Are you one of these people who start a diet or join a gym then after 3 weeks you have given up and within a month you are back to your old ways? Have you ever wondered why this happens.

If this is you then you are not alone but you can do something about it. You have to find out what you really want and why you want it.

The majority of people who come to see me about weight loss don’t really want weight loss. Thye want to change something in their lives and they thing that losing weight will give them these things. This could be confidence, happiness (the main one), a new partner, keeping their old partner or any multitude of things. A lot of the time they know this deep down but do’nt want to admit it to themselves because it can be uncomfortable.

Because its uncomfortable and can bring pretty emotional feelings to the surface they have convinced themselves that its weight loss or dropping a dress size that they want. Thinking in this way means that as soon as they hit a roadblock or an obstacle they give up. By taking the tie to work out why you want to lose weight or more importantly working out what you really want then you can keep yourself motivated for longer to see the job through and make being healthy part of your everyday routine.

What is your why?

Why do you want to lose weight? How will this make you feel? Why are you choosing not to lead a healthy life? What is the voice in your head saying to you? (this is really important)

Everyone has their own inner voice that speaks to them, but what is it saying in your case? Your inner voice is based on all the things that you have subconsciously learned over the course of your life. They may or may not be true but these are your beliefs about the world and can be influence by things that people have said to you that may have stuck with you. It can even be influenced by the media. If you watch the news on a regular basis the you probably have the belief that the world is a bad place because most of it is bad news (murders, rapes, bombs, terrorism) when the reality is that these things happen in the minority.

Then there is the negative effect of TV programs like Eastenders which are filled with negativity which inevitably will bring you down to its level.

Are you negative or positive?

If you have ever watched Family Guy you will know all about the evil monkey. He lives in Chris Griffin’s closet and comes out to scare Chris every so often. This is exactly what everyone’s evil monkey or inner voice does without you even realising it.

Most people already know how to lose weight. If you had to choose between a cheeseburger and chips or a salad I bet that you know which one is healthy. Most people also know that in order to get great results that they have to do some training or workout on a regular basis.

People know the answers already so what is stopping them from getting the weight loss results that they want.

In my opinion its the why. Figure out the why and the how is the easy bit. If you are motivated to take action to get results that will make all the difference.

Task

Here is  little task that I use with both my 1-1 clients and my group personal training clients to help them work out your why and see what is sabotaging you.  You can try this now if you want.

Go and look at yourself in a full length mirror and just be aware of what your inner voice is saying. Is it being negative? Is it saying nice thing? If it’s being negative and saying nasty things then this could be something that is holding you back. This could be affecting your beliefs about what you can achieve. If you don’t believe that you can get results then that is going to make it harder for you to get where you want. If you can work out how to change your beliefs about yourself (or get someone to help you with it) as well as being aware of neagative self talk then in my eyes that is over 90% of the battle. Once you know this you should be well on your way to working out why you want to lose weight.

Find out your why and the how will look after itself.

This article is by Liam Thompson, Manchester Personal Trainer and Weight Loss Expert. If you would like a weight loss consultation with Liam or one of our other personal trainers you can use the contact form to get in touch

The post Is the Evil Monkey Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? appeared first on .

I’ve been working as a personal trainer in Manchester for the last 4 years and by far and away the most popular question I get is about how to help people lose weight easily.

As a fitness coaches weight loss is what most of us do, at least that what I mostly do, I love working with people who have posture issues and injuries but I get the greatest satisfaction from seeing someone lose lots of weight.

Original Question

SO back to the original question that I get often asked. “How do I lose weight?”

Before I answer that I will always ask clients or potential clients why the want to lose weight. Let’s face it we all really know how to lose weight. Given the choice between a salad or a pizza we all know exactly which one is the healthiest and will help us lose weight. The problem is that most people chose to eat the unhealthy option.

So why is that?

Motivation and Willpower

Motivation is one of the reasons but people normally blame lack of willpower. I’m not great believer in the theory of willpower though. This is why I think it is important t ask the why question. Knowing why you want to achieve something mans that when the going gets tough and you get bored of the routine you will me more likely to stick to the plan.

If your goal is to drop a dress size or fit in to smaller jeans then ask yourself why. Is it to make you healthier or for you to look better. Could there be a deeper reason? It could be that you are overweight and you want to avoid disease or it could be and this is the most common reason that at some level you are not happy and you want to be happier.

