Sunday 5 June 2011

Bye bye BeachCamp

It seems somewhat perverse to be blogging about BeachCamp as the rain pours down outside my window but, despite how it looks outside, it is June and we will all hopefully get to don our swimwear sometime soon!

I have to say with the rainy weather I've found I've been less motivated to stick to the regime than I normally would in my pre-holiday tone up. In particular I find the cold weather makes me reach for comforting food and there have been a couple of chip eating incidents in the past two weeks (shhh don't tell anyone)!!

Oh well, even us health professionals aren't immune to comfort eating! And sticking to any regime too rigorously normally needs to cravings for banned foods, so I'm now going to go back to my usual 80/20 rule ... pretty much following BeachCamp 80% of the time and 20% of the time eating what I want. This also includes one rest day a week of no exercise whatsoever so that I have a day where I don't feel under pressure to stick to a schedule.

Where alot of dieters go wrong is that once they've lost the weight they wanted to they go back entirely to their old eating habits and the weight comes back on again. This is where the 80/20 rule comes into it's own by instead gradually introducing the less healthy foods, but keeping to your healthy regime the majority of the time.

So what habits will I be keeping up from BeachCamp?

Well first up is drinking water on waking and before each meal - I'm generally pretty good at drinking enough water at work, but I find I forget on weekends, so this is a habit I'm going to try and stick to.

Eating some protein with each meal. From the big 5 (water, fibre, fat, protein, wholegrain carbs) it's the protein that I will sometimes not have enough of. Particularly with breakfast, so this is another habit I'm going to try and stick to.

Finally the half hour exercise rule. Those of you that know me might find it odd that I'd find this rule useful as I'm a total gym bunny. But actually by limiting myself to just half an hours exercise, rather than doing longer gym sessions, I've found my whole gym experience more relaxed and I've been able to fit in more sessions than I usually would. For example I was away this weekend with friends and so it would have been antisocial to go off to the gym for 1.5hrs but instead I took my running shoes and went for a half hour run before breakfast which really didn't eat into the day at all.

By sticking to these habits I'm confident that the time the sun does come out my good work will have paid off and I'll be beach ready!

No comments:

Post a Comment