Do I feel less anxious because I started to balance my energy flow using chakra energy, or did I begin to feel less anxious and therefore felt more open to chakra balancing?
I was always a skeptic when it came to meditation, chakra balancing and crystal healing. But perhaps I just never understood it before. Now, as a meditation guide, I am obviously fully on board with the powers of this method of calling upon ones own positive energy.
Truth be told I still don’t fully understand it. But sometimes we don’t need to understand something, we just need to trust that we’re going in the right direction. If it feels right, you probably are.
So giving myself a moment to think, meditate, get rid of any negative energy and find my chakra balance is as important to me now as my next meal. It is nourishing, satisfying and necessary in surviving the day.
The seven essential chakras that I focus on are the crown, to understand . The third eye, to see. The throat, to speak. The heart, to love. The solar plexus, to do. The sacral, to feel. And the root, to be grounded.
We often find the answers that we look for deep within us. These can be the most important questions that challenge you daily. Why am I doing this? What is my purpose? Am I worthy?
You have the answers, but you need to stop for a moment to find them. Just by closing your eyes in a quiet space can help you to come up with answers, but to truly find peace with these answers then I would recommend meditation or a form of energy balancing. This will really speak to our soul.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Do you ever give your soul a chance to provide any answers, or do you just keep asking the questions?
Hey Shay. It’s you. Just a little bit older and wiser. Oh, and balder. Yeah dude, sorry. You’re going bald even now so the sooner you own that look the better. Luckily The Mitchell brothers from Eastenders are making baldness a bit cooler, so just get it shaved now and stop trying to perfect the comb over.
Let me just go through all the stuff that you’ve already experienced and then I can try to explain the sort of stuff that you will live through. I’m not here to change your past or your future. I’m just giving you a heads up.
By now you will have done pretty poorly at your GCSE’s, which was obvious seeing as you didn’t really put in the effort. But you know that you’re a bright lad, just not at Shakespeare or algebra. And right now you’re wondering what your future holds.
Let me reassure you that you’re about to meet your calling. You’re a kind and thoughtful person. No exams will determine your life or career. Instead, it is your character that will enable you to work with and support other people within the social care sector. You’ll learn a lot in your time doing this job. And the biggest education of all will be about how everyone you meet will be unique. Everyone is equal and has so much to offer and you can make a difference in enabling those who you work with to show it.
Technology will change. Wow! Have you got your Nokia brick yet?! Well, when you do and you’re amazed at how you can send instant texts to people then brace yourself for what’s about to happen. In the new millennium that brick will turn into a little computer with the whole world inside of it. And then you’ll have to deal with social media. Most people seem to like it but I just end up debating about politics with a stranger. A bit like you do now but not face to face. It’s all done on your phone.
I know that, by now, you’ve dabbled with a spliff and done silly stuff like what other teenagers do. Arguing with mum and dad is upsetting right? But they love you and when you become a parent you’ll see how tough being a parent is.
Oh! Yes you will become a parent! I know you’ve always said that you don’t want kids but when you find that person who you want to spend the rest of your life with and makes you very happy, then you’ll change your mind. And your kids are two healthy boys who love you more than anything in the entire world. And even as I write it, I beam with pride. So you have that to look forward to. But just remember, we gave our mum and dad grief sometimes so we’ll have to be prepared for our kids being terrors on occasions too.
Now at 18 some very difficult news is about to enter your life. I’m sorry, bud, but your dad will knock on your door and tell you that your mum has cancer. Hey, before you get too upset right now, let me tell you that this news shapes your character. You will deal with it personally and as a family. You will still create memories. But it will hit you hard. As a young man trying to make his mark in life, you will make mistakes and emotion will get in the way of good decision making. But you will also grow stronger from your challenges that are to come. And I won’t sugar coat it, as much as you will enjoy your life, there are some seriously tough times too.
Our two boys will still be very young when our mum dies. But she got to see them and they still talk about her now. So she’ll never be forgotten. And our dad has had to create a new life. He became our hero when he looked after our mum. But he had to move forward, which he is doing.
I like how you put your mortality into perspective, even now as an 18 year old. We have always wanted to live for the moment and get out of life what we can. And you don’t change. At 44, you’ll be planning a new life in Portugal with your family. You don’t do ‘what if’ at 18 and you won’t at 44.
