Exercise – committing to change

When you start a new health and exercise regime, you are essentially committing yourself to making some changes to your life. But where and how do you start?
We constantly find that clients are looking to make changes to their physical body but don’t want to diet, aren’t sure how to incorporate change into their lives and have no support.

And I am always meeting women who have failed in the past and then take this as proof that they aren’t going to succeed. These are the things you need to look at before you start out.

Firstly, people who succeed invariably have a few things in common:

• A plan
• Support
• Knowledge
• Feedback

1. Firstly for planning. Plan to succeed. If you aren’t exercising, your diet needs to be cleaned up and you eat more when you’re stressed, where do you start?

You start at the beginning with small, achievable and measurable steps. By planning and diarizing two group training sessions like boot camp per week.

Then we need to look at your nutrition – start the first few weeks by filling out a food / training diary. This is an incredibly powerful tool that shows you exactly what, when you eat and how you are feeling when you eat.

And start to have a look at yourself so you can understand your food triggers. If you know what your obstacles are, we can make a plan to overcome them instead of succumbing to them.

Next, we need to look at your mindset – what are your goals? Why are you making the changes? What do you hope to achieve? Why have you failed to make lasting changes in the past? What are the obstacles that need to be overcome?

Losing weight isn’t as simple as calories in vs calories out. There are so many factors that come into play and the more you know, the better prepared you are.

There are plenty of support materials available to help. Nutrition plans, goal setting plans and exercise plans – speaking with your Trainer will set you on the path to credible and reliable information we use with clients to get ongoing results.

2. Get SUPPORT! Support is something people often brush over. It’s hard to do ANYTHING by yourself and yet women I speak with have this innate feeling that they should be able to do it on their own. You wouldn’t tackle servicing your own car, you don’t go out to the movies on your own – we are social creatures by nature so by incorporating this into your new routine, again it’s another step on the path to reaching your goals. Training with other women increases your support network and puts you in contact with other women going through the same issues you are in your local area. You aren’t alone.

Make sure you enlist help and understanding from friends and family. You need them to help you break the cycle so that means changing what they do to a certain degree too.

There will always be people who don’t believe in you or think you can succeed but you don’t have to own that. The most powerful advice I can give you is to seek out and surround yourself with the people who believe you can make the changes and are willing to help you and support you through. Your trainer and a training partner are excellent support choices.

3. As a Personal Trainer, I get asked a lot of questions in relation to diet and exercise because people have been exposed to a whole lot of misinformation through the media over the years. I tell clients to look at the source of the information. Is the person giving the information to you qualified? Are they impartial? Is there unbiased research to back this up?

Magazines and television shows tend to report what will ‘sell’ not necessarily the truth or what is best for consumers. Fast weight loss is usually your body in shock and is water loss only. You find a lot of people put it back on in a short amount of time once back on a ‘normal’ diet.

To get into the shape of your life, you need to understand why it is you are in the place you are now. Is it part diet, part lack of activity and part emotional? If so, without addressing all these issues, how will a ‘lose a dress size by Saturday’ change your life? If you don’t know what to eat, how will substituting meals with shakes get you life long results? If you’ve never exercised, how do you know that walking is your ‘fat burning’ zone?

4. Lastly, you need feedback. How have you improved? Where are the centimeters dropping from? Are you losing or not? Is your fitness better? You need to know that the changes you make are making a difference and the only way you can do this is by tracking your progress. Our trainers make a point of continually updating this information with clients so they can see they are reaching their goals, we can fix any problems as they arise and clients can feel the efforts they are making, are WORTH it. Knowledge is power.

Now it’s time to ask yourself if you did all this in the past to succeed. If not, you know that there is another way and you can try again. It is possible to change your lifestyle to get lasting results and it is possible to CHANGE. At Babes on the Run, we want our clients to live happily ever after!

For further information, please email justine@babesontherun.com.au