In the simplest of terms, weight loss is nothing but a function of how many calories you burn versus how much you take in. Eating usually means you get calories, and day-to-day activities and exercise burns the. To make things very simple, you’re not losing any weight if you take in more than you burn off.

Conceptually, nothing could be more simple. However there are several factors to consider. These can include genetics, economics, culture, access to nutritious food, and access to decent amounts of exercise. The type of activities you engage in and your psychological makeup also contribute immensely to how well you lose weight- and keep it off.

Olympic level athletes often burn through astounding amounts of calories and consequently need to replenish them in enormous quantities. Swimmer Michael Phelps for instance, famously consumed 12,000 calories a day for his training regimen- up to 6 times the recommended daily allowance for an average person his age at the time. Of course, while most of us never get the amount of exercise someone like Michael Phelps would, most people in the industrialized world regularly exceed the 2000 recommended calories a day without even trying.

Read more…

It’s what the world is made of, it’s what we’re made of and it’s going be the deciding factor in whether we succeed or fail in our health and fitness goals.

What am I talking about?

Energy, pure and simple energy.

Doing what I do, I hear all the excuses in the world for why people “just aren’t doing it” most of the room put up their hands.

When we look closer at what is going on, it all boils down to one thing - energy.

“Oh, Im so tired after a day at work, my job is so exhausting, I just want to collapse in front of the TV when I get in” Whats the issue? Energy.

“Im rubbish in the mornings. I press snooze for an hour and then have to rush to get ready. I need a coffee firstnthing in the morning but I do not have time for breakfast.” The issue - Energy.

“It gets to four in the afternoon and I need chocolate!” What do you really need? Energy.

By not treating the body right, but not feeding it with the right fuel or by draining it of it’s very last drip of energy, we end up running on empty. We rarely take the time to refuel, to give ourselves an MOT. We treat our bodies and minds worse than we treat our cars. We know the effect it has on a car when you try and run it on empty, yet we do this to ourselves on a regular basis.

This week I had no energy for most of the week, well that’s what it felt like anyway. I have no one to blame for that but myself. Luckily I was in a position that I had very little to do and in fact I could take some rest. Had I been at home, living my normal life I would have seriously struggled.

That was the whole point, I had used up my energy and it was time to conserve it. The body knew intuitively what I needed and when I gave it the space, that’s exactly what it did, took the opportunity to recharge the batteries.

That was the actual results of my detox, I realised this as it came to my final days. It wasn’t about the body composition analysis said although I was pleased with my results. It was about how I felt afterwards and what was going to happen from here.

Looking at my results at first I was surprised and a little disappointed. Did I come out fitter? No. Not in the sense we would usually regard fitter. My resting heart rate was up slightly, as was my blood pressure (these were very low when I started though). Did I lose immense amounts of body fat? No only about a percent.

Did I get what my blood needed? Yes absolutely. For me, I did not really need to get fitter or leaner. I needed to relax and recharge and when I gave my body the chance to do it’s stuff, it intuitively knew what to do.

It needed me to stop “doing” and enjoy “being” for a while.

It took me a while to get this and it was in this process of “being” that I was able to rebuild my energy. I did this through yoga and meditation, breathing practise, spending time in nature, getting some amazing treatments but more importantly taking time out. Out of my busy body and out of my busy mind.

Over here in India they refer to this energy as “Prana” or life force and it is everywhere, both within us and outside us. Everything is about maintaining our prana and we can do this by leading a simple disciplined life or just by putting in small rituals to each day that help replace our lost energy.

I think most of us are guilty of using up our vital energy with all the other things in life that we see as important. Or wasting it with things like TV which we do not realise are still robbing us of our energy.

So many of the people I coach easily solve their issues through something simple like getting to bed earlier, having an evening routine that involves sitting down at a table to eat slowly and mindfully having bedtime rituals like a bath and a good book, instead of TV plus a bottle of wine and all the nibbles that go with it.

Or simply walking or cycling to work, instead of more rushing around to get to the gym after work. Or getting up when the alarm goes off and having a good start to the day. Or getting out of the office at lunchtime and actually taking a break.

Whatever it is we need to make sure we are regularly paying into the energy bank instead of just withdrawing all the time.

Then just maybe we will have enough left to do the things we really want to do.

Congratulations on your new bundle of joy! It’s no doubt that you’ll be enjoying all the wonders and surprises that come with your new baby. But it’s probably crossed your mind that you want to leave the baby weight behind and start reshaping your body to your pre-baby girth. You probably want to shed your maternity clothes and start fitting into your jeans, right?