You will live through world events such as war, an actual pandemic, the UK leaving the EU and in a few years time what is known as 9/11. None of these will directly hurt us or our loved ones but it will have a profound effect on us. Lots of decisions you make will be because of these things. We said that we didn’t want kids because of stuff like these events, but we did have kids so you’ll get to my age forever wondering how to protect them.
I know that you are currently looking at ways in which you can change the world. But you will come to realise that as long as you can enrich the lives of others close to you then you are doing your best. Remember the moments where you support someone going to their new job or to the swimming baths. Treasure those moments where you help them cook a meal in their own home and realise how important you are to the elderly man who wants to tell you about his childhood every time he sees you. That’s making a real difference.
You will become (and still are) a personal trainer. This all came about because of the hours each day that you spend in the gym. You might as well become a PT! But you’ll be older and wiser when you do. Right now, a workout is pumping up those nightclub muscles so that you can look good in a T. But when you’re closing in on 40 you begin to understand that training is about being able to put your own socks on in the morning and having the energy to run in the park with your kids. This knowledge is useful to you in your career as a PT.
Depression never goes away. I am sorry that you experienced dark thoughts as a teenager. But you will deal with each day as it comes, trying to overcome it in your 20’s. Eventually you just live with it and keep it in its place. The gym will help you, but the big turning point for you will be when you meet your future wife. You’ve got 10 years to go yet. Together you begin to start seeing life differently. You start to live life rather than endure it.
However, you will meet some amazing and influential people along the way but it’s only on reflection will you be able to appreciate it. Everything you and those around you do shape you and your environment. It moulds you. So you’ll soon realise who the people are that you need to hang around with and who to stay clear of.
I need to go now. I need to allow you to continue your journey that leads you to writing this message.
But just one last thing! Don’t turn off the 2005 Champions League final! I won’t tell you what happens but just keep watching it until the match finishes.
Keep smiling Shay. It’ll all turn out ok in the end.
It’s a strange relationship that I have with the fitness industry. I love it. I truly do. It has enabled me to follow my ambitions and dreams that I thought were beyond me or that had passed me by. I get to meet like-minded people which means I don’t need to bore my wife with news on my new bench press personal best. And the gym is my go to place for getting my head straight. Not many people get to say that about their workplace.
But it is also full of crap. For all the good it can do, there is an element of the industry that feeds off our insecurities.
Dr Gail Hines said,”If tomorrow, women woke up and decided that they really liked their bodies, just think of how many industries would go out of business.”
The fitness industry would be one of them. And in the past couple of decades I believe that the industry has begun to target the other half of the population too. Since the end of the degradation of women in magazines such as FHM and Zoo and newspapers putting a stop to page 3 in the UK, publishers had to target men in a different way. So now they put half naked pictures of male physique models in their magazines and tell them that is what they’re supposed to look like followed by an ad for creatine tablets.
But, despite it being important for the fitness industry to have men across the world feeling inadequate, it is far more lucrative for females to hate their bodies. Or to put it another way, it is more lucrative for the industry to tell women that they should hate their bodies.
For example, we join a weight loss group and go through the torturous weekly weigh ins whilst discussing our ‘syns’. Gym classes are attended mostly by women who are promised that they will burn fat, tone legs bum and tums and blast their abs. Personal Trainers are qualified in form and rep ranges but are way out of their depth when it comes to the emotional side of WHY a person has approached them for help in losing 2 stone in a month. (Some trainers are very good, by the way, but do your homework on them before you give them your money.)
The industry wouldn’t survive if we woke up tomorrow, looked in the mirror and said to ourselves “I am good enough. I am worthy.”
And that doesn’t mean that if we did this we couldn’t still train and eat nutritious food. But we would have a completely different outlook on how we approach our goals. We can always want to achieve a fitness goal that entails lower body weight or bigger muscles, but we would start to do it on our own terms.
The industry wants to confuse us.
When I go to the telly shop for a new telly, I immediately regret the whole process. It’s not that I don’t want a new telly, it’s because I am confronted by a salesperson who begins to fill the air with jargon. Yet, even though this is off putting, I do get excited about stuff that a TV can do that I never thought would float my boat. It draws me in. All of a sudden, things like OLED, QLED, 4k UHD, refresh rates, bezels, quantum dots, low latency and resolutions are the most important things in my life.
Before I know it, I’m leaving the shop with a screen as big as the one at The Odeon and if I can figure out the settings I’m sure it can make me a cuppa tea and give me a foot rub.
