Welcome to Bootcamp!

Happy New Year NITC readers! I hope you've all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year.

 

Having given you all a break from my blog and given myself a break from the usual healthy diet (a houseful of cheese and chocolate is too much for even me to resist!!) I have a feeling I'm not alone in needing a bit of a health kickstart to 2011!

 

So I'm going to be putting myself through a two week bootcamp and you're all welcome to join me!!

 

You see I don't make new years health resolutions – trying to do anything for a whole year is pretty tough – it's tiring just thinking about it!!! But choosing to do something for just 14 days is a psychologically acceptable time frame, if half way through you're really struggling you know there's only seven days left of it to stick to it and once you get to the end you'll probably think 'that wasn't so bad'.  It's also totally worth sticking to a health regime for two weeks as it can take that long for the benefits to show up in the same way that  there also seems to be a 7-14 day time lag on weight gain occurring after over-indulging – so don't be discouraged if results don't appear in the first week.

 

So what will I be doing? Well first up I'll be cutting alot of unhealthy foods out of my diet. I'm not going to go into the explanation as to the downsides of these foods (which I have covered before in my blog) but suffice to say you'll be doing yourself a big favour by avoiding these foods for two weeks.  These aren't all foods you'd necessarily want to avoid forever either - I don't always avoid eggs and meat but I've definitely eaten too many animal products over the last few weeks so for a two week kick start I'm going for a clean sweep.

 

Foods I'm avoiding:

Dairy

Gluten 

Meat

Eggs

Sugar and artificial sweeteners

Alcohol

Caffeine

 

If that seems to cut out most of your regular food don't worry I'll be blogging over the next two weeks with the rest of the details on my bootcamp including details of what I will be eating over the next two weeks.

 

I'll also be blogging on the exercise I'll be doing for bootcamp, but as an overview I'll be doing 20-40 minutes exercise a day for the two weeks, with one day a week "off" where I'll do 20-40 minutes of yoga to chill out. Again a 14 day time frame is pretty much manageable for most people – I certainly thinking resolving to exercise 5-6 days a week for the whole year is a pretty tough one to stick to.  But while it's quiet and no one feels like going it's not that difficult to fit it in.  More on exercise tomorrow but If you're not a gym bunny and this all seems a bit much just get off your tube or bus a few stops early and have a brisk half hour walk home everyday … not only will you have done some exercise you'll also very likely feel better for it !