Why this PT says, 'You don't need a PT!'

Before I began my health and fitness journey in 2011, like a great number of people, I believed that I too could have the perfect figure if only I had a Personal Trainer, like all the film stars have.  Of course I could eat healthy and exercise if someone were telling me to!  It'd be easy!

But is it that simple?  

Now that I'm a Personal Trainer, I can tell my clients how to exercise and what to eat.  I can push them hard for the sessions they spend with me each week.

But is that enough?

Just saying you have a Personal Trainer is not enough.  You can't just talk the talk and expect to get ripped through osmosis.  You have to walk the walk.  You have to turn up.  You have to turn up and you have to work hard.  And you can't rely on one session a week to get you the 'toning' results everyone seems to be after - you need to put in some out of hours effort too.

You need to eat right - abs are, after all, made in the kitchen.  There simply aren't enough hours in the day to work off some of the meals and snacks you can eat in one sitting!

And if I have to nag you to turn up, then you aren't committed.  And if you aren't committed, then your health and fitness won't be sustained.

As a Personal Trainer, I make very good use of the skills I learnt when I was a teacher.

I am a facilitator - my aim as a teacher and now a PT, is to foster independent learning - in other words, my job as a Personal Trainer is to get you to believe in yourself.  To get you to love exercise and healthy eating so much that you are able to sustain it without my constant attention.  My job as a Personal Trainer is to get you to be amazed by the things you can do that you never imagined you were capable of and to get such a buzz from this that you keep on wanting to improve.  

When this happens, you see impromptu days off, that mean you can come to an extra class a week, as super-lucky!

When this happens you see unscheduled appointments, that you can't get out of and mean you have to miss a session, as genuinely frustrating!

When this happens, I don't need to nag you to turn up because you are committed!

You don't need a PT to get fit and healthy, you just need walk your talk!

NB: obviously I realise I'm talking myself out of a job here - so I'll just add the caveat that a PT has the knowledge and experience to help focus and personalise your exercises and the ability to push you hard so that you get much more out of each session than were you to work out on your own  = )

Phew.

Paleo Celebration Cake

How do I top the paleo celebration cake I made for my daughter, Liv's birthday this year?  That was the problem I faced for Zack's birthday today - I'm not the world's greatest cook and I'm a bit slapdash but the paleo rainbow cake I made for Liv I think was the best cake I've ever made!

I'm not sure I topped it with Zack's paleo celebration cake but it's not bad and tastes yummy!

Paleo Chocolate and Raspberry Checkerboard Cake

Ingredients:

For the raspberry sponge:

400g creamed coconut (aka coconut manna or coconut butter)
6-7 eggs
1 cups of honey
2 tsp baking powder
300g raspberries
1 tsp vanilla extract

For the Chocolate sponge:

400g creamed coconut (aka coconut manna or coconut butter)
6-7 eggs
1 cups of honey
2 tsp baking powder
200g dark chocolate, melted
1/2 cup cocoa powder

For both cakes, melt the coconut in hot water in the packet or in a bain marie if it comes in a jar.
Add the baking powder and one egg at a time, whisking each one in - it will seize to begin with but will loosen up eventually.  
Add the honey and mix in well.
Add the other ingredients.

Split mixture between two lined sandwich tins and bake at 170 degrees until the sponge bounces back and a skewer comes out clean.

Allow to cool for a few minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.  Allow to cool completely before cutting.

While the cakes are cooling, make the ganaches.

White chocolate ganache: (not strictly paleo but...)

200g white chocolate
25g butter or coconut oil
50ml coconut cream
50g creamed coconut

Melt chocolate with the coconut and butter or oil in a bain marie, add the coconut cream once melted, this should stiffen the mixture.

If the mixture separates, the addition of one egg yolk has enough lecithin in it to bring it back together.

Dark chocolate ganache:

400g dark chocolate
50 butter or coconut oil
130ml coconut cream
50g creamed coconut

Follow same process as for the white chocolate ganache.

Using cake rings or cutters, cut the cakes into concentric circles, 3 or 4 will do.

Use the white chocolate ganache to coat the inside one of the largest chocolate cake rings.
Place one of the second largest raspberry sponge rings inside the chocolate ring.
Coat the inside of this ring with white chocolate ganache.
Place one of the second smallest chocolate cake rings inside this one and coat the inside with white chocolate ganache.
Place one of the smallest raspberry sponge circles in the centre.
Coat the top of the cake you have constructed so far with white chocolate ganache.

Starting this time with one of the largest raspberry sponge rings, repeat the process.

Continue until you have used up all the cake rings.

Cover the entire cake with the dark chocolate ganache and smooth with a palette knife.

Top with fresh raspberries and add a ring of them at the base.

Paleo Celebration Cake

And that's this year's paleo celebration cake!

Paleo birthday breakfast

My big boy's birthday today. 
12 years old. 
Oh my God, where did the time go?







