Your wedding day is one of the most important days of your life and for most brides and grooms to be, it often comes with a goal of slimming down for that special day. Being confident in your own skin is important but when it comes to your wedding day it will have more significance when all eyes are on you – after all Wedding and Honeymoon photographs are forever. A study undertaken by Cornell University in 2007 found that 70% of 272 women recently engaged wanted to lose weight for their wedding day typically around 20lbs, and that 80% of those women failed to lose anywhere near their original goal by the time of their wedding, procrastinating as soon as the word diet is mentioned. Most Brides turn to crash dieting choosing to leave dieting for their big day to the last minute “I have loads of time” – a recipe for disaster! Weddings are extremely stressful as it is, and the stress only increases the closer it gets to the wedding date. The last thing you want is to be on is low calories, feeling moody, grumpy and having regrets that you left it too late on the lead up to your wedding. The Solution? Plan your diet in the same way you are planning your wedding. Your wedding day body should be seen as a project and properly mapped out with milestones along the way. The ideal time to start your body transformation is 12 months before your wedding, this allows you to coast into your ceremony and down that isle without your diet taking over your life and most importantly without having to remove social events, alcohol and treats completely. Having worked with several brides in the past, the brides who gave themselves 6 to 12 months to prepare all achieved more than they set out to in the beginning, whereas those who gave themselves 4 to 12 weeks struggled due to the pressure with less than 50% achieving their goal. Next year I get married and as an example I have mapped out my entire regime based on similar plans I have designed for my bridal clients in the past. I use to compete on stage so my goal was to try and reduce my muscle mass because I want to look more feminine for my wedding day rather than having everyones attention on the size of my shoulders or how defined my back muscles are! inPhase 1: This is pre wedding dress shopping. There is nothing worse than feeling self-conscious trying on wedding dresses. Making decisions based on your current physique is very difficult. You may find that the dresses which suit you best at the moment are A-Line, but who’s to say that will be the case 9 months down the line if you have lost a lot of weight? – you may now prefer to go for a more figure hugging dress, resulting in over expenditure from purchasing two dresses. Starting your diet 3 to 4 months before wedding shopping can help you make more informed decisions on the style of wedding dress you would like. It also allows you to see how well you can stick to your new lifestyle changes and what a realistic dress size you can order that gown in based on how you have been performing to date. Moreover, shopping for dresses is a fantastic experience and it’s great to go in there feeling confident! During this phase I stuck to pretty much the same macro’s throughout the 4 months on a 20% deficit. On social events I followed my calorie target. I had 4 weekends away during this 4 month period and 2 weeks in America. I was also struck down by a severe kidney infection for a week. I made sure that my daily diet was made up of mainly whole foods (except for the almost daily chocolate bar!). Each day I hit anything from 12,500 to 20,000 steps. I trained 5 days a week for 60 minutes. This consisted of 2 upper body workouts and 2 lower body workouts, with one 60 minute outdoor run. Each resistance workout was made up of HIIT circuits with weights lasting 30 minutes, warm up and cool down cardio was a total of 15 minutes, and I also incorporated 15 minutes of yoga and stretching at the end of each session. At the end of phase 1 I went from a size 10 to a size 6/8 losing a total of 24.8 cm across my entire body. I only lost 7.5 pounds in weight. You can following my weekly progress by clicking here. My goal was to lose 32cm across my entire body in phase 1 but what i achieved given the circumstances was still amazing so I shouldn't be too upset! Phase 2: After the dress fittings you now want to start a new training program and have your macros re calculated. It’s time to start making weekly changes to diet either from habits or macro alterations. A new training program should also be designed, changing your training each week or having no consistency won’t maximise your results. Always try to follow the same program for around 8 to 12 weeks, this will make allow you to see progression in what you’re doing. I plan to switch over to a strength and fat loss program at this point. Heavy compound movements combined with post workout cardio. I still plan to keep my weekly yoga session in and small daily 15 minute practices. Many women are scared to lift heavy thinking they will become big and muscly. Women’s bodies are not designed to hold high levels of muscle, it’s virtually impossible for this to happen unless you are training correctly and eat in a surplus – it can take years of intense training for muscle growth to occur. When training on a calorie deficit for weight and fat loss you want to train heavy and eat correctly around the workout zone. Feed your body a good pre workout meal 1.5 to 3 hours before your workout containing low gi complex carbs, a protein and fat source. This gives your body fuel and will allow you to maximise your performance in the gym thus burning more calories! Did you know that losing fat involves increasing your metabolism? Muscle plays a huge role in increasing your metabolism. A pound of muscle burns around 10-20 calories a day whereas a pound of fat burns only 5 calories! Train hard, lift heavy and eat often throughout the day! Post workout meals should contain a protein and high GI simple carbohydrate. This aids recovery replenishing the depleted muscle glycogen and preventing muscle breakdown. Often people think they have gained muscle mass and look more toned when dieting and training, the truth is all they have done is shed the fat surrounding their muscles, making their natural lean muscle tone become more visible giving a false impression that they have gained. Phase 3: During Phase 2 and 3 is when you want to make the most impact in your diet, before the stress increases as you approach your big day. Ideally you want to achieve your goal by the end of phase 3, this way all the hard work is done, which means the next 3 months is just about maintaining what