Yesterday morning the lovely guys over at Simply Great Drinks
invited me sit atop the rooftop bar of the ME hotel, guzzle countless pomegranate cocktails and chat about everything health and fitness for the launch of their new 8 week challenge!
In case you aren’t already aware of them,
Simply Great Drinks are a new fruit juice company who not only use 100% natural
sweetness in all their products, but are also huge supporters of a sustainable lifestyle
and are on the quest to help rid the world of ridiculous fad diets. With a
number of renowned supporters behind them including Victoria Pendleton and
Doctor Christian Jessen, I was intrigued to learn more about the brand and
their ethos and pick the brain of their expert panel to feed back to you guys!
Before I start banging on about fitness and wellbeing let me first
clarify that I’m hardly one to preach about perfect health. Like the majority
of people I have days where all I want to do is lie in bed eating ice cream, I
occasionally drink and I’m not 100% in love with my body. I’ve had as many body
issues as the rest of the female population starting from the age of 12 where my quest for perfection turned into an obsession with food and control.
Little did I know as
I child that the idea of ‘perfection’ doesn’t actually exist, and instead that
drive morphed into self-hatred, self-harm and disordered eating. So before I start
moaning about how shit dieting is, let me tell you I’ve been through the
extremes and i'd like to think successfully dragged myself through it.
It sounds like a huge cliché but despite being very unhappy
for a long time I like to think I’ve come out the other side with a
wealth of knowledge and a lot of self-acceptance. I also know a
hell of a lot about food and exercise (although I don’t always put it
into good practice)!
Give me a plate of any thing however and I can guarantee I’ll be able to
tell you the calorie content of every item there. Perhaps not the most
impressive party trick, but arguably the only useful thing to come from a food
obsession.
It’s because of this that I’m usually skeptical about brands
launching new health campaigns. They usually sound pretty good but beneath all
the fancy branding they’re usually the same flaky quick fix solution that
leaves you drained of energy, fatter and a lot poorer.
It wasn’t until I spent
the morning chatting to the Simply Great’s expert panel that I really started
to understand what these guys are all about. Unlike most fitness brands, Simply Great are promoting a lifestyle not a
diet. Their new campaign fronted by Victoria Pendleton encourages people to
ditch the diets in favour of healthier lifestyle choices that will stick with
you for longer than that two week ‘quick fix’.
As soon as we were free to start questioning the panel, I headed
straight to personal trainer Charlene Hutsebaut. With over 22 years experience
in the industry Charlene taught me how to make small every day changes to not
just my work out, but daily tasks. By concentrating on ‘stacking’ the body
(aligning the head, shoulders down to the toes and engaging your abdominal
muscles), she taught me some really basic every day exercises to do during
tasks such as commuting and brushing my teeth. She encourages the important of making time in our busy
schedules to just pay attention to our bodies. Even though we all live hectic
lives, have families to run around after and jobs to dedicate ourselves to,
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have time to look after ourselves.
One of the most interesting people I spoke to however had to be
nutritionist Charlotte Stirling-Reed. Her passion and dedication to changing
the media’s representation of health was awe-inspiring, and I had such a
wonderful time just sitting down and chatting with someone who finally see’s through
the bullshit we’re being fed by the media.
These guys truly do believe in stripping back everything we think we
know about food and re-teaching ourselves the very basics in order to rid ourselves of viscous cycles of yo-yo dieting.
What I find really sad though there are obviously a lot of people how believe all this crap they’re
being force fed. I was lucky enough to be raised in a family of 'foodies' with a primarily vegetarian diet and very experimental mother. As a child I was so jealous of my friends who were allowed fizzy drinks and chocolate, and I remember one time I was so shocked to discover my best friend's family had a sweetie cupboard!
15 years later and I thank my mother every day for having such an open attitude towards food, especially as I look at my childhood friends now with their wealth of health problems.
We all have those friends who try every fad diet in the book “I’m not eating carbs for three months”,
“I’m only eating red meat!” “I’m only eating 1000 calories a day”, yet strangely just seem to be gaining weight. Yet still we feel this pang when someone else is dieting, that "should I be doing that too?" feeling...
Next time NOW magazine tries to talk you into that weird new ‘celebrity’ diet, try asking
yourself whether you’d be able to eat like that every day for the rest of you
life. If the answer is no, then it’s not going to work. Quick fix diets have to
be the laziest thing ever- just that whole idea of a last minute starvation before a
holiday annoys the hell out of me. Yes you might loose a few pounds before you
go away but then you’ll get there, eat normally again and revert back to where you
were before your horrendous month of juicing.
It happens to everyone who diets,
because they're ridiculous! Why would anyone choose a miserable cycle of yo yo dieting over living healthily and improving your body over time?
I have to admit it's all well and good someone telling you to ditch the diets, but
if you don’t know any differently or know how to nurture your body properly then nothing will improve. Which is exactly the reason why the Simply
Great guys have created a free 8 week challenge for you to try. By easing you into making little tweaks to your everyday life, this challenge
is so easily adapted to fit around even the busiest of lifestyles.
They offer advice to make the most of your morning commute, motivational tips and healthy eating guidance.
At the end of the launch I finally got some time to chat to Dr Christian about his thoughts on dieting (as you can imagine he had some very strong opinions on fad diets, juice diets in particular)! But what was rally evident was his devotion to helping people learn to love themselves again.
Food and exercise
should be fun and pleasurable, not something you dread every meal time as you
stare at your lettuce leaf and sob during your squats. It should be about
making the most of what you have and can make of yourself, self acceptance and
self love. I think it’s about time we say fuck you to all the crappy
journalists out there trying their hardest to make us feel shit about ourselves, and start really learning what our bodies need!
To try the 8 week challenge for free click Here, or to find out more about The Simply Great Drinks company click Here
No comments:
Post a Comment