcamps are charged £1,200 a year for training in the park, which is fair enough as they eat up lots of space and squeeze out other park users from the spot they train in. Totally different scenario from one personal trainer with one client.

How can such a policy be enforced? What’s to stop the trainer telling the parks police that he’s training a friend for free? And how can it be enforced fairly? Will a trainer who just runs through a park with a client a few times a week be expected to pay the same as a trainer who uses the park 5 hours a day every day?

Parks are public spaces, and personal training clients should be free to use the park to get fit, without an extra charge being passed onto them. All the pavements of a London borough are public spaces too, so what’s next, a charge for personal trainers jogging along the pavement with their client?

And the safety/regulation argument is nonsense. Clients are perfectly capable of checking qualifications, membership of the Register of Personal Trainers, first aid certificates, when they hire a personal trainer. Yet another layer of bureaucracy is the last thing anyone needs.

And if borough councils want to do more to promote the safety and wellbeing of people using the park, there are dozens of higher priorities they should focus on: dangerous dogs, gangs, drugs, dog litter, discarded syringes, drunks, rogue fast-food traders. A personal trainer is hardly a risk to the public when compared to this list.

What do you think? Have your say in the comments section below…..

Happy with your gym?

Here are ten of the most common complaints people have about their gym, and as you’ll see they’re a mixture of minor gripes, and pretty major issues:

1. Too crowded at peak times. The problem is often worse in low-cost gyms, which can even be too crowded at off-peak times.

2. Broken lockers, or lockers too small for all your stuff

3. Dirty changing rooms (who wants to see corn plasters and apple cores all over the place, and worse)

4. Showers too hot or too cold (or dirty/mouldy/no shower gel). I don’t know about you but I like a nice hot power shower (but ideally not scalding, like one I tried to use once, set permanently to scalding)

5. Broken exercise machines, that stay broken for months

6. Dumbbells strewn around the gym, so you end up spending half your time searching for a matching pair.

7. Cleaners vacuuming round your head when you’re in the middle of an exercise on the mat (this actually happened to my once, I nearly got vacuumed up)

8. Fitness Instructors nowhere to be seen (although to be fair, there are a lot of excellent gym instructors and personal trainers in London gyms, but some of them could be more proactive and available

9. Nasty cancellation clauses. When you join, you don’t always think to ask about the cancellation notice period. Three months is not unheard of, which is annoying if you need to cancel for any reason.

10. Empty water fountains and paper towel dispensers. You can get round this by having your own water bottle and towel, but it’s nice if they’re provided.

What drives you crazy about your gym? Or are you happy with your gym? If you’ve complained, what happened? Have your say in the comments below…..