If you are thinking about trying to lose weight or stop smoking or drinking or changing your life for the better then go ahead and try the following task.

Ask yourself why you want to lose weight (or whatever it is that you want).

Peeling the Onion

Once you had your answer then you can start to peel off the next layer. If you want to get into a smaller dress then that’s good but you need to ask yourself why again.

Keep going until you get to the emotional reason.

Once you have the emotional reason then I want you to write it down with a time frame for achieving it. Keep it somewhere handy like your purse or next to your fridge and check it every day.

This will help to keep you goal at the forefront of your mind.

It could be that you have wedding and you want to get into the dress for that. Keep going and keep asking why.

The more emotional you make your reason the more likely you are to get results and stick to the plan.

Also try and visualise what you want because as the saying goes “If you can believe it then you can achieve it”. This is a strategy that to athletes use to help them achieve their goals and for good reason because it works.

Always start with why if you want to get results in anything you do.

This post is by LIam Thompson who is the Head Coach of Northwest Personal Training in Manchester.

Liam also runs weight loss and fitness boot camps in Manchester City Centre

The post How Do You Lose Weight? What Questions Should You Ask Yourself? appeared first on .

This is by far the most common question we get here at our training studio in Manchester.

This is also probably the exercise i use the most with my 1-1 clients as well as my fit campers. If you work with me or you have worked with me in the past then you will already know what it is. Or do you?

I’ve put together a short video of this exercise that you should all be doing somewhere in your routine to show you exactly how to do it. Its locked though so you will have to click on one of the links below to see it.

View The Video Below

The post What is the best exercise for weight loss appeared first on .

One of the most common issues with people trying to lose weight is that they think they have to spend hours in the gym working out. I’ve seen it in all the gyms I’ve worked in,but believe it or not most people are spending a lot of time in the gym that they don’t need to.

Picture the following scene if you can.

Overweight girl (or guy) comes in religiously after work every day and spends at least 60 minutes on a treadmill. They might even put the incline up to 8 or 9% and spend most of their time walking up hill or on the cross trainer getting a good sweat on. The fitter ones will probably just jump strain into a jog or a fast run and go for a full hour, but at the end of the week they are disappointed because they are still not fitting into their favourite jeans.

Fair play to the because they are doing a massive 5 hours a week of exercise which is a lot more than most people, and is more than the current government recommendations

However the cycle continues and after a few weeks of frustration they give up, usually declaring that they have tried everything to lose weight and exercise doesn’t work.

This is happening in gyms all over the country and is one of the reasons why just getting a gym membership doesn’t work for most people. Getting a gym memberships is like walking into a restaurant and being asked to cook your own food. Yeah you know what you want and you can see all the shiny machines but you’re not really sure what you should be doing, so you do what everyone else is doing. It’s a classic case of the blind following the blind.

But anyway back to the Italian dude. His name is Vilfredo Pareto and he is responsible for what is known as Pareto’s Law or the Pareto principle.

Basically what this means is that you can get 80% of your results with only 20% of your effort and you can equate this with anything in your life. Seriously try it. Here are some examples.

I bet you if you have a look in your wardrobe you probably wear 20% of your clothes around 80% of the time.

How about your friends,  I reckon you spend around 80% of your time with only 20% of your friends, watch 20% of your TV channels 80% of the time and if you have your own business 80% of your income will come from only 20% of your customers or even less. Here’s another one what about the foods you eat?

Check out Pareto’s Law Wikipedia Page

So what has this got to do with fat loss and exercise?

What if you could get your best fat loss results from only 20% of the time that you think is necessary to burn body fat. Well you can and that is how the Pareto Principle applies here. At our fit camps we probably only do about 60-70 minutes of high intense work each week, which is around 20% of the 5 hours a week that most people slog away on treadmills for.

Even with this we still manage to get amazing weight loss results. Check out the picture of Carmel below who is one of our fit campers. She managed the results below in less than 9 months with only 3 x 45 minute sessions each week.

If you can make 3 sessions a week and work hard for those 3 sessions and do it consistently over a period of time then you will get results. The culture that we live in these days is one of quick fixes when it comes to weight loss but the truth is that there isn’t really a quick fix. I’m sure that might not be what you want to hear, but I don’t want to mislead you. What I don’t want to do though is help you get results and get healthy and the way to do that is to be consistent in what you do.