you have achieved taking the pressure off you. Your dress should be arriving at the end of phase 3 which can also help reduce costs when it comes to dress alterations! At this point in time I plan to switch over to Y3T for 12 weeks, this is a 3-week cycle you repeat 4 times taking you to 12 weeks. On week 1 you do heavy compound movements with low reps and a tempo of 3 to 5 seconds in the lowering phase. In week 2 your lifting moderate weight, in the 14 to 18 rep range a combination of compound and isolation exercises. In week 3 you’re going to failure in each exercises, its built up from supersets, drop sets, giant sets and really pushes you to the limit. Once all 3 weeks are completed you go back to week 1 but you have to lift more weight or do more reps than you did the last time round. I love this system! Phase 4: Your wedding ready 3 months before your big day! It’s time to reverse out of your deficit slightly and have some more calories – you will need the energy! Your already looking fantastic for your henny / stagger, your lifestyle and health has improved and your oozing with confidence. All those good habits you have built up over the past 9 months are now embedded. It’s highly unlikely you will return to your old ways now and you will now be able to make much more informed decisions when it comes to food choices long term, thus maintaining what you have achieved on plan. At this point I plan to switch back to resistance HIIT circuits and increase my yoga and cardio. This will offset the slight increase in my calories. I am going to use Yoga as a stress reliever helping me feel calmer and more relaxed as the wedding day approaches. Of course Yoga will also benefit me physically due to its strengthening and toning qualities.
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The media for the past few years is saturated with women empowerment - women fighting against men for equality in all areas of life and work. I try to stay away from writing controversial posts wherever possible but I can't help that think that there is very little evidence to support women empowering women. When I do see women supporting one another its usually for all the wrong reasons - a witch hunt against men.
This post is aimed at women in every day life and how they treat other women around them. I have recently returned to the UK from 9 months travelling, and have started back at work and socialising again amongst new and old groups of friends. What I do notice is that when meeting up with the girls there is very little positive chat on what other women are doing. The chat is what a certain or couple of females are doing wrong that they don't agree with. One of my friends spent over an hour the other day chatting about a girl in the office that her and apparently everyone else in her team doesn't really like. The girl is apparently rude, doesn't dress right and just doesn't measure up against the other girls". As women, we often make superficial judgements of other women too quickly, we then spread this opinion and change the mindset of others close to us on this person and then treat them based on our judgement. I have, in the past been guilty of this too until I was the subject of a group of girls behaving like this towards me. I had previously been someone that was never a threat in the office, I was overweight, didn't take care of my appearance in the way they did, wore frumpy clothes, I was quiet and lacked confidence. When I went through my own transformation my confidence changed. I started taking more pride in my appearance how I dressed, conducted myself and they didn't like it, I then became the victim of their lunchtime gossip and treated like an outsider. A common subject on the Nemesis private client forum, is role models, inspirational people who we aspire to be like. Although there are women in the fitness world that I look up to or whose bodies I admire, my ultimate role model has to be Michelle Mone. I read her autobiography a year ago to this very month, and was so inspired by everything she has achieved in life when the odds were against her. Her book inspired me to read further autobiographies by powerful women (especially entrepreneurs). There are far too many women out there who are unaware that they themselves are inspiring others unknowingly, and in doing so we lack the ability to empower one another. As females we rarely tell one another how fantastic they are, or how we look up to them etc. My friend Sarah inspires me because she runs multiple businesses, she is constantly learning new skills, she gives so much time to other people, she runs a family home and 3 kids. My friend Katrina went through a phenomenal life and body transformation over the past few years and I am in total awe at her dedication and persistence. Every Sunday my clients check in with me with a review of their week on plan, they may have fallen off the wagon on some days, never went to the gym etc but I always look for a positive to motivate and empower them. There is always a positive in every situation. If someone has lost weight – TELL THEM If someone painted a great picture – TELL THEM If someone has a beautiful smile –TELL THEM If someone has beautiful earings on – TELL THEM If you notice any positive however small – TELL THEM. Women need to support other women AND men! We also need to realise that we all have different opinion's and aspirations for our future or how we want to live our life. If someone wants the suburbia family life but you want a career and jet setting, those around you should support you not mock. Positivity starts at home Did you know that if you become a Nemesis PT client you receive access to our recipe blog? We create new recipes every month and even our clients help contribute to the blog! Every so often we like to give non Nemesis Clients a wee taster of what they are missing out on! Like our fantastic simple to make Turkey Pad Thai recipe. We encourage all our clients to ensure their daily diet contains 80% whole foods and the remainder 20% can be from convenience or something naughty like a glass of wine or some chocolate. In this recipe we reached for the pre made sweet chilli sauce because lets face it, after a long day at the office you just want your supper on the table in the least amount of time as possible! If you love Wagamama's Pad Thai dishes you will love our version more! It contains all 3 types of fats essential to the daily diet, over 7g of fibre per portion. If your on low carbs why not remove the noodles? if your on a high protein and fat diet add more turkey steak and instead of using low calorie cooking spray fry the turkey in olive oil.
