*Original publication date November 2016*
With Christmas around the corner, I’m thinking of party frocks and nice outfits to wear for the festive season. It’s ok to be a little out of shape, and it’s only now that I’ve realised I need to lose a few pounds to fit into my nice fancy frock for a masquerade ball next month (more on that later).
I asked top fitness professional Chris Zaremba his thoughts on increasing fitness levels both up to and including the festive time – and for the year beyond. Chris is well qualified to help – he first took up fitness when he was obese and under doctor’s orders at age 50.
Now, ten years on, now he has lost a third of his bodyweight in fat, put on some muscle too, and has a cabinet full of fitness and fitness modelling trophies. He also has a growing client list – mainly those in their fifties wanting to follow Chris’s ‘Fat to Fit at Fifty’ approach – and turning to him for his fitness advice.
What are the top tips you can give to someone wanting to get fit and tone up for the festive season, which is just over a month away?
Someone once asked me if what they eat between Christmas and New Year would have a serious detrimental effect on their health and fitness. I replied that it wouldn’t, it’s much more important what they eat between New Year and Christmas.
I guess that’s the first point – Christmas is just a few days. If you eat well for 360 days, those five or so days will never be noticed.
Overall, I’d give three sets of guidance:
A – Eat Less: Most of the Western world tends to eat too much – and a considerable benefit would be obtained by many by simply reducing the amount eaten, alongside an increased movement level. That really will do it. Here are some further guidelines on this, if you want more: 1. Within this ‘eating less’ approach, add in a view to ‘eat better’. Cut the total amount overall, but within that, keep the protein and fibre up, and the sugars and saturated fats down. Don’t try to eliminate the saturated fats completely, the body needs some, but only have those that come with protein attached. 2. Try to plan your days eating every day. Think of what you are going to eat, and approximately when, over the remainder of the day. And if you have the keenness to do so, it’s best to write that plan down. ‘Plan your eats, then eat your plan’, sums it up. My preferred plan usually has breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner at three-hourly intervals – which neatly gives me the 12-hours of eating in each 24 – plus an extra feed straight after a weights workout to make 6 meals a day. What’s that 12 hours eating in 24 about? Read on… 3. If you decide to eat something that you know you shouldn’t, make it worth it – Quality Not Quantity, is the guideline here. A glass of good wine to replace several of standard stuff, or maybe a pint of craft-brewed ale with natural ingredients rather than a few of the amber fizzy stuff. Same for bread, too. But don’t be a diet bore – if you’re going out to a Christmas party, enjoy the event, try to follow the guidelines – and if you’ve planned your day well, then you have probably eaten less earlier in the day to allow for a few excesses at the party.
B – Exercise More: The body is happy to accept exercise in any form – going to the gym and formal training sessions isn’t the only form of exercise that counts. Your body actually wants to move, to exercise, it’s only your brain that’s advising you differently.
- Try to get some cardio in your life as a regular session – that’s a brisk walk, jog, bike ride, cross-trainer, something that gets your heart rate up for around 20-40 minutes. An ideal time is pre-breakfast, as this is the best time for the body to supply fat as a fuel, as I mention in more detail below. In addition, later in the day put in a resistance or weight training session on two or three non-adjacent days per week. There are many examples of exercises available, including on my website, and try to include exercises for the major muscle groups of the legs, chest and back.
- Progress incrementally, but do progress. If you can do 8 good repetitions on one exercise for example, then try 10 next time. And if you do that, try 12 the time after. Then, with success there, increase the weight but drop the repetitions to 8 as your target next time. To do this, record your exercise progress, as recording your data is key to the week-on-week encouragement this gives you – measurement is Motivation.
- Find exercise activities in your daily life – walk up stairs rather than taking the lift, maybe walk rather than drive for a short journey – and if you are walking, do it briskly – if you walk 40% quicker than before you will burn 40% more calories per minute! And you get to where you are going earlier – where’s the downside in that?
C – Extend Nights: The body’s primary fat burning period is overnight, specifically the period between a few hours after eating the last meal up until when calories are consumed again. This period is gold dust to the keen fat-burner. Make use of it by following these three guidelines:
- Create a 12 hour gap between consuming calories. So if you ate dinner at 8pm, don’t have breakfast (or any other calories) until 8am. If you know you have an early start tomorrow and have to eat breakfast at 6am, then tonight’s eating and drinking should be done by 6pm.
- Get some light/moderate calorie-burning exercise in for some part of the 11th hour of those 12. So once you wake up, go for the 20-40 minute cardio I mentioned before. Nothing intense or anaerobic that is going to demand fuel from other than your fat reserves.
- Have some coffee before that morning exercise. No sugar or milk, of course, as they contain calories and that would break the 12-hour no-calorie guideline. But the caffeine in black coffee is fine and acts both as a stimulant and helps the fat cells release fat to the bloodstream for use as fuel.
