Its that time of year again when everyone is making health and fitness (and likely weight-loss) related promises to themselves. One of the most frustrating things I see as a fitness professional, is people spending their hard-earned money on programmes and plans which I know can’t possibly work.
Just this morning when I downloaded my email, I was presented with a number of offers for various weight loss plans and detox diets from daily-deal sites.
I am not normally one to try to belittle the opposition in an attempt to make my system look good, but one of the primary reason people state for not being able to buy in to the results orientated programmes which I offer is the cost…..and yet at the same some are gullible enough to ‘invest’ £75 in a 5-day juice detox diet!
Its not so much that a detox diet won’t work (indeed I have my own 7-day detox book of recipes which I give away to members), but it is useless as a short -term intervention if it isn’t accompanied by some real information about how to continue to eat going forwards.
You can’t ‘detoxify’ for 5 days, lose a few pounds (mostly water incidentally) and then go back to your old habits, and expect anything to have changed. To put it frankly, you have to be really stupid to think that will work. Oops, apologies to the 118 people who have apparently already signed up for that offer today.
You don’t have to be that clever to recognise that you won’t be able to exist on fruit shakes for the rest of your life. My own detox programme is really nothing more than a book of breakfast, lunch and dinner recipes which are sugar, dairy, wheat, alcohol, caffeine and processed food free. They still have all the required food groups (protein, fat and carbohydrate), and won’t leave you hungry, miserable, and madly craving the next chocolate bar you see.
They simply get you used to how good you can actually feel when you stop putting unhealthy, inflammatory and fat storage promoting food into your body. It could be used every day for the rest of your life, although the limited number of meal choices would get rather boring!
I did have a client a few years ago who used the 7-day detox recipes almost exclusively for 21 days, lost nearly 9lbs, then carried on using the same principals and getting in regular, appropriate exercise until she had dropped several stone and looked amazing. She wasn’t really detoxing in the traditional sense, just learning how to eat for health and fat loss.
The very principal of a diet detox is unrecognised in the scientific world. The body has a highly effective detoxification system using the liver – a few days of juicing (or any other fad diet) will do nothing at all for sustained fat loss, and give no real health benefits. You need a strategy which you can put into use 24/7, 365 days per year, with the occasional reward meals thrown in.
The body stores many of its toxins in body fat, so in general the fatter you are, the more toxic you are. And if you are unhealthy at the core, the body will hold onto that fat as much as it can. You don’t get rid of toxins to lose fat, you firstly have to allow the body get rid of fat to lose the toxins! Short-term interventions are utterly pointless!
You need to learn a new way of eating and exercise which helps your body to lose the excess fat, and hence become cleaner and healthier from the inside out. Its these very principals which we teach all of our clients here at Merlin Fitness, and it is that, along with the accountability and support, which gets the sustainable results.
If you want to learn more, we still have a few spaces left in our 28-Day ‘New Year New You’ Challenge starting on Saturday 10th January, which will give the lucky few Plymouth ladies the opportunity to learn exactly how to eat and exercise to lose fat and get healthy and strong.
It will only cost you a little more than the 5-day juice detox, but for that you will get 28-days of full on support, starting with our 2 hour information-packed challenge orientation on Saturday 10th, access to our fun Metabolic Magic classes in our studio at Christian Mill Business Park, an accountability journal and daily emails to help you stay on track, and a whole lot more.
You don’t have to pay anything right now. Just click this link to sign-up and express your interest, then follow the instructions on the follow-up email to schedule your complimentary consultation to see if the programme is right for you. Spaces are very limited to ensure that everyone gets individual attention, and we can’t accept everyone.
Looking forward to changing a load more lives in 2015!
Beth
