To lose weight, you have to do some calorie counting. It is no good pretending you will lose weight just by carrying on as you do now. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got!

Wishful thinking won’t get you anywhere. Something has to change in your life. You either have to reduce the amount you eat, or increase the amount of exercise you do. Preferably both. It is not hard to make small changes to your lifestyle that you’ll hardly notice.

If you cut out just 2 cookies a day (250 calories) and take a brisk 30 minute walk (250 calories) that’s a 500 calorie deficit in 1 day. Continue for a week and that’s 3500 calories – which is equal to 1lb of fat. You’ve just lost 1lb of fat in a week by hardly doing anything different!

Losing that amount of weight may not seem like much, but slow, steady weight loss is the perfect way to go. This way you’ll be able to continue and maintain the reduction, your heart and lungs will improve and your muscles will strengthen.

Having muscle means you burn more calories all the time – even when you’re sleeping or reading a book. And it’s muscle that causes the changes to your body shape, making you look toned and sleek. And doesn’t this new body deserve to be properly nourished? By cutting out junk and processed foods, cooking good, fresh food from scratch and eating fruit and vegetables in a rainbow of colours every day, you’ll be doing just that.

And your body will thank you by making you feel healthy and full of vitality and energy. You only have one body, and it has to last a lifetime – look after it!

All the best,

Carol J Bartram
(Personal Trainer, Pilates Instructor)

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Lose Weight Calories

The Low GI Diet

You are what you eat. That’s absolutely true and it would not make sense to deny it. But then, common sense does not seem to be apparent where the modern way of eating is concerned.

It seems we would rather spend our hard-earned money on brightly packaged foods made up mainly of chemicals and additives. Our body does not know what to do with this nutritional nuclear waste, and shoves it into fat stores. Store more fat than your body burns, and Hey Presto! You get fat. And because this food leaves you hungry again in a couple of hours, you eat more. And get fatter.

The GI Diet will change the way you eat. And it’s not goody-goody “Thou shalt give up candy and fries forever, or else”, but is simply a list of foods that are low in calories and high in nutrition. The Glycemic Index is about how quickly your body digests food, and what it does with it. High GI foods such as cornflakes or packaged white bread are broken down quickly and give little nourishment because they are processed and stripped of vitamins and fibre, and are usually full of sugar or salt. Or both.

The calories from these foods will be stored as fat, as they cause a sharp rise in blood sugar in the bloodstream. The body reacts by producing insulin to bring the levels down – and high insulin levels are directly linked to fat storage. The food you just ate is stored as fat. And because the body has not been properly nourished and needs fuel to keep you functioning, you find you are hungry again a short time later.

Low GI foods, on the other hand, are close to their natural state – brown or basmati rice, wholegrain pasta and bread. Base a meal around these, and your body digests them more slowly, the fibre helps your bowels work efficiently, and the food is used to power your system instead of becoming more fat. So you feel fuller for longer and enjoy better health and vitality.

Good food equals a good life – and the Low GI Diet can help you achieve it.

Please click the link If you would like to read more about the Low GI Diet.

All the best,

Carol J Bartram
(Personal Trainer, Pilates Instructor & Massage Therapist)

Technorati Tags: low gi diet, glycemic index diets, glycemic foods index, food glycemic index, GI Diets

Sometimes all my good healthy eating and exercise intentions go to the wall. So much to do and so little time to do it in. It just doesn’t seem worth doing 10 minutes of exercise here and there, so I often end up not bothering.

Mistake Number One.

All exercise “counts”. Every single, solitary little bit, as long as you do it as if you meant it.
So walking the dog for 15 minutes in the evening as well as the morning is well worth doing and will carve some fat off Fido as well. Walk to the mailbox, the local store, go upstairs to use the loo instead of using the downstairs one.

Every little helps.

I am so not a morning person. I make a hibernating grizzly seem approachable. So when I have a Personal Training client at the crack of dawn, it is always the temptation to make her do the exercises while I watch her posture and count the reps, instead of doing some of them along with her.

So this morning I made myself join in. At 8 am I was counting grapevine and box steps as my client and I pranced up and down her gym – mostly in step and sometimes even on the beat. She thoroughly enjoyed this change to her routine, and I? Well, I burnt a few hundred calories and went whistling home in a much better temper and feeling at peace with the world. So now, if I don’t manage to get in a “proper” workout today, I won’t feel so bad.