Now, I’m not saying that these fancy things aren’t useful on a TV, but I would question if I really needed something so glitzy as the TV that I bought. They are buzzwords. They make us want and need something that we think we don’t already have. It makes us feel inadequate if we leave the shop without a TV to go home to our own TV. Our own TV that might have a wobbly button and it’s a few years old but it still works perfectly fine.
The fitness industry sells us our fitness like a TV shop sells us our TV. They make it sexy and an absolute necessity for our lives. Their jargon and their buzzwords, their special offers and their ‘must have’ product means that we fall for their pitch.
I’ll get a new telly that does what I want it to do in my own time and with the advice of those that I trust. And if we say the same thing about our fitness goals, then we could all sit back and watch the industry do a bit of sweating of its own.
Having spent the past two weeks with kids obsessed with football at a multi sports camp and having two footy mad kids myself, the question “Who is better, Messi Or Ronaldo?” Is asked to me almost daily.
But this question isn’t just something that kids ask. People debating on the terraces, in the workplace, online and in pubs must be one of the most frequently asked questions in the footballing world for over ten years.
So, my answer is usually pretty boring to most people.
The problem with finding the answer here is that we are talking about two of the most gifted footballers to ever play the game. They both have different strengths to each other but they are considered some of the greatest ever because even their weaknesses are pretty strong.
But these footballers are once in a generation freaks who are exceptionally gifted. They are so good that players such as Neymar, Modric, Salah, Mbappe and Haarland simply get overlooked as the best in the world because, even though Messi is in his later years as a footballer, is still winning some of the greatest trophies in world football.
Kids score a goal and instantly celebrate with Ronaldo’s ‘Suuuuiii’ celebration. They are more than great footballers. They are icons. Kids want to be just like them. And when I watch some adults play football in the local park, I suspect they do too.
And whilst this enthusiasm for mimicking heroes is all good fun, I can see an issue with how we view ourselves and how it can affect our own expectations of our own abilities.
I’ll take you back to when I first started going to the gym. I would see the most physically imposing guy in there and want to look like him. He was the gym GOAT (greatest of all time). I would watch how he trained. I would notice the protein shakes he was drinking.
Yet all I was managing to do is raise the bar to a height that might have been way too high for me, my genetics, my lifestyle and crucially my health and physical development.
I didn’t need to be anybody else or aspire to anyone else’s goals. Sure, I can always ask questions and get training tips, but trying to become the same size as Triple H was a poor start to my gym journey. It can be demoralising and, for many people, ends in quitting the gym altogether.
My son Jonas is a terrific footballer for his age. As an under 9’s player he is currently playing in an under 10’s league and looks comfortable. But I do try to keep his feet on the ground. He watches lots of football on YouTube. Rather than watching video after video of Ronaldo and Messi, I would much rather he watched the leadership of Jordan Henderson on TV or even go to the local stadium of Scarborough Athletic and aspire to have the passion of their team captain Michael Coulson.
SMART
When you are wanting to create your fitness goals I would recommend the SMART approach. This stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time. And I’m going to look at the achievable bit for this article.
As I have stated above, I believe that many of us raise our bar to unrealistic levels and if we were to lower it then we would get to where we want to be much easier. It doesn’t mean that we can’t be brilliant at what we do, in fact, if we can look at our achievable goals realistically, then there’s a much greater chance of being brilliant at what we do.
Firstly, you need to recognise your competition. The only competition is YOU. Nobody else. You want to achieve just as much, if not better, than yesterday’s you. This could be by maintaining your physical activities from week to week, looking to achieve an extra mile on the treadmill, putting an extra couple of kilos on the bar, aiming for higher reps or keeping a stable nutritional diet. It doesn’t matter what Hulk is lifting on the platform. It’s your journey, not theirs.
A few years ago I trained a very active 50 year old lady who wanted to gain muscle hypertrophy. As time progressed and her personal bests were increasing she began to show me pictures of Karissa Pearce, who is a CrossFit athlete. My client wanted her physique. I had to attempt to manage my clients expectations. It wasn’t that she didn’t work hard enough in the gym but it didn’t meet the criteria for her achievable goals. Karissa Pearce was a professional athlete in her mid 20’s who was able to train full time and stuck to an incredibly tight diet to get the physique that she had (and still does). My client, despite her levels of enthusiasm and spirit, did not live the same lifestyle and I would not have been doing my job correctly if I enabled unrealistic goals.