Anyway, what does a 12 year-old paleo boy want for his birhtday breakfast?  Why, wild boar of course!




I think this may be more what he had in mind...

But this is what he got, wild boar and kangaroo from 

The meat on the left is kangaroo steak and on the right is wild boar steak.

Both were delicious!  The kangaroo doesn't taste like anything I've tasted before but was delicious and the wild boar was similar to pork but with a sweeter flavour.

I think he liked it!

He's a bit of an Asterix nut so wild boar for breakfast made him very happy!

 

Love my paleo family!

Happy 12th birthday, Zackary!

Why your government sugaring the pill is actually killing you.

Even before I went on a health kick and became a Personal Trainer, I had a mistrust of processed sugar. Whilst my kids only gave up sugar totally once we decided to go paleo, I had always limited their intake.  Also, whilst I am by no means a great cook (awful, some might say) I do always cook from scratch so we have always limited our intake of added sugar in sauces and savoury processed foods.

A recent article in the Guardian makes me very glad we have avoided processed sugar, generally fructose, so much.

On the whole, the sugar that is added to fizzy drinks, cakes and other processed foods is high fructose corn syrup.

This processed fructose is literally poison!

This article in the Guardian puts the scientific spin on this.

In a nutshell, this article shows how dangerous fructose is and how the government and food giants are trying to use misunderstood terminology to put a positive spin on a very negative thing.

The European Food and Safety Agency states that sucrose is better for you than glucose because it has a lower glycemic index.

This is irrelevant.

Glycemic index measures the rise in blood glucose, not blood sucrose!

'Yes, fructose has a low glycaemic index of 19, because it doesn't increase blood glucose. It's fructose, for goodness sake. It increases blood fructose, which is way worse. Fructose causes seven times as much cell damage as does glucose, because it binds to cellular proteins seven times faster; and it releases 100 times the number of oxygen radicals (such as hydrogen peroxide, which kills everything in sight). Indeed, a 20oz soda results in a serum fructose concentration of six micromolar, enough to do major arterial and pancreatic damage. Glycaemic index is a canard; and fructose makes it so. Because fructose's poisonous effects have nothing to do with glycaemic index; they are beyond glycaemic index.'

• Robert Lustig
• The Guardian, Monday 21 October 2013

Glycemic index is not the issue - here's why:

'Glycaemic load is where it's at. This takes into account how much of a given food one must eat to obtain 50 grams of carbohydrate. The perfect example is carrots. Carrots have a high glycaemic index – if you consume 50 grams of carbohydrate in carrots, your blood sugar will rise pretty high. But you would have to eat 1.3lbs – 600 grams – of carrots to get 50 grams of carbohydrate. Highly unlikely. Any high-glycaemic-index food can become a low-glycaemic-load food if it's eaten with its inherent fibre. That means "real food". But fructose is made in a lab. It's anything but "real".'

• Robert Lustig
• The Guardian, Monday 21 October 2013

Here is why sucrose is so nasty and why the idea that something is safe, offering positive health benefits even, based on eroneous science is so dangerous.  

The food industry is fond of referring to a 1999 study showing that liver fat generation from oral fructose occurs at a very low rate (less than 5%). And that's true, if you're thin, insulin sensitive, fasting (and therefore glycogen-depleted), and given just fructose alone (which is poorly absorbed). Conversely, if you're obese, insulin resistant, well fed, and getting both fructose and glucose together (like a sizable percentage of the population), then fructose gets converted to fat at a much higher rate, approximating 30%. In other words, the toxicity of fructose depends on context.

• Robert Lustig
• The Guardian, Monday 21 October 2013

Here is the entire article.

Alongside planning your day comes planning your meals.

If you know what you need to get out of the freezer in advance, what ingredients you need to have ready and what you are eating for each meal, not only will you vastly reduce your food waste and food bill but you will be in control of your nutrition. 

This means you will be less likely to snack on undesirable choices because you won't have bought these items and you will be properly fuelled up regularly on healthy  foods and will be less likely to crave the unhealthy stuff.

Download this planner for free to help you.

I trim the edges and laminate in an A3 laminating pouch so I can reuse it each week - OHP pens work best because they don't smudge but can be wiped off easily with a damp cloth each week.

If you focus on cutting sugar, limiting flour and reducing processed foods, you will change your life - for real!

How many of us find it hard, if not impossible to motivate ourselves to make time to exercise?

How many of us start exercising regularly and then find it falls by the wayside when something 'more important' comes along or we have a 'busy' month?

Let's address that issue of 'busy' months.  If you are a grown up, you will find, I'm pretty certain, that every month is a busy one.  If you make a list of everything you have to do on a daily basis over the course of a week, you will find it very quickly becomes overwhelming.  Go on, have a go!  Write a list of everything you have to accomplish on a daily basis over the course of a week.  Then it's easy to see why exercise drops off or is non-existant.

