Weight loss or athletic performance - Optimise your opportunities
There is a whole industry based on people’s beliefs about body image and ‘dieting’. The very word diet has, for many, come to mean a short term reparative measure. “Do this and you will lose weight”. Yes, but put it all back on, and more, a month later!
When we talk about ‘diet’ at the Fitness Consultancy we are talking about your permanent eating style. We are not food fascists and indeed believe that eating should be one of the great pleasures in life. But it is all about balance.
Whether we are talking about the athletic diet for elite sportspeople, or a new regime for the morbidly obese, there is the same approach. First: We want our clients to understand what they eat and why they eat it. This sometimes means looking at a person’s relationship to food. For athletes this means a mind-shift that accepts that the demands of training and competition require a different ‘re-fueling’ strategy to the sedentary lifestyle. You don’t’ put the same fuel in a Ferrari Formula 1 car as the family Ford.
In over-eaters there are other factors that drive the diet. A person who is over-weight, bordering on obese, will often know intellectually that they “should eat less and exercise more”. It is what stops that person emotionally from following that advice that is the key. Of course a young, bright, adult lady knows that eating two packets of Jaffa Cakes and swigging half a bottle of red wine at 3am is not good for her. But unless we, and more importantly she, understand the motive for that action we will never be able to assist her to change those eating habits.
Our clients have to have the benefit of insight and encouragement as well as information.
So the FC approach is far from dictatorial, crash dieting is not what we seek. We want informed change that allows pleasure in food tempered by balance and education.
We start with a dietary diary – what do you eat? What do you really eat, not what you kid yourself you eat! How much? And when?
What do you drink? How much? And when? This is not a blitz on fizzy drinks or alcohol, but trying to establish hydration levels. When one of the national teams first employed a nutritionist they found that 32% of the players were de-hydrated and 28% were seriously de-hydrated. Folks, that is over half the team in trouble before they started training! A squad of 22 fit young men mostly performing below their inherent capacity for the want of H2O.
With the Fitness Consultacy you get a reasoned approach that looks at you the person - the individual - and tailors the approach to optimise your opportunities, whether the goal is weight loss, elite sports performance, or simply a better balance in your life.