That’s it, just those three guidelines. There’s much more I can say about each of those points, but the above is all you need to get going. Also, if you can’t follow this on every day, then do it on some; the higher percentage of days that you can do this means the quicker you will obtain your results.
I suspect that this is far too much for just up to Christmas – so start now for the festive period preparation, then adopt them as your New Year resolutions too.
What will your Christmas dinner consist of?
It will be a very traditional Christmas dinner – roast turkey with all the trimmings followed by Christmas pudding and Christmas cake later, washed down with some of my favourite ales and wine. And I won’t be counting calories, and I’ll give MyFitnessPal the day off.
But I will do a 5K run at about 8am, after breakfast, at about 10am do a weights workout in the gym (luckily it’s a 24×7 one, so it will be open) – then back home to help prepare the family lunch, starting about 11am.
Do you have an Achilles heel, i.e. the one food you just cannot give up?
I don’t have any food that I give up entirely – although there are many that I cut down a lot on. Chocolate, cake, beer, bread and wine are all things that I love to eat – but these days I lower the quantity and heighten the quality. So, rather than 3 pints of rubbish beer, I’ll drink one pint of something special and craft-brewed. I use the term ‘Quality Not Quantity’ to describe the approach.
The exception is in the final two weeks before a photoshoot or contest – then I really do have to give up all the naughties.
Do you ever have ‘cheat’ days, where you throw caution to the wind and eat what the heck you want?
Absolutely! But it doesn’t have to be a whole day of cheating – if I’m going out on a big dinner and know that I’ll blow all the calorie and macronutrient guidelines to pieces, then I’ll consume rather less during the day – and plan to ensure I get my full dose of pre-breakfast cardio and resistance training later in the day.
Same for lunch – I can go absolutely bananas if it’s a social event with some good old friends, perhaps – but I’ll plan for that and have decent nutrition and exercise over the rest of the day. And if I ever have a full day as a cheat day? That’s pretty rare but I’ll usually find time for a pre-breakfast run both that day and as a hangover cure the day after!
New Year’s resolutions very rarely last, with 66%* admitting to breaking a resolution within one month. What is the best way to stay motivated after New Year’s Eve?
The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that people often plan to spend more time doing things – especially fitness things – such as ‘I’ll go to gym more often, I’ll do a morning run, I’ll spend time cooking from raw natural ingredients rather than chucking an instant meal in the microwave’ – but rarely do they identify those things they are going to spend less time on.
If you’re going to spend more time doing certain good things, you need to recognise those things you are physically going to spend less time doing. Top of my list is less time on social media and less time watching TV – the average UK person spends over five hours a day on those.
Staying motivated also comes from seeing progress. I started getting into fitness ten years ago when I was fifty; the last thing I expected was to enjoy it – I was only following doctor’s orders. But when I started to see the numbers on the scales moving, felt the trousers getting a bit loser, and heard the compliments from my wife, then the motivation was there in abundance. The Magic Moment happened for me – where fitness activities moved from being something I had to do, to something I wanted to do. Motivation will never be an issue for me now, nor anyone else once they hit that Magic Moment point.
I’m in middle of watching Fit Happens, it’s very inspirational! What is the main message you want to relay from this very watchable, informative programme?
In the first series of ‘Fit Happens’, we tried to show ways of getting fitness into viewers’ lives’ that make it both easy and enjoyable, and don’t take a whole chunk of extra time. We point out that only slight changes in the way you do things – walk a bit quicker, choose foods based on the good nutrition within them, maybe come into the weights area at the gym as well as the cardio zone – can have massive benefits, especially when continued over a time. ‘Fit Happens’ isn’t targeted at the already sports-mad and fitness-dedicated person; its designed to help everyone to show how their lives potentially can improve with a little planning and priority setting in fitness.
We also show how fitness can come into your life at any age – with me at 60, and Keith Cormican in his 30s – and both well-known in the fitness field. And the two ‘Generation’ specials, targeted at inspiring those who aspire to making a big change in their fitness and appearance, take this further by featuring the very broad age range of 20-60 with Dan Wynes and me taking on significant fitness challenges.
The first series of ‘Fit Happens’, along with the two Generation specials, are on my YouTube channel – the second series, which adds London-based fitness professional Nicola Feustel to the team – is now being edited and should be on TV early in 2017.
If you were Prime Minister, what would you do?
I have a few non-fitness priorities, such as those relating to traditional ale in traditional pubs – but I guess that’s not what you mean! In the fitness and health world, I would do everything possible to ensure people understand that looking after their own present and future health and fitness is their own responsibility, not the state’s. More adverts relating to healthy living, and plainer nutrition information on packaged foods. There is already confusion amongst many about various types of fat, sugar and other carbs, salt and other numbers. That’s fine for a fitness professional, but probably too much for the average person. So I would introduce a Fitness Factor points on each food – a single figure based on a calculation of overall calories, how many calories from each macronutrient group, salt, fibre content plus micronutrient analysis. Each person is allowed so many points per day depending on gender, existing health parameters and goals.
