Your body is amazing, its constantly adapting to changes, not just internally but to your external environment. And yet, when we’re scrutinising it, we never stop to think about things from it’s point of view. So, lets flip the switch, if we want to know why it is that we seem to crave the quick sweet or salty immediate relief of a snack food or why it is those last few stubborn pounds are being so, well, stubborn, we need to know how our body views these things.
So, you’ve decided you need to lose weight, you’ve got a big event coming up and you’ve already bought that dress/suit for the occasion in the next size down hoping it’ll spur you on to stick with the exercise and diet you’ve recently started.
You’ve started out with the best intentions, and you’d meal prepped for the first half of the week, but today its all going wrong, you’ve run out of time and you need to get to work, so you skip breakfast. Halfway through the morning you suddenly feel your energy drop, by the time lunch rolls round you are famished, you need a sugar hit and you need it now, and you reach for the closest thing that can provide that…its probably not going to be the carrot sticks and hummus is it?
In spite of the fact that healthy carbs would be the best option for sustained energy release throughout the afternoon it isn’t going to sate the hunger you’ve now got as you’re probably approaching your fifteenth hour without food. You are going to choose the ‘instant hit’
and as you ‘skipped breakfast’ you can feel justified in your choice (or so you tell yourself)
Likewise the strict and punishing exercise regime you set yourself, which you did on day one nearly breaking yourself and neglecting to warmup/cool down sufficiently has left you so sore you can barely get yourself out of bed and dressed the next morning, much less attempt any kind of exercise today.
Now lets look at these scenarios from your body’s perspective…
Right, OK, we did a LOT of stuff that we’ve never done before…not a problem, I’ll just grab some extra calories from breakfast… She didn’t stretch out the muscles so we’ve got a fair bit of lactic acid we need to shift, I’ll memo the liver and get it to up operations (so there goes your energy for the day). Hmm, she missed breakfast, and I’ve got all those muscular micro tears from yesterday to fix- dammit…
For the love of GOD- I NEED FOOOOOOOD!!
…
That’s about the time you reach for that pastry/packet of crisps/chocolate bar.
Your body’s main, scratch that; ONLY priority is your survival.
It could not give one solitary s#*t what it looks like in a bikini, not now, not ever.
This is why most diets, and by ‘most’ I mean ANY fad diet (which they all are save for eating healthily for the most part) fail.
If slimming clubs actually did their job properly they’d never have repeat customers, which we all know not to be the case.
Its simple science and I’m about to lay it out to you flat: if you restrict your calories too much your body will go into survival mode, yes you’ll lose the weight, but also your metabolism will slow down.
The irony is people view this as a bad thing, but from an evolutionary stand-point it makes perfect sense, your body learns to do more with less – it becomes more efficient!
How cool is that?
I mean if it was any area of the public sector we’d be lauding its ingenuity but when we’re trying to get into ‘that’ dress it feels less than impressive, it feels like its mocking us. Especially when we finally lift the calorie embargo and our body goes
“Finally-sustenance, we better put by a store in case the next winter is hard too!”
Ok, ok I may be overplaying the interchange but the result is the same, all the original pounds come back- plus extra. Nice.
So how about this, DON’T diet, eat sensibly, make sure you always have your five a day (and yes, that can include baked beans!) and once a week get that takeaway, but, every day do twenty minutes of exercise. It doesn’t have to be prescriptive, do whatever you want to do, mix it up, youtube vid, a brisk walk, grab a couple of tins of beans and do resistance work or yoga (ALL exercise has benefits, more on that to come)
The key is consistency.
Every day.
And we’ll discuss rest days once the habit is set…
CC Personal Training 