Perhaps you do schedule time for exercise, but then along comes an important meeting at work you need to prepare for or a party to plan for or house maintenance or visiting a sick relative and then exercise falls down the list of priorities again.

How many of you go to an exercise class?  I bet you are less likely to skip that than if you schedule your own time to go to the gym or for a run or whatever it is you do.

Why is this?

Because timetables work.

You may think only the overly anal have timetables, only the obsessively neurotic plan their days and that may be a little bit true.  But people who plan, get things done!

Part of the reason exercise might fall by the wayside is if you have lists of other things to do.  I don't know about you but I can even put off procrastinating with effective prevarication and clever tangent creation.  I can make a 10 minute job last literally for weeks, months, sometimes even years! Genuinely!

How do I get round this?  I am learning.  It's a work in progress but at the moment, this technique allows me to fit everything I need to do into a day without ending up a physical wreck, without wasting time and without feeling like I have no time to myself.


I timetable my day.


I make sure that there are blocks of time that, as far as possible, are written in stone, but can, at a push, be moved around - so there is flexibility within rigid structure.

I work part time at the moment, to allow for the demands of a young family but this can still be done even if you work full time - you may just have to delegate more.  I plan a hour of housework a day, an hour of laundry and dinner cooking a day, an hour of exercise a day and an hour of writing work a day.  On top of these are hour slots for PT clients and kids' activities.  Hours can of course be added, when I have copy deadlines etc.

The reason for this is that I am naturally very chaotic and disorganised and I find it very hard to focus on any one job if I know I have plenty of time.  I need a deadline.  I need the panic that not having quite enough time gives me.  If I know I can potter abut all day doing housework, I will get very little done but when I know I only have an hour, I get a lot done.  When I know I can sit at my computer all day writing that copy or revising for an exam or whatever it is I need to do, I can easily get sidetracked by facebook or emails and my mind goes blank.

By scheduling a focused hour, I become super productive.

My main problem, when it comes to making sure I am organised enough to leave time for exercise, is laundry!

I have no problem putting it in the machine.

I have no problem hanging it out to dry.
I even have no difficulty folding it up and putting it in the laundry basket.
(I don't iron.  Ever.  I decided a long time ago that it was a waste of my life.  So I don't do it.  I fold very smooth and flat and be done with it and I have taught my eldest two how to iron their own school shirts; husband does his own.)

What I do have unbelievable difficulty with is putting the folded washing away!  I'm sure I can't be alone in this.  It piles up and up until the mountain of clean, beautifully-folded clothes topple over. 

So I have decided not to do it any more.  I will do the bits I can do - washing, drying, folding but then the rest, I will delegate: the kids will put it away.  Every day.  During the hour I have put aside for cooking dinner and laundry, I will fold and pile clothes and deliver to the kids to put away.  This works like a charm!  I no longer have piles of washing!

I am lucky that my kids are now old enough to do a decent job but you get the idea.  Hand on the jobs you can't do to make time for the job you need to do.

And that job is: take care of your health!  

And so we come to that little idea of other things becoming more important than exercising.  Really? Really?  Are you telling me that there are more important things that taking care of your joints so you are able to get up out of a chair without using handles when you're 60?  There are more important things than making sure your heart and lungs are functioning well enough to allow you to walk to the shops or play with your kids?  Really, you are telling me there are more important things than ensuring your bone density (especially women) doesn't deteriorate to the point of osteoporosis in later years? Really?

Come on!  Exercising daily makes you feel good!  It makes you look good and it cheers you up!  And if you are living in the UK in the autumn, you will know that a bit of daily cheer goes a bloody long way in these short, dark, gloomy days!  Exercising daily makes you feel powerful and in control.

There is not one workout you will EVER regret doing.  
Not ever!  

How many days have you already regretted not getting in shape?

Plan it.  
Schedule it.  
Organise your day to make room for your health and well-being!  

Why on Earth wouldn't you?

Junior Hero Academy are classes I run just for kids.  The little Junior Heroes that come to see me are AMAZING!

They never give up, they work really hard and they listen really carefully (generally more carefully than my grown up clients!)  This means they do the exercises I give them carefully and with great form, meaning they get the most out of each exercise and they vastly reduce any risk of injury.

I'm so proud of my little Junior Heroes!


Today I thought we'd have a go at developing a party piece for Christmas.  I said we were going to look at pistol squats.  We did some TRX pistol squats to get them used to it.  Then we got into the pistol squat from the bottom up.

I told them they would have to practise really hard between now and Christmas and that then they would have a great showing off thing to do to impress people.  In case you don't know what a pistol squat is, they are REALLY HARD!


Have a go - this is how you do them.  Stand on one foot with the other staying dead straight in front of you.

Keeping your heel on the ground, squat down until your bum nearly touches the ground but doesn't and make sure your leg is straight out in front of you.  Then get up again without putting your other leg on the ground!

So, I told the kids to have a go.

They only went and did it!  A little practice.  A few fallings over.  Then they went and did it!