I feel like if someone would have sat down with me when I was 16, 17 and even 18 and explained the ins and the outs of what it really means to be fit and healthy, I would have been doing what I’m doing now a long time ago!
Health and fitness is not a straight line. It comes with ups and downs and experiments to find what works for your body. After all, no two bodies are the same and each requires a different amount of exercise and nutrition to function properly.
If you’re beginning your journey into health and fitness and feel a little bit overwhelmed with it all (trust me when I say you will), hopefully these tips and little words of advice will help you moving forwards.
Fad diets are a bag of cr*p
Fortunately not literally, but they may as well be! Cabbage soup? No thanks. Celery juice? Think again. Skinny teas? Hmmm I’ll pass. Every single one of these quick fixes doesn’t work. You can’t keep them up and you’ll never last past a few days on them anyway. Save your hard earned pennies and just eat a balanced diet. It literally is as simple as that…who’d have thought!
The internet tells you to eat 1,200 calories, ignore it
Typing “what are the lowest calories you can eat and stay healthy” into Google is a bad idea hun. Google has no idea how tall you are, what age you are, what your body composition is and what it needs to function properly. It’s absolute bullcr*p to think that you can eat 1,200 calories and be healthy.
Carbs are not the enemy!
Trust me they’re really not, plus you’ll need them later on in lift to help you lift heavy in those weight sessions. Whilst I’m on the subject actually, no food group or macro-nutrient group is the enemy. Oh and protein isn’t the be all and end all either. Find a balance and discover what works best for your body.
Being healthy doesn’t mean low calorie, it means high nutrient
Looking for low calorie alternatives or swaps will not make you healthier. More-often-than-not these foods are often no better than their higher calorie friends. Calories are not a measure of health and eating low calorie isn’t necessarily a recipe for success. Focus your energy on finding foods which are high in nutrients instead.
Doing a million ab exercises won’t give you a visible six pack
And to be totally honest Sophie, you don’t want one anyway! Six packs are totally overrated and not everyone is built to have one. Stop spending your whole gym session doing endless crunches. Ultimately abs are made in the kitchen and require a dangerously low body fat percentage to achieve!
Lifting weights won’t make you bulky
If you start lifting weights you aren’t going to wake up one day looking like the hulk. Lifting weights is actually super empowering and makes you feel like a proper badass woman. Plus there are so many other benefits to this type of training too!
Equally don’t say goodbye to cardio. Do some digging into HIIT training to save you from the treadmill. As hard as it is to start off with, it’ll soon become one of your favourite ways to train.
There are different ways to be fit
Forget the bottomless pit of stereotypical fitness girls there are over on Instagram. It will forever seem like there is a new body part that you need to make bigger, smaller or more rounded. This doesn’t mean you have to do the same! Fall in love with different ways to be fit.
Go swimming, head out on long walks in the countryside and take up different activities like rock climbing. It’ll soon become apparent that spending seven days in the gym is not as fun as it’s made out to be!
You will never look like other girls, so stop striving to
Because you aren’t other girls. You are you and you are beautiful in your own right. Stop aspiring to have a thigh gap when you have muscular dancers legs, it’s not going to happen. Accept that you are built the way you are and learn to love the body shape and type that you have. The sooner you do that the happier you will be.
And finally…
You will receive copious amounts of advice from someone close to you in your life. It isn’t necessarily the best advice for you and could be detrimental to your mental health. Discover what works for you and learn to love who you are both inside and out. Ignore the bullsh*t, stop Googling quick fixes and put time and energy into becoming a healthier version of you.
Love from a much older and wiser you 😉
This is all so true! Especially the stupid fad diets. I’m really struggling with fitness at the moment. I always used to swim but there was a fire at my local pool a year and a half ago and it still hasn’t reopened! (There’s no other pools easily accessible to where I live). I tried joining the gym and hated it and I’ve recently been doing at home work out DVD’s. I suffer a lot with joint problems and currently have a bad knee from doing the workout DVD. It’s seriously disheartening when you’re trying to get fit but your body just goes against you 😩
Oh bless you! That sounds horrible and so demotivating! I feel for you I really do. If you need any advice hun just ask I’m always on hand 🙂 x