The saying goes “Reach for the moon and you’ll land among the stars”. But it can only refer to your moon and your stars. Not Messi or Ronaldo’s, Triple H or Karissa Pearce’s moon or stars. They have their journey, you have yours.
So many young people give up on their dreams because they could not interpret that dream into reality. And adults do it too, until we become a society of people giving up because we couldn’t manage our expectations.
A child should be able to dream about becoming a World Cup winning footballer, but the reality based on statistics in the UK is that a talented kid at football who manages to be invited to an academy has less than 1% chance of making it to becoming a professional at ANY level. However, that shouldn’t burst a kids bubble. If they aren’t one of the lucky ones to make the professional level, then it is worth noting that there are over 5,000 football teams in non-League divisions. This is an excellent standard to reach which is often paid (depending on the league and the club). Just because you don’t have Ronaldo’s career, it doesn’t mean you are rubbish at football.
As a kid I would dream about playing for Liverpool FC and, although I don’t earn the weekly wage of Mo Salah, I did follow my ‘sporty’ dream eventually by becoming a Personal Trainer and I currently coach sports to children. And so we should dream, as long as you manage the reality.
I encourage my own kids to dream about their goals. But, just to give you an example of the sort of stuff they aspire to achieve, it involves mansions, high performance cars, professional football, becoming a YouTuber with millions of followers and traveling to the moon. These are all great ideas, but I also want them to realise that just having a home is winning at life too. Affording any car is a luxury. Having your health and talent to play at any level of football is amazing. Having real friends that appreciate you is special and just being able to see the moon is a blessing.
Reflecting on my own fitness journey, i now understand that my achievable goals are to be able to run and lift as well today as I was doing ten years ago. It’s to fit into the same size jeans as last year. It’s to meet new and interesting people. It’s to keep a positive mindset and feel good about myself. If I continue what I’m doing then I have a good chance in achieving this.
Please, keep dreaming. Aspire in doing whatever you want in life. It really does keep the fire in the belly burning. But when it is time to form your plan of action in your life, be SMART.
A big motivation for me to write my blogs was always to dispel the myths surrounding our health and fitness so that we could safely enter a fitness program or nutritional journey without wading through the murky waters that are bogus articles, magic pill advertisements and other fitness professionals giving out misinformation.
A fitness goal should be fun to embark on without unnecessary jargon, untruths and charlatans making it stressful.
And so I feel it necessary to come to the defense of the humble cheese, grilled or not grilled, for my latest findings. As this week, a gym member approached me to ask if it was true that grilled cheese adds more calories to non grilled cheese.
This is a very valid question, especially when you consider that it was a fitness professional who told her. After all, they’re the ones in the know right?!
But after thinking about how this could possibly be, the gym member looked for a second opinion. I must admit, the logic and the simplicity of the answer that I wanted to give (a resounding no it doesn’t!) Couldn’t leave my mouth. It could be that the fitness professional had done their research into this and knew more than me on the subject. So I said that I doubt it, but I’ll do some digging and find out for sure!
Rule number one for any budding Personal Trainers out there…don’t be afraid to say that you aren’t sure but you’ll get back to them with an answer. And even if you do know the answer, say that you don’t know but you’ll get back to them. You want their contact details remember! But it also stops you from being a bit of a know-it-all and, as this post suggests, one day you’ll give a wrong answer without doing your research.
Ok, back to cheese.
My findings were clear and just as I had thought. The calories do not get any higher from grilling it.
However, and this is perhaps where the confusion lies, it becomes easier for the body to digest cooked food therefore the body works less than when digesting raw food resulting in the body burning less calories. But the numbers are small. It’s like having 8p in your piggy bank when you need to save £20,000. It won’t make a huge dent.
Still, this doesn’t apply to grilled cheese. But could there be another reason to believe that grilled cheese is higher in calories than non grilled cheese?
Hmm. There is a theory that we tend to over indulge when we eat cheese on toast or toasties. We might add butter or use oil before applying the cheese perhaps, or maybe choose white bread instead of wholemeal. Yet it doesn’t change the caloric make up of cheese. The issue here is on a person’s food prep habits, not the cheese. It’s like feeling bloated after eating a full strawberry cheesecake and blaming the strawberries.
