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Wednesday, 19th November

Keri’s Leaner faster stronger

Seasonal and local – day 2

Is out of season food healthy or not?

Unless you live a life like Barbara and Tom from the good life, tending to your fruit and vegetables day in day out, you probably have little knowledge of seasonal food and it’s health benefits.

Since eating within the seasons is the advice given by health professionals these days, it makes you wonder if eating out of season food is in fact healthy or bad for us?

From a health perspective, food that’s not in season has been grown in huge greenhouses or shipped from warmer climates travelling thousands of miles before arriving in our supermarkets. This has many consequences for the consumer. Firstly, they are picked before ripeness so that it can endure the long distance shipping experience. This means that it’s nutrient profile is lower than a local and ripe product. Vitamin C for instance, which is abundant in most fruit and vegetables, is notoriously unstable and so would be lost in transit so to speak, making out of season food less nutritious.

Also transporting produce sometimes requires them to be zapped by a burst of radiation to kill germs. Preservatives such as wax is also added before refrigeration.

Taste wise there is absolutely no comparison. Locally grown food tastes amazing, has great texture and looks appetising. Most local food grown by farmers are also healthier due to having less pesticides and chemicals used for preservation too.

Air miles is another issue for many people. Local food usually travels only a few miles from farm to table ensuring less pollution to the environment.

Another quite interesting argument for eating seasonal is the fact that our bodies actually crave seasonal food due to the weather. Have you noticed how you fancy salads in the summer and crave stews and soups made of root vegetables in winter?

It’s all great saying that local and seasonal is better,tastier and cheaper, however how practical is it to eat like this all the time? If you lived in Italy or California, it wouldn’t be much of a problem, Burry Port however?

Unless you love pigging out on carrots and caulis for the whole winter, you are going to get pretty bored very quickly. Not many fruits are in season in cold and wet Wales in winter.

Our advice would be to try and eat as much seasonal food as you can to get a good amount of natural vitamins and nutrients, as well as getting a tastier and better value product. However supplement with imported fruit and veg as well. We have no intention of giving up bananas anytime soon as they are a great addition to the sports diet.

Seasonal food are in abundance in supermarkets these days, as they do try and cater for popular demand. Many supermarkets buy produce from farmers in Wales and the UK these days, you can usually find the grower written on the label.

Another option for tired and busy workers is frozen fruit and vegetables.

Studies show that these are actually healthier in terms of vitamins and nutrients than many fresh out of season produce, due to the fact they have been picked and frozen within hours, and so have not lost any of their nutrients. It also means you can eat strawberries for instance all year round.

Choosing frozen also means less wastage for the family too. No more shrinking yellowing broccoli lurking in the back of the fridge, which everyone forgot about!

Here is a list of what’s in season in November, helping you to make good seasonal and local choices in the supermarkets and small local shops.

Eat to train,

Nicola.

Twitt
Posted on

Tuesday, 2nd September

Practicing doesn’t make you perfect, but practicing a lot WILL make you attain a peak performance more often than not.

If you look at your habits every day, then you will realise why you are being successful or not by now surely.

What do you practice most in your day and week?

When was life working out best for you, and which habits did you used to practice on a daily basis back then?

What were you doing? Who were you hanging around with back then?

What were you eating? How often were you getting your training sessions in on a a weekly basis?

Who did you learn most from on a daily basis to create new productive habits? Did you have a coach back then and were you in any kind of programme to get the best out of yourself?

So from this you should be able to realise which habits work best for you, what inspired you to get into shape in the first place and isn’t it time you replicated all of those habits again and got into fantastic shape, both mentally and physically?

You know it’s going to take a lot of hard work to be at your best physically and mentally again, but dig out that roadmap again of how you were at your peak once in your life, and you will soon be getting the very best out of yourself once again.

Your daily and weekly habits will determine how successful you are full stop.

Twitt
Posted on

Sunday, 13th July

I always get asked “what happens when I finish the 12 week challenge”?

I have to say it’s going to be very unlikely that you will go back to your old ways when you complete the 12th week, you will definitely be a changed person by then.

You will have a new version of what your everyday life is now.