The same applies to food, if you can be consistent in what you eat then its ok to go out and binge occasionally because it’s not the occasional binge that determines your results; it’s what you do consistently on a daily basis.

To join our next 4 week fit camp block starting next Monday and start to get results just like Carmel alove click on the link below

http://www.northwestfitcamp.co.uk/register-manchester/

The post How an Italian Maths Geek Can Save You Hours in the Gym appeared first on .

Keep reading if you want to learn the 1 secret weight loss tip that most personal trainers, boot camps, and programs don’t want you to know about, but first I want to tell you a quick story.

Believe it or not I struggle with my weight a bit, in fact I always have done. I like to have a beer or two at the weekend and go out for meals with Rachel (my other half) but I have a trigger point that makes me realise I need to go back to being healthy. Its usually when my jeans start to feel a bit tight.

So here is a pic of me playing football about 5 years ago, at the time I didn’t realise how much weight I had actually put on. I actually though I was in good shape and I was counting calories but the problem was that the food I was eating wasn’t actually the healthiest.

Carrying a few extra lb’s

Fast forward 5 years later and this is me now, I still play football competitively, and I still struggle a bit with keeping my weight down, but I’m 38 years old this year and probably in better shape than I’ve been since my 20’s.

I do this as much as possible by trying to be healthy and cutting out as much of the junk from my diet as I can, but I still have the occasional beer (or 2 or 3) and I still eat out now and again. In fact here is a recent picture of me enjoying a pint of Guinness at the 6 nations this year (and I had more than 1 that day).

Me at the Rugby enjoying a Guiness

Anyway enough about me, you’re really here to learn secret weight loss tip for keeping in shape, so here it is.

So what is this secret weight loss tip?

Well I’m really sorry to disappoint you but unfortunately there isn’t really one to be honest, there are lots of programs and diets out there promising fast weight loss results and in fact I can easily hep someone drop a dress or a jeans size in 4 weeks. The thing is you have to keep it up so it has to be about lifestyle change.  If you go back to your old ways you will put it back on. Even worse if you lose it initially by taking some meal replacement products like Herbalife or Body By Vi (or starving yourself  you will end up putting your weight back on with added interest. I would strongly advise you to avoid these if you value your long term health.

My philosophy on weight loss is on getting healthier by eating better and doing more exercise (notice I didn’t say eating less) The majority of people who want to lose weight will get better results by eating better and not eating less. Dieting and severe calorie restriction doesn’t work in the long term unfortunately, but there are still plenty of unscrupulous trainers out there who will recommend a product because there is a great profit margin on it.

Just this morning I had a call from one of these guys who wanted to meet me to talk about this great new weight loss program.

Here is how the conversation panned out.

Sales Guy: “Hi Liam, I have this great new weight loss product that I would like to talk to you about”

Me “What is it”

Sales Guy “Why don’t you let me buy you a coffee and Ill tell you all about it”

Me “Can you just give me a run down on the phone Im very busy”

Sales Guys “ Its called ***** and it’s a meal replacement shake”

Me “erm….Im not really interested but thanks for the call”

Sales Guy “You can make a lot of money from this, our trainers are averaging £1500 a month”

Me “To be honest with you I’m not really interested because it doesn’t fit in with my core values “

Sales Guy “so you don’t want to make an extra £1500 per month”

Me “Well that would be nice but I would rather do it ethically, thanks for your time”

These sales people are doing the rounds with personal trainer and fitness professionals all over the country and unfortunately people are just seeing pound signs.  If you are a personal trainer reading this you have a duty both morally and professionally to offer the best advice to your clients.

If you are just someone who wants to lose some weight, then please avoid these products because they are designed with only one thing in mind. To relieve you of as much cash as possible. They have very little nutritional value and will not work in the long term.

My advice, is to eat healthy, get some high intensity exercise  in and stop looking for the secret to weight loss because they don’t exist. There are no secrets.

The post The only secret weight loss tip you will ever need appeared first on .