1. Using low calorie Olive Oil cooking spray, spray your wok or frying pan and pre-heat
2. Brown your Turkey pieces. 3. Add in the onion, zucchini and red peppers and fry for 2 minutes. 4. Add in the sauce, then the remainder of the veg and basil 5. In the final 2 minutes of cooking add the express noodles. This makes 5 portions - ideal for bulk cooking. Per Portion Calories:419 Protein: 40.6 Carbs: 37.4 Fats: 11.5 Fibre: 7.6 After summiting Kilimanjaro in October 2017 and 6 months later reaching Everest Base Camp in the spring of 2018, we felt like frauds for not tackling our own home countries highest mountain ‘Ben Nevis’. “You’re doing Everest Base Camp and you haven’t climbed Ben Nevis?” was one of many comments we received during both the Everest and Kilimanjaro hikes from members in our hiking team - they had a point! Ben Nevis is the tallest mountain in Great Britain at 4,409 feet above sea level, attracting over 100,000 hiking enthusiasts each year, and this month it attracted another 2! Our second shameful admission – we both haven’t explored much of our home country either. As kids our parents regularly took us on Scottish caravan holidays but we both remember very little of them. Our memories warped from photographs our parents had taken. With this in mind we decided we would head to Fort William by going down the A92 and then join the A9 before cutting across to Fort William. Our return journey would be going home via Aviemore. The drive to Fort William and through the Cairngorms is spectacular, rugged brown and purple landscapes from various types of heather broken up by rocks, waterfalls, lochs and streams. Many people are often attracted to this area from seeing the Lonely Planet, but trust me those scenes don’t do it justice – your missing out on all the best parts that contribute to the fantastic landscape like the fresh, crisp, clean smelling Scottish air. Fort William is a tourist destination, and we shopped around for a reasonably priced B&B but the cheapest accommodation was 2 nights at £800.00. No wonder the Scots travel abroad for their holidays! Determined to still do the hike we decided to camp at the fully serviced Fort William Campsite located at Glen Nevis visitor centre, it cost us £40.00 for the 2 nights, £85.00 for a new tent and double airbed. The facilities were fantastic, clean toilets and showers, a burger van, restaurant, bar and shop! Plenty of power points in the bathroom area for glamping females – hair straighteners, wands, hair driers and perfect lighting for applying your make up! We arrived on the Friday night, and had an amazing Scottish meal of haggis, neaps and tatties at the Glen Nevis restaurant before turning in for the night. We decided that we would get up at 7am the next morning and have breakfast, aiming to start the trek around 8am. However, time ran away with itself and we didn’t end up reaching the start of the path until 9:15am. We are not experienced hikers, Kilimanjaro was the first hike we had ever done. We do love adventure sports and a challenge! We read that most novice hikers and reasonably fit people take 4 to 5 hours to reach the summit – challenge accepted! Unfortunately we were not able to take the obligatory Glen Nevis bridge starting point photographs because there was a group of around 30 charity hikers about to start at the same time – we bolted across the bridge to prevent us being stuck behind the group. Prior to setting off my dad who had hiked Ben Nevis in the 80s and is a regular hiker said the first hour of the hike is the hardest. In my opinion both the first and last hour are equally as hard. The first hour is a steep rock path which is taxing on the body. You will find very quickly that the first hour of the hike ends up being like a slowed down scene from the Full Monty, where you are constantly taking off layers of clothing. As we ascended the campsite slowly started to get smaller and smaller, and the landscapes wider and wider. As with all hikes we have undertaken we have learned that the summit is deceiving, you always think you can see the summit but it’s just the mountain teasing you and it’s actually a plateau with the summit hiding out of sight. Even on a clear day you will never see the summit of Ben Nevis on the track until around the last 30/45 minute of the hike. Don’t forget to keep looking back and all around you as you climb this first section – the landscapes are breath-taking. The route we took is often called “The Tourist Path” do not let this give you a false belief it’s easy – it certainly isn’t. We were also in shock with the amount of people we saw on the path in flip flops, trainers or wearing all the wrong types of clothing. The weather and temperature in the Cairngorms changes instantly and you don’t want to be caught out – last week there was snow on the summit! There was also people with small dogs like yorkies or cairn terriers making them do the hike – dogs with legs that are 5cm tall – seriously?! One dog we seen was limping because of the terrain on its paws and the owner had to carry the dog off the mountain. Common sense says a hike of this magnitude is only suitable for dogs like spaniels, beagles, labs etc. As you turn the corner on the first stretch of