Your cravings will have gone or mostly gone, you will put exercise near the top of your “must do’s” most days, you will have a new lifestyle, you will have an unbelievable amount of energy, your outlook and ambitions in life will look totally different, and you will tend to be an optimist instead of not being bothered about doing worthwhile things.

Plus you will have a new body with a much improved level of health, both inside and out!

The pain in your body will have long disappeared, because you will be moving so much better now in all ways.

Maybe in the past you used to go in the garden for a couple of hours and couldn’t move for a few days. Everyone has had that feeling. Because of the training we do, you will be used to many of those movements and your body should be ready for anything.

Whenever physical activity you may have done as a one off in the past will have made you feel too old and stiff, those days should now be well and truly over as you now embrace physical effort, and you will be very aware of the benefits you get from it.

I find those who set new goals after finishing their first 12 weeks absolutely fly through the second 12 weeks because of their new ability and most importantly, a newly found self-confidence and a much higher self-esteem.

Overcoming the first 12 weeks was the hard bit, developing healthy habits for the first time in years and finally discarding bad habits that were holding you back, both with your body and mind.

Ending your first 12 weeks is only the beginning and definitely not the end!

Twitt
Posted on

Monday, 30th June

We try to make you accountable for your efforts by our constant measuring process. This shows if you are improving, falling back and what rate of progress to expect in the future if you keep eating and training like you currently are.

All of this will be a proven way of success.

An excellent way of strengthening your longer term success is having an “accountability partner”. In life, you have friends, family and work colleagues who will often share in your experiences in getting fit and healthy. This is your “circle of support”.

If this circle of support is filled with negative people, who don’t offer support when things get tough and encourage you to go back to your old ways, then your chances of failure go dramatically up. The easiest thing will be to quit because these people usually never exercises themselves, never eat well and will want you to stay at their level.

This is why it’s important to have one very positive person at least who will go through it all with you, one person who has your real interests at heart, and will support and encourage you even when you want to throw in the towel.

They will offer realism when you are only pretending to try and you could do better, they will offer support to help make sure you actually make it to your training sessions, and they will celebrate in your success when it happens.

I find that if the person I train is living in a household where one partner eats and drinks rubbish, then that person will always struggle. The entire household needs to support each other, because if the supermarket shop is full of sugary and fatty foods, don’t pretend that those foods will not be eaten at some stage, because they will!

A healthy lifestyle cannot be a short term commitment, and if everyone buys into it then the household will feel so much better that it will never want to go back to the old unhealthy lifestyle anyway. Working as a team is always better than fighting against others who aren’t supportive of your goals to be fit and healthy.

Twitt
Posted on

Friday, 27th June

If you are start off in school in year 1 and you start learning basics, then it’s a natural progression to move on to new stuff pretty much year in year out, and often from week to week even, all of which are stepping stones to your development.

If you use this analogy in relation to exercise, then it should work the same way but often in practice it never does. Most gyms are not accountable to their members, because most people’s experience of gyms is being shown around the gym in broad terms, given a sheet of paper they give to everyone, and then forgotten about and left to their own devices once the direct debit is signed.

How many people do you know when they begin to exercise keep on doing the same old thing at the same level of intensity (or lack of!). It’s heartbreaking when you see this going on for long periods of time, and these individuals never progressing the way they should.

Proper exercise technique can take a lot of time, not only to show it but make sure good form continues to happen.

It’s human nature to go back to old ways, and when you exercise going back to old ways can mean sloppy form and potential injury, and definitely no progress.

It’s also human nature to find the easiest way of doing things.

Going through the motions in gyms is what most people do. Picking the more difficult movements, which require a high amount of energy just to do them are unfortunately what most individuals avoid, leading to mediocre results and a lack of general fitness. You commit to spend time in the gym, so why not make it as productive as possible?

Your programme needs to change regularly if you really want to seriously change the way you look and perform regularly, you need a few different types of workouts that will challenge your body to adapt, and you need to totally get out of your comfort zone, because your body requires a different stimulus all the time to keep on progressing.

See your training as a constant progression, and not just training and getting through it for the sake of it. It makes the difference between being a constant success story or just drifting through your programme without any kind of meaningful results to show for it.

Twitt