Since a lot of adult activity is formed in the school – added to concerns about rising levels of obesity in the young – I would also introduce nutrition and exercise theory as a subject in schools, and – finally – absolutely stop selling off playing fields – get kids running around them instead.
There’s a rise in clean living, veganism and vegetarianism. Some champion these diets as a means of losing weight. What do you think of these diets / lifestyle choices and do you think they can help weight loss?
‘Clean living’ is the first point you mention – if, by that, you mean to encourage people to have more interest in their nutrition and make healthy food choices, that will get my vote any day!
I’m not such a fan of vegetarianism – for one health reason, and one purely selfish reason. On the health side, I’m a big believer that protein is the primary macronutrient in helping to build and maintain a healthy body, and that most people’s diets are deficient in protein (while being over-supplied with other macros). There are indeed vegetarian sources of protein – but the most efficient way of getting the best quality of protein for you is via eggs, certain fish and meat, with the number one preference for me being poultry. Generally speaking, non-animal sources of protein don’t have all the top components ingredients – the essential amino acids – that make a complete protein, and also its harder for the body to get to the protein and break it down for use within the body.
The selfish reason is that I love eating meat! It’s a rare day that I steer clear of chicken, turkey or beef. I’m not an advocate of processed meats – such as ham or bacon – but I’m happy that whole meat forms the basis of the protein part of my diet.
But yes, and coming back to your question, it’s absolutely possible to lose weight on a vegetarian or vegan diet – but anyone following that approach should make sure they are not losing significant amounts of muscle mass as well as losing the fat. And if they are dropping muscle mass, then they should think about finding ways of increasing the protein in their diet, as well as perhaps getting into resistance training in the gym.
You’ve competed in numerous muscle and fitness modelling contests. How does it feel to model in shorts, when there was a time you’d be more comfortable covered up?
It is indeed an unusual activity, and I have found that you need to be pretty self-confident to be willing to be viewed and judged on your appearance when you are wearing nothing at all but trunks or gym shorts.
It’s certainly not for everyone; my wife said she wouldn’t enter the female classes for any sum of money – the threat of showing that much of herself for inspection by 1000 in the audience, plus the judges and sometimes TV cameras too would make her run a mile in under a minute!
I enjoy the contests – and I’ve had some success, mainly in the categories delimited by age. There’s no way that I’d walk away with a trophy if, at age of 60, I was being evaluated against those one-third of my age. I started competing, very nervously at first, at the age of 54. And even after 18 contests since then, I still get a tremendous thrill from the preparation, appearing on stage, the cheer of the crowd and ultimately being awarded a trophy.
I’m very fortunate to have been in the top five of all 18 of those contests – which are the trophy positions. 10% of my friends think it’s great that I do this – the other 90% think I’m nuts and should grow up and behave in a much more mature fashion!
How do you motivate and help clients who struggle with will power and motivation?
I sometimes find that just having me involved is sufficient motivation. My clients find that having to report back to me every few days is enough of a spur on to help them towards success. And eventually, most of them hit the Magic Moment I mentioned in an earlier post, when getting fit is no longer an obligation, but a joy – usually when the numbers of weight and body-fat percentage start making real progress.
My clients all know that I am there to offer suggestions and advice if they begin to lack confidence in their abilities to go forward with it. I offer my clients unlimited support by email, phone or in person as appropriate, and that helps them through the low moments.
Paul McKenna and others use hypnotism as a way of re-programming the mind. How would you help someone change a pattern of a lifetime to eat more healthily and start exercising?
I’ll leave the hypnotic stuff to Mr McKenna, while I concentrate on coaching techniques to help them to come up with the answers themselves. Although I try to find ways of eating well and adding exercise that can be fun as well as beneficial, there are times that a level of will-power is needed. Two of the tools I use to help in this are – firstly, to advise a planned approach to eating and exercise with no more random eating (just because the biscuit jar is there) – and secondly to set up an incrementally progressive exercise programme. If a client can run at 12kph for three minutes, and next week does 12.1kph for the same duration, that is a new Personal Best, earns applause from me and smiles all round. Good endorphins, bring on next week!
As a food journalist and restaurant critic, I eat out frequently. What advice would you give me for wanting to lose weight before my birthday? I have 7 months!
You can make a massive difference to your health and fitness in seven months! But the sooner you start, the better. Not next week, not tomorrow – now! I suggest you put into place as many of those points in my first post as you can – and keep logging your activity and the results. Your results will become your motivation.