Make this year count

Back to work :( 

Its the dreaded Monday after a long two week break over Christmas and New Year when you lose track of time and days and think its suitable to have some left over chocolates for breakfast and stay in your jammies all day not even having to step foot outside apart from emptying the bins full of all the left over sweetie wrappers and bottles of booze you have been drinking since the last day of work. (Never mind trying to figure out which coloured bin is going out and when!?)

Not something you would expect to hear a personal trainer saying is it? Well the truth is I am no different from any one of you. I enjoy doing the same things over the holidays as everyone else. Maybe the only difference is I know I’m going to pay for over indulging during the holidays and I expect the next few workouts at the gym to be torturous.

The old saying ‘New Year, New Me’ is something everyone should avoid saying! The first thing you need to admit to yourself is that your still the same old you. Except this year/month/week – TODAY you have decided it’s time to sort yourself out with a change in your lifestyle. Don’t fall into the ‘diet for 6 months before summer’ group either. Decide from today you are going to make small changes to achieve a healthier version of yourself. Start with the simple things such as try cutting out fizzy juice from your choice of hydration for a few weeks and see how you get on. Try just having diluted juice instead. Don’t try going cold turkey from alcohol for the month of January either, you have literally just spent the best part of two weeks drinking whenever you want and now your just all of a sudden going to stop like it’s something you never really had anyways?! NO, just try cutting it down to maybe one night at the weekends in January. Then maybe in February you could try cutting it down to one night every other weekend and see how it goes from there.

As for the food we have all been eating over the holidays, now it’s not like you’re going to be buying a box of after eights and some matchmakers to eat every night during the week now is it? Don’t stress yourself too much about all that still lying around the house. We all have our bad habits but no one eats the same the rest of the year the way we do at Christmas. So for a start just try and cut out eating late on at night. Try and just have your dinner at the end of the night and then if you feel hungry later on just have a drink of water to fight the urge to eat rubbish which is just breaking a habit instead of feeding the ‘starvation’ before bed.

Stick with that just now for the diet side of things.

Now as for the gym side of things, yes definitely get along to your local gym but to make life so much easier try just signing up to a class once or twice a week. It will be a lot easier to go along to a class with your friend for moral support than to jump into a gym by yourself clueless as to what all those machines are supposed to do for you and wondering if you’re using them correctly. Only to be left feeling stressed out and anxious when your there which in turn will totally put you off the gym for all the other months out the year when believe it or not yes the gym is actually still open. Stick with the classes for the month of January see how it goes, you will meet new people who will all be in the same mind frame as you and trust me no one is going to be staring at you like you don’t know what you’re doing, everyone will be too busy sweating away their Christmas and New Year’s dinners to even have the energy to judge other people.

 

Hope to see you all soon.