I love cheese. I’ll eat it in some form almost daily. Although I wouldn’t advise following my addiction to cheese and eating too much of it too often, I would recommend eating a cheese toasty or a cheese on toast occasionally.
It’s even better on cheap white bread, but don’t tell anyone I told you so.
This week’s quote of the week comes from the Dutch motivational speaker and author Alexander Den Heijer.
I have read lots of his work based around our environment and how to prime it to suit our needs in which to meet our personal goals.
He encapsulated this message perfectly when he said…
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
If you now focus on a specific goal that you have struggled with lately, you might find this quote useful to you.
We often put ourselves in the firing line when we don’t meet our own expectations. Perhaps your gym goals have stalled and you feel demoralised by the process. Firstly, the process is something that you must believe in for you to get successful results. So a full overhaul of all of your foundations isn’t what ‘fixing your environment’ means. After all, a flower doesn’t need a tropical rainforest to grow, it might just need a little bit more sunlight at the other side of your desk.
To ensure that you create the proper environment for your gym goals I’ve added a few tips below that should become your positive habit forming actions moving forward. AKA…priming your environment.
* Pack your gym kit the night before. If you’re in two minds on whether you attend the gym today, when your kit is ready to go in the boot of your car then you are far more likely to stick to it than rummaging the drawers for your favourite vest or sports bra during the morning rush.
* Prep your favourite nutritious meals. Batch cook sauces that can be frozen. Defrosting it and making a bowl of pasta or rice is a better alternative than starting from scratch…and if we really can’t be bothered to cook after a long day at work, we resort to takeaways. But you are more likely to stay within your calorie goals by prepping your own meals.
* Be around positive people. Whether it is in the gym or people you hang out with, if you are getting negative vibes from them then ditch them. This might seem like a big decision, after all, this could be a friend you’ve known since childhood or it could be your wife or husband. Talk to them, tell them how you feel, but if you still feel like crap because of what they say and do to you, then move on.
* And on the same theme as above, if it is a job, a gym, a pub or a social group that is holding you back then find an alternative. Find the places that allow you to be you and not what your environment demands of you.
And on that note I’ll finish with a final quote from Alexander.
“You often feel tired not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
We are all in a constant process of change. How you choose to adapt and evolve is largely down to you as an individual.
Your thoughts and feelings are probably very different to those of 20 years ago. Or 10 years ago. Or one year ago. And even less.
In the time that you click onto this page and read up to this point, your brain has inputted, stored and refreshed this information and it will keep happening every 15 seconds of your life. This continuity field allows the brain to call upon past experiences, snapshots and perceptions and use it in present situations. And because the brain is constantly collecting this information and storing it, we adapt our beliefs, thoughts and feelings along with it.
Once we know and understand this, the quote by Soren Kierkegaard starts to make sense…
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
The brain is constantly traveling back in time to recall each moment that is relevant for the present experience of the individual. Collecting stored data to form appropriate actions. This is how we are able to scan words when we read.
But, despite these most amazing things happening to our brains, we are the director of change and evolution. This is how habits can be broken and how past experiences can be used for strength, positivity and future happiness.
Heraclitus said…
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
What did he mean? My interpretation of this is that once you step into a river the water is displaced with new water and the nature of the river is changed permanently. You are also changing.
Just because you have experienced a moment in your life does not mean that you must replay it. It just needs a little rethink, or in the case of your brain, a rewire. We can train our brain to do as we want. We can change what we don’t like, but your brain needs new material to process.
Neuroplasticity is the term used to describe the brain’s ability to adapt to different circumstances throughout your life. Affirmations, which is a technique to instill a positive mindset through repeated words and sentences, is the most popular way of achieving this brain rewire.
Affirmations are often short sentences that can be easily remembered and stored in your brain. And as we have discovered, once your brain has inputted this into its system, it will roll it out when needed.
Governments and ad companies use them too! So it’s not some hocus pocus stuff that some people want to believe.
I’m lovin’ it. Just do it. Get Brexit done. Build a wall. These are just a few examples of successful catchy earworms that are/were repeated to us constantly but there are actually thousands and thousands of other examples of clever affirmations that are instilled into our brain in order for us to act how that particular campaign wants us to act. Well, the good news is that it is actually YOU in control as long as you can counter the influences from around us.