Reading Food Labels: The Basics

One of the best ways to protect yourself from foods that are potentially bad for you is to learn how to read food labels correctly. Generally, if we ate clean, whole unprocessed and natural foods, we wouldn’t even need to be able to read labels because we would just simply be picking out the fruit and veg at the supermarket or even better from the farmers market, rather than having it disguised in a processed ready meal.

The plain truth is, for many of us we will at least be buying some sort of convenience foods at some point so before you can begin to work out what’s actually in a product, by reading its nutrition  label, you need to first understand the basics of your daily requirements and how much you should be eating.

These are the basics of what you need per day:

Calories
A 125lb (9 Stone) woman needs around 2000 calories to maintain her weight and a 160lb (11 stone 6 lbs). male needs around 2,400 calories per day to maintain his weight. A calorie by the way is not just a calorie and different types of calories can have massively different hormonal responses but this is a good place to start if you are a beginner. I don’t generally advocate counting calories if you are eating healthy foods as its not really an issue.

FAT
Fat intake should be kept at or below 30% of total calorie intake, so that’s a maximum of 67g fat per day for an average women and 80g for an average man. Saturated fat intake should be kept as low as possible and should not exceed one-third of the total daily fat intake.Try and eat healy fats where possible such as oily fish and nuts.

CHOLESTEROL
This should be kept to less than 300 milligrams/day. If you have heart disease, limit your daily intake to less than 200 milligrams. Also limit sugars, cereals and white carbs if you have heart disease.

Salt and Sodium
Salt / Sodium intake should be around 1,100-3,300 mg per day, and keep to the lesser amounts if you have high blood pressure.

The Label:

The nutrition label on your food will generally list the amounts of calories, protein, carbohydrate, fat, fibre, cholesterol and sodium per serving and per 100g of food.

Use the per serving calculations to see how much of the product you are going to eat and use the per 100g to compare different products in terms of the percentages from each nutrient within it.

Another useful way of doing this is:

• 1 serving of carbohydrate = 15g carbohydrate = 68 calories (food roughly equal to 1 slice bread or 1 medium sized apple)
• 1 serving fat = 5g fat = 45 calories (food equivalent = 1 tsp oil)
• 1 serving protein = 7g protein = 31 calories (food equivalent = 30g of meat)

Reading The Ingredients List

A nutrition label on any item of food in your supermarket will always list ingredients in the order in which they appear.

For example if sugar is in the first 3 ingredients in a long list, the product is pretty high in sugar, but if it appears as one of the last ingredients, then the food is lower in sugar.

Our advice is to look for products that contain the most natural ingredients.

Also, if a product contains organic ingredients, it was most likely list them as such. For example, organic tomatoes.

Dodgy ingredients to look out for and avoid as much as possible include monosodium glutamate (E621) butylated hydroxy anisol, potassium nitrate (in most processed meats), sodium nitrate (again found in processed meats), sodium benzoate (usually found in many soft drinks as well as margarine) and sulphur dioxide (generally found in dried fruit and some fruit juices).

Hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated fat means that there are trans fatty acids in the product and thes should be avoided at all costs as they are one of the main causes of heart disease.

Processed and artificial sugars like sugar, fructose, high fructose corn syrup (HFCC) and mato-dextrin as well as artificial sweeteners like sucralose, saccharin acefulsame k and aspartame should also be avoided where possible becasue they can be damaging to the nervous system as well as raise insulin levels and promote fat storange. Artificial sweetners may be disguised by using brand names such as Splenda and Nutrasweet, so watch out for those as well

Other additives to stay clear of include yellow colorings- E102 (tartrazine), E104, 107, E110, red colorings- E120, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129, 180, blue coloring- E131, 132, 133, Green coloring- E142, black coloring- E151, 153, Brown coloring- E154, 155, natural orange coloring- E161.

Basically what you need to do if you want to stay as healthy as possible is to buy foods that are natral as possible. Its much easier that way and you wont need to worry too much about labels and calories.

The post How To Read Food Labels appeared first on .

Gluten is a sticky protein found mainly in wheat and other grains. Gluten is also what makes dough sticky and elastic. Gluten is present in foods made from wheat such as bread and pasta however t can also be found in smaller quantities in grains like barley, rye and even in oats due to cross contamination.

Gluten free diets seem to be a bit of a fad at the minute with many diet gurus and weight loss books jumping on the bandwagon, however is there any substance in going gluten free. I think there is.