the climb you will reach a fork in the path, you can turn right (the mountain goat track) for an express route or stick to the zig zag path which flattens out with a beautiful scenic walk beside the loch. If this is your first time stick to the zig zag and absorb the beautiful landscapes. We seen a lot of people slipping on the goat track and it isn’t actually a proper track. At this point we were in the zone, our breathing was regulating, our stride improving and we were making great time. This part of the stretch gives you some rest bite for the next difficult climb which lasts 2 -3 hours depending on your pace. We never stopped at all during this stretch, we sipped on water as we trekked – oh and sucked on our chuppa chups (Highly recommend hard boiled lollipops for your ruck sack to enjoy along the hike!). It was at this point I noticed the clouds were coming down thicker and the temperature was dropping, concern was starting to hit me that we may reach the summit and not be able to see anything. My dad told me when he summited he only stayed for 20 minutes and couldn’t see more than half a meter in front – he came down scared he would stumble on a cliff edge and fall over. On this stretch of the climb we started to see climbers who had reached the summit to see sunrise descending down the mountain. The odd passing conversation of “not long to go”, “it’s amazing” really lifts your spirits and makes you push on – it was like this all the time on Everest. Remember how I said that all mountains give a false impression of where the summit actually is? Well those thick grey clouds were now blocking all views of the top. Our pace was starting to slow down too as the terrain and path changed to broken rock. We were both slipping all the time and you really have to concentrate on your footing. “Your only 20 minutes form the summit” one guy said to another hiker who was visibly struggling. I looked at my watch and it was coming up to 12 noon. New challenge set - to reach the summit by 12:15. The pace was increased and we pushed through. The clouds started to part and lift as we reached the highest point in Great Britain at…… 12:15. We had ascended in 3 hours, we are now officially “Elite Hikers” according to the Ben Nevis Website. We spent 2 hours on the summit exploring every inch bowled over by the 360 degree landscapes - there is so many amazing photograph points. We also came fully prepared to celebrate our hike with … wait for it…. a box of Cadburys roses. I can safely say that we made it off the mountain but the roses didn’t! The guys next to us were making their way through a collection of miniature whiskeys!
It’s taken me years to try out yoga – I guess I have always liked the idea of being a ‘Yogi’ – I understand the health benefits it brings with it and how it can really compliment all the sports I enjoy doing. I guess the real reason for putting it off for so long was because I know how inflexible I am. Not only am I not flexible, I also have no rhythm! - I am an appalling dancer (even though I do actually enjoy dancing – with a couple of glasses prosecco for confidence of course!). Yoga I hope will loosen me up Inspired by a Yogi I follow religiously on Instagram, who funnily enough is called @inspiremyyoga, I signed up to a beginner’s 6-week block yoga class. Arriving at the yoga class I made sure I was right at the front. ‘Flexibility is a Product of Yoga not a Prerequisite’ the instructor told the class. After the first class I was hooked, I am one of those people who are only motivated nly when something challenges me and by hell Yoga challenged me. I don't let anything get the better of me and I keep doing it until it no longer defeats me. The great thing about going to a beginner’s class is that you learn one or two moves each week. The teacher spends time going round each individual and helping them into the position or giving pointers. I like how they communicate the breathing techniques and encourage you to think more about the movement and what you should be feeling. I try to do this with my own personal training clients. I am constantly preaching to them that anyone can move a weight from A to B but it won't change you without implementing tempo and putting your muscle under tension. At the end of the course all the moves we learnt over the six weeks are pieced together allowing you to flow in and out of each position seamlessly to perform the moon salutation. I train four to five times a week at the moment and before each training session I now start off with some light cardio to warm up my muscles followed by some dynamic stretching before doing 30 to 40 minutes of resistance circuits. I then repeat by cooling down with some light post workout cardio followed by 15 minutes of stretching and then 5 minutes going through the “moon salutation”. I no longer train at the weekend, it’s my body and brain downtime and I actually feel like I am performing better by having 2 full recovery days back to back.
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AuthorsSharon & Lainey are Online PT & Nutrition Advisors with a combined 18 years experience in the Health & Fitness Industry. Archives
August 2018
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