You just need to keep telling yourself and reminding yourself of your aspirations, needs and life goals. If a burger company can make us keep going back to eat burgers with the same texture of cardboard and a government can instruct a whole nation to strip themselves of their rights and leave the EU whilst they titter all the way to their offshore accounts, then I’m sure that we can all manipulate our brains with our own affirmations. Positive affirmations.
When you stand in the river, it changes. Make sure that you change what you want to change too by giving your brain positive things to process. Because when it comes to it, your brain will be using this information to enable you to make those changes.
Continue to remind yourself who and what gets you out of bed each morning. Keep telling yourself how well you could do the new job that you have applied for and repeatedly remind yourself of your health and fitness goals. Write stuff down. Put it on a white board or on the fridge door. Keep your favourite affirmation as a screen saver. Anything at all to allow your brain to compute those words and keep them.
Everything keeps changing. You don’t have to be the one thing that doesn’t.
I must have spent what equates to years of my life worrying about what people think about me. Certainly as a teenager I wanted to feel accepted by my peers in some way. And then in adulthood along came social media, where ‘likes’ and ‘thumbs up’ became far more important in my life than they should have. In job interviews, social settings and on social media, I wanted to be liked and wanted.
But then it stopped.
I didn’t suddenly turn into a person who didn’t care about what others thought about me, but I did become very aware of my change in attitude on whether or not somebody liked my personality, accepted my dress sense, my political opinions and my interests. I care, but don’t cry about it if somebody doesn’t like me for whatever reason. I do me. They can do them.
My ‘resting bitch face’ can be a hindrance. Maybe I can look angry or disinterested when actually that’s just my face! I don’t just walk around with a smile. I need to be approachable in my profession, whether in the gym or in my future projects. Yet I can only continue doing me, otherwise people wouldn’t get me, they’d get fake me.
Did age change my attitude to being accepted or not?! In my experience, older people tend to have less of a filter. Am I just getting old?!
My appearance is deceiving. I’m bald, so I shave whatever bits of hair grows on my head. I weight train and eat a lot, so I am of a larger size. I have tattoos including flags of communist countries, guerilla warfare leaders and football club badges. People might judge me on this. Also, I’m open about my politics. Just the other day a parent at my son’s football match asked me why we chose Portugal to be our next place to live. Without hesitation I said it was because Portugal is in the EU and we want to get out of Brexit Britain. I could have just said ‘For the weather’, but then it wouldn’t be me.
Yes, if I make friends, I can lose them pretty quickly. I just can’t say what I think people might want to hear. And I appreciate transparency in a friend. They can call me a dick if I’m being a dick. No hard feelings. It’s the people that can’t take it when I pull them up on something. It needs to work both ways. I don’t need them as friends. They can fake it elsewhere.
Remaining calm and focussed when I get labelled, misquoted or misrepresented is something that I still have to learn to deal with. After all, I am human with all the same sensitive emotions as the next person. I’m not a robot. But a piece of good advice from author Morgan Richard Olivier is something that I always refer back to.
She said…”Letting people be wrong about you or a situation while keeping your peace and focus is the most misunderstood power move you will ever make.”
You see, becoming comfortable with yourself is one of the greatest super powers that you can possess. You can spend a lifetime trying to impress people. How we look, think and behave are being judged all of the time, and yet, by whose standards?
Will my life be any different if Graham from Dudley gives me an angry face emoji because I am happy to refer to Sam Smith as ‘they/them’ on the internet?
Would I feel any better if I were to explain to Sally on the Co-Op till that I’m not a far right football hooligan, just a follicy challenged lover of Liverpool FC?
I don’t need to explain myself. And you don’t have to explain yourself.
My two boys love going to their grandparents for an overnight stay. Their granddad, a professional refurbisher of bar billiards tables, often has a finished table in his garage so the boys can take their pool cues that they got for Christmas.
They also get to stay up later on an evening than they would do if they were at home. Staying up later is always a treat! But the biggest treat of all for my 6 and 9 year olds are the meal times at Granny and Granddad’s.
An overnight stay will usually consist of a takeaway or a meal out for burgers or pizzas and a dessert afterwards with a fizzy drink to wash it down with. Basically, lots of foods with very little nutrition.
But I can’t pin this all on their Grandparents, absolutely not! The boys also have occasional takeaway meals or frozen pizzas and chips at home too. The boys have been invited to friends houses for tea, they’ve gone to Macdonald’s for birthday parties, they receive toys for buying ‘Happy Meals,’ supermarket meal deals involve crisps and chocolate, going to the movies encourage us to eat buckets of popcorn lager than my youngest child and reformed chicken comes in the shape of dinosaurs. All of these things appeal to adults too, so we cannot ignore the fact that children will be drawn to such inviting foods.
