What's hiding in your kitchen? - by Derran Langston, Owner and PT @ RWF

I think I've probably lost track of the amount of times a client has told me they eat a certain food, and I've told them it's full of sugar/trans-fats/additives and they've replied with 'really? I didn't know!'.

It's a bit of a sad indictment of society that we simply believe what the packaging WANTS us to believe, and what the adverts WANT us to believe, rather than taking five seconds to double check the claims.

Low fat? Less than 5% fat? Lower fat than the standard brand? All are simple tricks to make you think a food is good for you. 99 times out of 100, low-fat foods are awful. They've taken out the fat (and fat doesn't make you fat, but we'll get on to that some other time) and replaced it with sugar. Why? Because fat tastes good. Remove it, and you've got to replace it with something else. Most of the time, sugar. Check the nutrition labels on low fat foods. You're looking for the 'carbohydrates, of which sugars' bit. Bear in mind a teaspoon of sugar weighs about 5g, and that low-fat yoghurt or bowl of Special K suddenly looks a bit ropey doesn't it? In a 50g serving of Special K, you've got nearly two heaped teaspoons of sugar. Branflakes (the healthy option, right?) are even worse.

The answer is simple. Don't believe what you are told. Read the labels for yourself. Anything ending in '-ose' is a sugar. Smart manufacturers will bank on people not knowing that, and instead of sugar will write 'dextrose', or 'glucose', or 'fructose'. It's all still sugar.

Have a rummage through your cupboards now. That innocent looking Dolmio pasta sauce, the Muller Lites, the SunPat peanut butter. How about your WeightWatchers low fat cereal bars? None of them will have sugar in, surely?

You'll be surprised what is hiding in your kitchen, cleverly disguised as something 'healthy'. Take a stand, take responsibility, and change your buying habits. People are often amazed at the huge changes they can make just by being more aware of what they are eating.

The Yo-Yo Dieter - by Rebecca Conlin, PT @ RWF

Looking at what I have achieved now it’s hard to believe that only a few years ago I was overweight, unfit and extremely shy. In fact growing up in a family who put health and fitness last I was uneducated on what being healthy meant.

It was a visit to the doctors aged 13 which led to me being in the career I love today. Walking into the surgery with a knee injury, the doctor examined me and then to my horror weighed me…13 stone! I weighed the same in stone as the years I had been alive. The diagnosis was childhood obesity; my growing bones were being put under too much stress making my knee joints painful.

Firstly, I want to put an end to the excuses. You are not overweight because you have the fat gene. You are not overweight because you have big bones. You are overweight because you eat too much and/or you don’t move enough. I know this because if anyone should be using these excuses, it is me. All my family are overweight, I myself was overweight, I was ‘big boned’ and it was ‘genetic’… it made me feel a little better, but I was lying to myself. 

Immediately disgusted that I weighed so much I cut out all junk, did not eat after 6pm and if my weight loss wasn’t going as planned I wouldn’t eat at all. This is where my yoyo dieting and disordered eating began. I lost and I gained, I went up and I went down, I had good days and I had bad days. The amount of diets I have tried and ultimately failed, I would need more fingers and toes to count on.  The heaviest I have weighed is 15 stone.

So why do people yoyo? How many times have you heard, or said, 'I did lose weight but I put it all on again'? First of all the word ‘diet’ has a certain stigma to it.  The word ‘diet’ automatically makes people defensive.  Diets typically give you a set of strict rules to what you are or are not allowed to eat, and if you deviate from the plan you have jeopardised it all. What happens when you follow the diet word for word, you step on the scales and… nothing, zero weight loss, despite all your efforts? Reducing the amount of food you have eat so much so that you can’t possibly reduce it anymore?

What if I told you to lose weight you needed to eat more?

Almost 15 years later I am a stable size 10 weighing 10 and a half stone. I eat more often, I have a constant supply of energy AND I’m happy and confident.

Why?

1.      Eating smaller meals more often is believed to keep your metabolism running at the optimum level. After 3 hours your body detects that you haven’t eaten for a while and responds by slowing the metabolism to make your energy last longer. Eating every 3 hours can help prevent this.

2.      The main bulk of my diet comes from unprocessed foods, lean meat and fish, fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, herbs and spices, nuts and most importantly lots of water. Keeping your diet as close to nature as possible, the way we were built to eat.

3.      My diet fuels my workouts making me perform at my best in every session. In addition to diet, combining high intensity interval training with a specific weight training programme will allow you to sculpt your body into your ideal physique.

My advice is to ditch the excuses, ignore fad diets, break the chain passed down from parent to child and get educated to what healthy actually means. I have given some basic guidelines based on personal experience and my work with clients but by no means is this a comprehensive guide.