Here are my Top 7 reasons why you should think about removing gluten foods from your diet.

1. The glutamate content in gluten has been shown in many studies to damage brain cells. Basically glutamate is what is known as an excitotoxin. In short this means that it overexcites brain cells (very much in the same way as MSG). Basically this means that it makes your brain cells so excited that they don’t switch off and eventually die. Gluten has also been link is linked to many psychiatric illnesses due to these factors.
2. Gluten is associated to osteo-arthritis. If you suffer from osteo arthritis, taking gluten out of your diet will relive pain almost immediately.
3. Gluten has been linked to autism in children. Removing gluten from an autistic child’s det has been show to to the most important factor factor to healing their child. The same studies can also how reintroducing by accident i to the child’s diet, such as birthday cake at a friends house immediately flares up all behavioral changes associated with autism.
4. Gluten can cause depression. The inflammatory responses that happen in your brain when you eat gluten containing foods can cause symptoms that are not unlike depression. No amount of antidepressants or counselling sessions will cure this if you are sensitive to gluten. Removing the gluten from your diet can alleviate the symptoms of gluten cause depressions
5. Gluten can make you older quicker The inflammation associated with wheat leads to more wrinkles  and avoidance of wheat leads to quicker regenerating of the skin cells.
6. Gluten can damage the enamel on your teeth and lead to fillings. Consumption of gluten has been linked to faster tooth decay and loss of tooth enamel in several studies.
7. Gluten can make you fat. When we ask our clients to remove gluten and wheat products from their diet we see drops in body-fat levels almost immediately. The reason for this is because gluten raises insulin dramatically (in some cases faster than actual sugar) and because it is also a strong allergen it raises cortisol which is the stress hormone  The combination of rises in both of these hormoes leads inmany cases to increase in body fat especially around your belly.

If you would like to learn more about his I would recommend that you check out the this excellent book Wheat belly By William Davis which will really open up your eyes as to how much this protein is actually harming our health and helping to make us all fatter.

The post 7 Reasons To Go Gluten Free appeared first on .

“Eat more fat, are you crazy?” is probably what you are saying. After all doctors, dietitians and nutrition experts have been telling us for years to go on low fat diets and eat less fat. Well I have a bit of news for you. It doesn’t work. In fact you need to eat more Fat, but you cant just eat any old fat, it has to be the right kind of fat

What If I told you that eating more ‘FAT’ WILL actually make you healthier actually help you lose weight. Yes really Eating more fat will help you burn more fat.

As a matter of fact if you come and work with me as a 1-1 personal training client or come to our boot camp we ask you to up your fat intake 15 grams per day and I recommend a fish oil supplement to help speed up the fat loss process.

Thing that many people get a bit scared when it comes to fat though is that there are different types of fat and although some are good, there are also bad fats that should be avoided at all costs.

Different Types Of Fats

So as I have just mentioned there are different sources of GOOD  BAD fats and what is really important is that we can learn tell the difference between the two..

BAD fats are generally found in foods like pastry, biscuits, doughnuts, cakes, fried foods, pizza, processed meats and junk foods like crisps and chocolate. These are very often called to as ‘trans-fats’ or sometimes ‘hydrogenated fat’.

These are BAD fats and should be avoided where possible as the body cannot metabolise them. This is the stuff that gets stuck to your artery walls and can cause heart disease.

Next time you go and buy a tub of margarine check out the ingredients. Most are made from olive oil or sunflower oil which are healtyish fats in their own right, however they are chemically altered by passing hydrogen through them in order to make them solid at room temperature rather than a liquid which is their natural state. This in turn makes them onto trans or hydrogenated fat. After this process they have to be bleached and then yellow colouring is added to make them look more like butter. Not good at all.

Always, always choose butter where possible

GOOD fats come from foods like avocado, coconut, nuts (not packaged peanuts), seeds, olives, extra virgin flaxseed oil, whole eggs and oily fish (from Salmon, mackeral, sardines etc)

Quick note on eggs, lots of people ask me about eggs white and if it’s better to just have egg white omelettes. I would always say no because you get all the nutrition, vitamins and fat in the yolk so have your eggs as a whole. They come as a natural package so no need to split them up.