Thinking about it’s worse than doing it.

All the best,

Carol J Bartram
(Personal Trainer, Pilates Instructor & Massage Therapist)

Technorati Tags: healthy eating, exercise, exercise intention, weight loss, workout

Healthy Eating and Exercise

This is a dieting system which claims to be so simple that any idiot can follow it and lose fat – hence the title, which will catch your eye if nothing else.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots also claims that you can lose up to 9lb every 11 days by following their system. This classes as extreme weight loss, and caution should be taken, even though it’s unlikely that you’d actually lose that much weight that fast.

When you sign up, you fill in a form giving foods that you like. I suggest you don’t put down burgers and pepperoni pizza! The online diet calculator then produces you 11 days’ worth of meals, all calorie and fat counted, so you’ll never have to agonise over what to have for tea. This will cost you $20. The accompanying handbook giving lots of fat-loss tips will set you back another $19, but is full of good ideas regarding motivation and exercise to keep you reducing.

This diet is said to work on the basis of releasing fat-burning hormones within your body, so the food that you eat is burnt up rather than stored as fat. Also, because the meals change regularly within your 11 days, your metabolism is kept guessing what you’ll eat next – but the foods that you eat have to be “Fat-Burning compatible”.

In Real-speak, this is a reduced-calorie, low GI diet. Low GI foods are all the good-for-you items like brown rice, beans and pulses, oatmeal, lots of vegetables and fruit. Combine these foods with lean meat or fish, in moderate portions 4 times a day as instructed, lose the fries and candy, do some exercise, and even the World’s Greatest Idiot is bound to lose weight.

I think I’ll go and sign up right now.

If you would like to read my full Fat Loss For Idiots review please click the link.

All the best,

Carol J Bartram
(Personal Trainer, Pilates Instructor & Massage Therapist)

Technorati Tags: fat loss idiots, fat loss for idiots, diet for idiots, fat loss for idiots

Fat Loss For Idiots

I teach a Pilates class at a local gym and was explaining the importance of exercises like the Monkey Squat. Not only does it teach you correct lifting technique, but it also exercises the leg and core muscles that enable you to get out of a chair. I was explaining how important it is, particularly as you get older, to have the strength to get up from a chair without having to use your arms.

At the end of the class one of the ladies asked me what type of exercise she could get her husband to do, because he was having difficulty getting out of his armchair unassisted. Now this lady’s husband was only in his early sixties, but had recently been ill and had therefore become inactive. I suggested he start walking (after checking with his doctor) to help gently strengthen his legs and then get him to come to class.

This man had spent over 40 years in the armed forces - I would have expected him to get back into shape fairly quickly. So why hadn’t he?

I think the answer is that changes caused by inactivity happen so gradually that people just don’t realise how badly out of shape they are getting. Until the day they can’t get out of their favourite chair unassisted!

The body does not like inactivity, and if we don’t work it our metabolism slows down (we lose muscle mass) and the more muscle we lose the harder it is to do anything so we lose even more muscle. It becomes a vicious circle and often leads to almost total inactivity.

The solution is simple - Keep Active! Go to the gym, take classes, do Pilates, walk…Do anything that keeps you moving. If you’ve been ill, start exercising gently as soon as your doctor tells you it’s safe. Don’t vegetate. Remember if you don’t use it you’ll lose it!

All the best,

Robert E Bartram
(Pilates Instructor)

Technorati Tags: Exercise, exercise at home, pilates

Hi,

We are Robert and Carol Bartram and we are both qualified Pilates Instructors. Carol is also a Personal Trainer and Massage Therapist.

This blog is dedicated to advising you about healthy and unhealthy eating, exercise and all things fitness related. It will be a place we can discuss topical issues that come up in our Pilates classes and Personal Training sessions with our clients (names will be changed to protect the innocent!).

You are welcome to give feedback and comment on any of our posts and I would encourage you to do so. After all, isn’t that how we learn to improve what we do?

We hope you enjoy reading our posts as much as we enjoy writing them and it’s my hope that in some small way they will benefit you.

All the best,

Robert E Bartram & Carol J Bartram
(Pilates Instructors)

PS Out of the two of us Carol is the writer. My writing skills are not as good as hers so I apologise in advance if some of my posts are not grammatically perfect!

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