As parents and grandparents we can’t avoid it, but that doesn’t get us adults off the hook.
I have previously written an article about children being ‘The Great Imitators’. As much as parents believe that their children often do the exact opposite as of what is asked of them, their brains are gathering all of this information that they see and hear and then used as a survival mechanism for when they need it.
How we interact with our partners and colleagues, what we watch on TV, our language, the way we dress and what we eat are all closely observed by the young mind.
As my role as a coach for children during half term, I’m fully aware of how I talk to my fellow coaches. Children listen. Children copy. I’m also very careful about what I eat at lunchtimes with the children. I wouldn’t eat a Greggs steak bake in front of them after having a talk to them about healthy eating. There’s a time and a place. Even for a Greggs steak bake.
So how do we get our children to be more mindful about what they eat? Firstly, it is important to not criticize or ridicule any meal choices that they make. Food should never make anyone feel anxious or ‘bad’. Food should be enjoyed, yes, all food. If a child enjoys chicken dippers then ask them what they enjoy about them. How does it feel and taste to them? Talk to them about what you can add to the plate alongside their dippers.
At home, the boys know that if they ask for fish fingers or chicken dippers it will come with wholemeal wraps, mayo, ketchup and a good sized portion of vegetables. It’s a compromise. For about two years and especially for our youngest who looks like a celebrity doing a bushtucker trial when he’s eating broccoli, the veg wouldn’t be touched without having tears. Now, because we continued putting the vegetables on his plate consistently and he sees his older brother and his parents eat the veg on their plates, he eats his veg without any prompts. He watched and he copied.
We can’t expect our children to choose better options with anything in life unless they see the grown ups doing it too! Sure, their teenage brain along with other teenage peers and influences will challenge their decision making. It is one of the most feared periods for a parent and one I’m yet to experience, but if we can promote the right messages into their young brains now then at least we are giving them a fighting chance as young adults.
My message is clear to the adults that I train and the children that I coach, you can still enjoy all food types and be mindful about what we need to enable our bodies to grow strong, to be healthy and happy, to excel in what they enjoy and to survive. The balance is something that is important to find and it is my job as a parent and coach to help people do that, whether for adults or children. After all, what age group doesn’t like to find the letters of their name with a plate of Alphabites?
I don’t have a device that tells me how many steps I do each day, but if I did, this past week would’ve been off the scale.
During the half term holidays I have been helping out at a sports club for children aged from 5 to 10. The idea is to get the kids as active as possible and to encourage teamwork, movement and healthier eating. And of course if the kids are moving, the coaches are too! One of the coaches did wear a gadget to track his steps and they were over 20,000 by the time the kids had gone home for the day.
During half terms my usual training routine of gym work gets out to one side. This is fine as I schedule these events into my annual training plan. In effect, I know that I don’t need to use the treadmills in the gym for my cardio if I have a productive NEAT (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) regime. And whether it be staying active with my own children or being active with 50 other children, I am comfortable with my activity levels. So I don’t particularly need a device to tell me that.
However, just like tracking my calorie intake, it’s good to check in from time to time and keep myself on my toes! So using such a device is always a credible way of keeping on top of things.
So if we take a look at what 10,000 steps a day can do for your body, hopefully we can all achieve a healthy and balanced lifestyle without slogging it in the gym every day or feeling depressed because we haven’t managed to get to a fitness class this week.
According to research, 10,000 steps a day can strengthen your heart and keep blood pressure under control. It can reduce body fat and maintain a healthy weight (with a sensible eating plan). It can improve stability, muscle tone and strengthen the core. Getting your steps in each day can also improve brain function and help with lowering anxiety and depression.
And we don’t have to panic if we only manage 5,000 steps on some days. We all need to sit and binge watch the new series of You, right?! But it just means that we average out our steps throughout the week. Some days you’ll probably hit the 20,000 mark if you are generally active.
So have a think about how you can achieve more steps into your week. Also, check out a device that will count your steps. It doesn’t have to be expensive, a free app can give you an idea of your activity levels.
And once you find the activities that you enjoy, you’ll find that you don’t even need to be running with 50 kids every day to achieve your steps!
Never Give Up PT 