Well, don’t worry, an article at Self.com by Bari Lieberman entitled “Lose the Baby Weight: The Fastest Way To Get Your Pre-baby Bod Back” knows exactly what you need to safely shed the pounds you might have put on during the maternity period. Read more…

If you’ve been on one of our Fit Farms weeks, you will know that we often refer to it as the “kickstart” to a healthier lifestyle, and that I talk about the fact that the first part of the change process can be a bit “uncomfortable”.

You may recall some of that discomfort, but by the end of the week you realised that it was a necessary part of the process, and that it’s just your comfy “old slippers” have been taken away.

I’m experiencing that for myself again this week. I decided the first week of my adventure, I needed a kickstart, a controlled environment where all my usual comforts were taken away. Where I couldn’t just slip into my old habit of “pleasure-seeking”, as a reward for working hard. Yes, I do these things too!

I was also intrigued about whether strict detoxes actually work, and how they approached this in the East. I’m in a Wellness Retreat, doing their detox programme, and I have been introduced to some pretty uncomfortable new slippers, in the shape of juice fasting and coffee enemas.

Now those seasoned Fit Farm people will know that the key to success, where you actually change behaviours, just lies in wearing
in the new slippers. There’s no quick fix, because there is no magic food or exercise that you can do that will actually change your habits. Not in a week.

So you might say I’m getting a taste of my own medicine here, but I wanted to try something different.

There are three zones we can be in at any one time:

1. Our comfort zone, where we feel at ease, where everything is familiar and therefore feels nice and comfy.

2. Our stretch zone, where we are being challenged, it is requiring something new of us, we are growing and evolving and it can feel quite exhilarating, but not as comfortable at first.

3. Our stress, or panic zone. This is when we are way out of our comfort zone, we are scared, anxious and our body goes into “fight-or-flight”, thinking we are in danger physically and therefore producing the stress response.

You can probably guess which zone is the ideal for most of the time. Stretch. We literally need to “stretch” ourselves on a regular basis, then what happens is that we are more resilient to things which come along that throw us into the stress response (which if triggered on a regular basis makes us fat and tired).

So what happened with me recently, which I know is common is a lot of people, is that I spent too much time in the stress zone, that in order to balance things out, I had to spend the rest of the time in the comfort zone. This meant I was never in “stretch”, which can lead to you being dissatisfied, fatigued, and stagnant.

We sometimes have to bite the bullet, make a decision and take the leap, going through a bit of discomfort in order to make positive changes. Eventually you’ve got to led go of those comfy old slippers and do something different. Only then do we start to increase our “stress threshold”, our ability to deal with stress.

I realise this isn’t going to be an easy ride, but I have faith that what will come out of it will benefit me, and others. This is “delayed gratification”, not the “quick fix”, and if you like you can follow my journey on here, as I’ll be sharing all of what I’m learning along the way.

For now, I’ll leave you with a thought for the day:

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone”.
Neale Walsh

So here I am in beautiful Goa on an adventure to discover how the East approaches health and wellbeing, in particular, how they manage stress and stay so calm and happy.

I must admit that, although I am fairly fit and healthy in many ways, a peaceful mind has still eluded me. Recently, I became exhausted, adrenal fatigue they told me, which would also explain why I gained a stone in weight when i had changed nothing.

My diet was healthy, and I did more exercise in a day than most people did in a week. It just didn’t seem to make sense. Ok, I knew a little about the cortisol connection to weight gain, however, it is something hadn’t experienced first hand.

As I started to study more about this stress response, and research the people who had come on Fit Farms, it became more and more evident that the body’s biochemical reactions to our lifestyles was a huge factor in many weight problems.

Most of the men and women I speak to with weight issues, it’s not as simple as that they just started eating more, or stopped exercising. It’s a much more complex issue, and the weight is just a symptom of something being out of balance. This may be a lifestyle factor, a demanding job, or one the road all the time. It may be an emotional issue, we are dissatisfied with our lives, and as we have been brought up to reward with food, we are using food to give us pleasure. It may be the type of food itself that is causing the problem, as so many people rely on stimulants, most notably sugar to get them through the day.

Stress and other factors throw the body out of balance. This now seems to have reached epidemic proportions in Westrn society.

Through my own experiences, being let down and disillusioned by Western medicine, I have over the years looked outside of the norm for the answers. I healed my fractured spine with The Alexander Technique, and I believe that our health is in our own hands.

This time I wanted to find a cure, an antidote for stress, and what better way to learn that discovering it for yourself.

I had a feeling that yoga and meditation are a crucial element of this, and where better to learn than in India. So here I am, taking this journey, ironically after one of the most stressful weeks I have had at work in a long time.

By keeping this diary, and just sharing my experiences, I hope that my learning will help others take responsibility for their stress, and their health, and do something about it.