Bad fats are one of the reasons why you get blocks in your arteries. (sugar and insulin I sthe other cause but that’s to detailed for today’s article)

Due to years years of over consumption they cause little deposits in your artery walls which restrict the blood flow which relates to many common heart problems.  Not only that, they also cause you to put on weight fast as the body has no real use for these fats.  They are waste, So either go out as waste, clog the arteries or get stored as body fat.

GOOD fats on the other hand are VERY different and have a whole host of GREAT benefits!  GOOD fats are NATURALLY OCCOURING fats (IE NOT processed) and they are a GREAT source of energy!  Your body NEEDS fat to BURN fat!

When i refer to GOOD fats I’m generally talking about Omega 3 and Omega 6.  There are 3 kinds of fat containing these:

• mono-unsaturated: Almonds, avavado, olive oils etc
• Poly-unsaturated: Walnuts, oily fish, seeds etc
• (good) saturated fat: Coconut oil, egg yolks

But you don’t really need to understand all the above, what’s important is you understand your body needs a good balance of all 3 different types of fats.

Benefits of Healthy Fats

• Great Energy Source
• Fats are needed to regulate your blood pressure
• Fats insulate your nerves, think of them like the rubber around an electric wire
• Many are naturally protect against inflammations
• They provide insulation (which includes keeping your internal body temperature warm)
• Healthy Fats help can help to improve skin, hair and nails. Fats in our skin can make us appear more radiant
• Fats protect our internal organs
• (in the ladies) They help keep reproductive organs healthy
• (in the guys) They improve testosterone production which means more muscle and increase in sex drive.

Fats also taste great and satisfies our tastes buds and hubger, and the benefits above are not the only ones

Basically you should be eating MORE fat in your diet each and every day.  Lifestyles that are low in fat have many problems, your hair and skin tone will eventually deteriorate, you’re likely to get hormone imbalances, increased weight gain, possible bad moods and a ton of other unpleasant things

How Much Fat Should I Be Eating?

Good question!  As ‘guidelines’ go, they say your total calorie intake for (good) FAT should be 30-35%.  So you could start by adding a few handfuls of nuts and seeds to your meal times each day, and fry in coconut oil rather than the oil your using.  Try eating half an avocado with breakfast

Personally, I think that it depends on the individual in terms of how much ‘FAT’ they can tolerate.  My fat intake may seem a lot to most people but I play a lot of sport so am pretty active.  But NEVER skip on adding FAT to your diet, you’ll be surprised at the results

The post Eat More Fat To Lose Weight appeared first on .

If you are trying to lose weight one of the foods you need to be careful around is fruit and especially due to the high levels of  fructose. Fructose is the sugar that is found in fruit and if you are trying to lose weight then this could be bad news for you. 

Basically sugar is sugar and if you eat too much of any kind of sugar including in fruit then the chances are that this is going to make you store more fat especially around your belly.

The other thing is that fruit is not as nutritious as we would be led to believe. Of the 13 vitamins, only fruits that contain fat can even start to provide fat soluble vitamins,  therefore only olives and avocado can help with vitamins A, D, E
and K.

There are far better ways to get the fat soluble vitamins  in our diet by eating more meat, fish, eggs and poultry.

Fruit is also not a great source of the eight B vitamins although it is a good source of vitamin C but you can get as much vitamin C from vegetables if not more especially green leafy ones.

So basically if we take into account that fruits are indeed not that nutritious, then we have to look at how they affect our waistlines and make us put on bodyfat.

Fructose, which you may know as fruit sugar,is quite uniquely metabolised by your liver, so it doesn’t get the chance to be burned up as fuel in the blood. In this case it goes straight to the liver where it is processed to be turned into fat. You might want to bear this in mind the next time you drink a large glass of “healthy fruit juice” with your breakfast.

Table sugar or processed white cane sugar that we put in our coffee or sweet foods is made up of a single molecule of glucose and a single molecule of fructose.  The key change in our diet especially in the western world during the period in which obesity levels have risen pretty dramatically is not just down to the increases in our consumption of sugar but quite specifically down to the combination of fructose and glucose. Add these two sugars together and the potency of fructose and glucose is as follows – as the fructose part of the table sugar gets sent to the liver pretty much straight away for it to be metabolised it has little or no impact on blood glucose levels.

