Are you sabotaging your desire for a healthy life?

THERE are so many fitness and health gurus, articles and products available in the health and fitness industry that quite often you can become extremely confused and rightly so.  
The diet industry in the UK alone is worth two billion. So there are a whole lot of companies out there making an absolute fortune from consistently bombarding us with all sorts of fitness and health solutions. There really is NO Quick Fix to getting slim, fit and healthy.

Common mistakes

• Restricting your food
I have done regular weigh-ins with clients for years; I can confirm that not one of them has ever had a basal metabolic rate under 1,150 kcal. This is the amount of energy in calorie value that their body needs to function if they were to do nothing more than sleep on a sofa all day. So my question is, how on earth do you expect your poor body to function on a daily restricted intake of 600-800 calories? So your body goes into panic mode, thinks it is being starved and slows the metabolism right down to preserve fat stores.

• Over-training
Training at the gym for hours to the point of exhaustion, is counter-productive. Mix your sessions to include resistance training, cardio and High Intensity Training for around 45 minutes to an hour per session three to four times per week; this is plenty.

• Alcohol
Your biggest saboteur, it is laden with calories and has no nutritious value whatsoever.
Your body cannot metabolise alcohol as it views it as poison, so as you are working off the alcohol calories, any food that is sitting in your stomach is busy being stored as fat.

My top four tips:
• Plan a long-term lifestyle change instead of following random fad diets.
• Incorporate regular effective exercise into your life – minimum three hours per week.
• Eat at least three well-balanced nutritious meals per day.
• Limit alcohol to a weekend treat.