How To Start

Before even evaluating your diet or level of activity, I believe the best way to make a change to your lifestyle is first to fully understand your personal situation and then go at it slow. All the articles about extreme dieting or month-long workouts to the perfect summer body are just false promises. The cruel lesson you must learn is that it takes commitment. There’s a reason why most of the test subjects that these magazines use for the fads they claim work are the people actually employed by the mag. These people are getting a massive amount of assistance from PT’s, nutritionists and other health experts to help them get the most out of those few weeks and achieve that summer body they promise. For most of us though it’s quite a bit harder.

I’m just over a year into my own fitness journey and I still haven’t reached my goals - that’s because I’ve realised the journey lasts for your whole lifetime. That month-long workout I mentioned above implies that you’ll do everything you can to make a change to your body in four weeks but then just go straight back to your old habits when you’re done, so don’t think of it as a diet or a workout programme, think of it as the rest of your life, because once you start seeing results why would you ever want to go back?

As well as this, going in all-guns-blazing with unrealistic targets could actually inhibit your performance, or worse, just make you never want to put your Nike Airs on again. I’m not saying don’t aim high - a positive attitude will sometimes be all you have to keep you going back to the gym or stop you from picking out baked beans drowned in artificial tomato sauce over the kidney beans in water on the next shelf. But the simple fact is, it’s going to take time to get where you want to be, otherwise you’d see everybody you walk past flaunting a cover-model body. It’s not that easy! It’s a hard lesson I had to learn too - when I bought my first set of weights I expected to wake up with arms like Arnold the day after back and biceps!

So what I’d say is throw out that magazine showing off the latest fad diets that guarantee you the same body as the model on the front-cover. I’m 100 percent sure that that model has never dieted as extreme as some of these fads are, not just because it’s unrealistic, but because it’s also unhealthy - think of the amount of essential nutrients you’d be depriving your body of if you only ate a few hundred calories a day like they tell you to.

Instead, I’d ease into a new routine by gradually incorporating healthier alternatives to the foods you eat already. Whether that be by removing the fatty yolks from your eggs and just sticking with the protein-packed whites, or switching from white bread to wholemeal when you fancy toast for breakfast. In fact, right there, scrambled egg whites on wholemeal toast, a healthy snack is as simple as that. Once you do this for every meal and have altered each mouthful of food a day to a healthier alternative, you soon wont recognise the new eating plan you’ve created for yourself when you compare it to the processed, unnatural food you used to eat. It may be difficult to adjust for the first couple of weeks, but it gets easier for sure, and eventually you’ll be craving roasted red potatoes with your steak rather than a bunch of ‘death-by-salt’ french fries.