The glucose part of the table sugar performs this role and stimulates the pancreas to increase the output of insulin which is a storage hormone. The result of this is that we have triglycerides being formed, thanks to the actions of the fructose, and they are able to be stored, thanks to the glucose causing insulin to be released.

Food companies might like to tell you that all sugars are created equal but, when it comes to fat storage, the glucose fructose combinations are frightenly fattening especiall High Fructose Corn Syrup which is present in sweet drinks such as fizzy cola’s

The post Could Fruit Be Getting In The Way Of Weight Loss appeared first on .

For the last 18 months I have been using the Virgin Active on Deansgate in Manchester to train myself. I like to train in a different environment to the one where I work and the facilities there are excellent to be honest. They have lots of equipment that I use including Kettlebells, TRX and Vipers. Most of you might not be familiar with these but they are excellent pieces of kit that we as fitness professionals use in our own studios. In fact I even recommend the place to some of my clients and fit camp members who have joined on the back of my recommendation.

Anyway I have been happily using the gym since August 2011 and have always found the staff to be very friendly, however as someone who works in the industry it can be frustrating to train in a commercial gym and watch how uneducated the general public are about how they train themselves.

I find it hard to not be able to help people if I think they are doing something wrong or training incorrectly because that’s what I do, but it’s not my domain or place of work so it’s not for me to talk to these people.

It is however the job of the gym instructors or the personal trainers in the gym and today when I was doing my own workout there just happened to be a guy training next to me. Now when I say training he was actually doing some bicep curls with 10kg on the cable machine resting for about 2 minutes and then repeating, after that he moved on to the calf raise machine and pretty much started to do the same thing. The guy wasn’t even breaking sweat or getting out of breath and it was obvious that he was quite obese. Now when I was working in LA Fitness or Fitness First I would have been over chatting to the guy and explaining how he could get faster results by doing compound exercises, having less rest time and generally working even a bit harder to get his heart rate up.

Now I might be being presumptuous here but the reason why this member was in the gym was to lose some weight so I paused my workout and went over to the desk where the personal trainer/ gym instructor was standing and just said “there is a member over there who is obviously here for weight loss and he looks like he needs some help. He is just doing bicep curls and pretty much wasting his time walking around aimlessly. You might want to go and help him out and give him some pointers.”

The trainer actually laughed at me thinking this was funny, grabbed his cleaning spray and headed to the nearest treadmill to give it a wipe down.

Those of you that know me, know that I’m usually the most chilled out person there is normally and I don’t get angry at things but this really pissed me off as it was basically the gym saying we don’t give a crap about our members. It was a deciding factor in me quitting my membership and looking for somewhere to train when I move out of the city centre in the next few month. Maybe it wasn’t the Personal Trainer’s fault, after all I’m sure he didn’t get into health and fitness to spend his day wiping down treadmills and sweaty machines, however whoever’s fault it was, it is a massive disservice to the members who use the facility and is quite frankly not on.

These big box gyms that pay their fitness professionals to spend their day keeping the gym tidy and cleaning machines don’t work for the general public who are uneducated. Sure for the guys who buy the muscle building magazines and the educated who know what the are doing gyms are great but for someone who is too intimidated to ask for help or has never really exercised before they can be daunting environments where you are left to your own devices.

Having a gym membership if you are a novice is the equivalent of being asked to cook your own food in a restaurant.

I know that I run a personal training studio and a weight loss boot camp but this is not a promotional post. In fact if you live in Manchester you are spoiled for alternatives to gyms. There are loads of results based facilities apart from our own that you can use that are run by experienced and passionate health and fitness professionals who care about their clients. People like Ric Moylan if your into boxing fitness, Paul and Johnny Stannard of Lean Fitness, Ben Handbridge’s Body Fit Academy in Swinton is another and if you live or work in Didsbury you have Mike Bach and his ABC Boot camp.

If our fit camp members  miss more than one session we are on their backs phoning to see where they are (and I bet the guys above are the same), the same goes with their nutrition and other aspects of weight loss and health. They pay us to get results, so we make sure that’s exactly what they get.

With a gym membership you are paying for access to the gym and that it is after that you are pretty much obviously on your own as I witnessed today.

The post Why I Quit My Gym Membership At Virgin Active appeared first on .