More from my couch

I regularly receive email about this blog and of course email from clients. I'd like to share some of my philosophies with some questions and answers.

Why do I have to work so hard? Such and such a person is doing this and getting 'x' results!

Firstly, I want to ask you who you are taking the journey for - yourself or "such and such"? The truth is that everyone's realities when it comes to health and fitness are different. I have to work hard to stay healthy and maintain my weight, so does Craig Harper, yet you don't hear either of us bitching about how "hard it is". We just accept it, deal with it and do the best we can. I have other clients with extremely robust metabolisms but poor thought processes surrounding them. The key is accepting and understanding YOUR REALITY right now. Work with what you've got RIGHT NOW and start accentuating the positive (see below). Live your journey for YOU.

Why can't I eat just for the sheer pleasure of it?

Hell, I'm not stopping you!. It's called a "planned indulgence" - yes, that's right, something that you eat just because it tastes good. Life is too short to eat crappy food. Life is also too short to eat yourself comatose having a "free day". The only freedom I see is freedom from common sense.

"You made me keep a log and it triggered me to overeat."

Must have been a powerful piece of paper! I've never known anything inert to trigger certain behaviours. My advice: take responsibility for what you did and try to work out the situation that triggered it. If you still come back to a sheet of paper or a spreadsheet, you need a thicker skin, Tiger.

PS - many studies have shown that keeping a food log to be extremely beneficial with long term weight control.

"You eat perfectly all the time, but I can't over this time of year"

Hello, staying well isn't about being perfect all the time. It's about being consistent. Try substituting your can't with won't and re read the statement. Again, it's all about choice. It's commendable to be intuitive with your eating and being more aware of oneself. But it doesn't do you any good having no modicum of character and discipline in your life. Allowing yourself to "eat intuitively" does not mean "I can shovel heaps of poor quality crap down the old pie hole just because I feel like it". There are other overriding factors such as overall health and well being that factor in. Loving yourself and being intuitive sometimes means saying "no".

PS - I am far from perfect, but I'm pretty consistent.

"Isn't 'eating clean' just a pretty name for another diet?"

Depends how you define "diet". If you're talking caloric restriction, I'm in the "no" camp. Eating clean aka eating healthfully and staying away from highly processed stuff is beneficial to health and sporting/life performance.

"yeah, but" and "I can't"

This means a) I have an excuse for everything and b) I won't.

PS - I never saw this couch jumping episode but if I saw my kids doing this, I'd throttle em :)

Eating Out

Weekend nearly over and I'm just about to roll into another very busy week ahead. I don't think I have mentioned that DH and I are going to build a house! We bought some land about two years ago which has a view of the city (albeit - it is far away, but still!) and now that we are back in Brisvegas, we've decided the time is right to build.

We have spoken to various designers and the last few weekends have been spent trawling through display villages. We have two homes picked out that may fit the bill, but as our block has a slope, some of these project builders may not be too keen to work with us.

Today we looked at homes from Metricon and Adenbrook and by about house 4, I had already had enough! We decided to go out for lunch and we went to the "Coffee Club". I ordered a Chicken Tandoori Wrap with salad and when my meal came out, I reckon it could have served two for lunch quite easily. As someone who has been brought up to clean my plate, it was initially difficult to immediately request a doggy bag for half of it - but once I had eaten all of the salad and half of the wrap, I was glad I had made the decision.

Which leads me to the issue of how our eyes are bigger than our stomachs and is it part of the human condition that we're lulled into thinking "more is better" and "better get a Value meal" etc. However if we stop for one moment and think - "am I pleasantly satisfied?" half way through a meal, especially like the one I described, the answer will be "yes". I think the "clean plate brigade" have a lot to answer for - I don't know how many times I have cleaned my plate, just because the food was "there", but I'm slowly becoming more discriminating!

Exercise wise, it was double-RPM this weekend, Hi Performance on Saturday morning and my regular Sunday afternoon class. I particularly enjoyed Hi Performance and went in feeling a bit nervous about what expectations members have of a one hour sweatfest - some really want to smash themselves and others are apprehensive - so I really went to town on workload versus recovery - which worked really well.

Today's class was also fun and I got to hang out with a friend who has done her RPM course too. We got a chance to practice our new choreography and I swear that girl is a demon on Track 3~ ouch and double ouch!