Without our health, we have nothing.

Getting up off the couch to do a few rounds of exercise isn’t the easiest thing to do. Let’s face it, the sofa’s comfy and working up a sweat isn’t. Still we all know that exercising is important to our health and that it will do us well to include fitness routines into our daily activities. So to help those of us having trouble getting amped up with exercise, here are a few of the tips from fitness experts and people who have successfully benefited from exercise from a recent article at WebMD entitled “10 Workout Secrets: Expert Exercise Tips”.

According to the article writer, Carol Sorgen, it’s important to be consistent. Cutting back on high calorie food and slowly increasing your exercise might help you lose weight. It’s not necessary to start running races right away but gradually exercising will definitely help. Read more…

Ever find yourself promising to have a salad but ending up with a packet of french fries? Or committing to the idea of just watching the movie without any snacks but finding yourself unable to say no to a tub of buttery popcorn? We all have, and believe it or not this may have a lot to do with where we eat , if Time.com’s article “Nobody Orders Fast Food Salads But That’s Not the Real Problem” or MSN.com’s “People will Wolf Down Stale Popcorn Out of Habit, Study Shows,” is to believed.

According to both articles, if we’re already hardwired to scarf down burgers at fast food joints or buy popcorn at movie houses, we’re likely to do that whenever we’re at a burger place or sitting to down to see the latest blockbuster. Still, that doesn’t mean that we can’t overcome our programming. Fitsugar, a popular blog on fitness tips, offers a few ideas on how to “Break Bad Snacking Habits”. Read more…

The holidays are upon us and for most of us, it’s time to break out the eatin’ pants. After all, once it starts with the candy frenzy that is Halloween and runs on through Turkey-and-Stuffing Day (aka, Thanksgiving Day) and then of course, the traditional food fest that is the Christmas season, we’re probably going to have several big and delicious meals and we’ll need to jeans to accommodate them. Read more…

Crunches are the part of the most basic exercise regimens we all start with. We do them to exercise our core muscles to gain better balance, improve our cardio performance and sculpt the most amazing abs possible. But let’s get the truth out there, are we really exerting all that effort when all we’re getting are the Hollywood-approved midsection and not the two other benefits?

It’s a question researchers at the Indiana State University dared to ask when they held a study among healthy young adults. Their assumption was that those with better cores would succeed in their battery of exercises more than the others. However, the results seemed to say that while most sports scientists and coaches believe in the correlation of subjecting your core to a workout (typically through crunches and medicine ball exercises) can improve your athletic performance, studies on the subject (including this one) have yielded a very mixed bag of results. Read more…

There are many benefits to having a dog at home. Dogs are, after all, great companions if you’re ever lonely because they’re loving. Also, aside from being man’s best friend, a dog can be your very own personal security guard or hunting partner. But did you know that keeping a dog at home can also help you lose weight?

Surprised?

Well, according Tara Parker-Pope, who writes for the NYTimes’ Well Section, if you’re looking to lose some poundage, having your very own pup is much better than running on treadmill (providing, of course, that you’re not allergic to dogs).

In the article Forget the Treadmill. Get a Dog, Ms. Parker-Pope relates that studies have shown that older people are more likely to take regular walks if they have dogs because their furry friends will always need to be walked so they get some exercise too. She also cites findings from researchers from Michigan State University that dog owners got at an average of 30 minutes of exercise about 5 times a week while those without canine companions hardly get as much exercise.

The study, led by Dr. Matthew Reeves also brought forth an important question: does dog walking add to the amount of exercise you do, or does it merely replace the exercise you would have done if you didn’t have a dog?

It turns out that dog walkers tend to take part in other physical activities for leisure (say, playing sports or gardening) and they got about 30 minutes/week more exercise than people without dogs.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that having a dog means that you’ll being doing the walking. Some people have large enough yards for their dogs to run free, while other people need to hire dog walkers for various reasons.

Still, it should be noted that another study found that people who acquired dogs were able to increase their physical activity compared to before they brought their dog’s home.

Another interesting result of yet another research project done at the University of Missouri is that most people who walked with dogs were likely to get more exercise than those who walked with human companions. Why? Simply because humans could talk each other out of tiring exercise while dogs don’t.

Dr. Johnson who led the study says that people “help themselves by helping the dog.” Basically, Johnson continues, “If we’re committed to a dog, it enables us to commit to physical activity ourselves.”

Now isn’t that better motivation for getting a work out?

To learn more about how owning a dog can help you get more fit, read Forget the Treadmill. Get a Dog by Tamara Parker-Pope at NYTimes.com. You can also find more fitness and workout tips at the Well Section.