I spent a recent camping trip being pretty healthy – sticking to my usual healthy eating with a few little extras sprinkled in here and there, along with plenty of activity windsurfing and surfing – but I still came back a couple of kilos heavier than when I left!

Some of this is fluid retention that usually goes in a couple of days (which is why I know it’s fluid as fat won’t shift that quickly!) but I think a kilo I can attribute to fat weight – and this was by no-means an indulgent trip!

Most of us experience this with every major holiday or even long weekend.

Despite being ‘good’ most of the time, the cumulative effect of these indulgent periods will really make a huge impact on the waistline if some action is not taken to immediately get back on track. This is one of the big reasons why people gain weight each year – without getting back to where you were previously you can easily keep gaining and gaining weight without even realising it.

It’s a good idea to develop healthier holiday habits: a holiday is a treat in itself but all too often we think we need to eat loads of the wrong things in order to enjoy ourselves! But if you can make the healthier choices while on holiday you can actually enjoy the treats all the more.

How many times have you looked through your holiday snaps to see photographic evidence of the weight gain?

Some tips:

- Drink plenty of water: You will dehydrate much quicker in the heat and we often mistake thirst for hunger.

- Avoid liquid calories: That ‘virgin’ cocktail is still choc-full of sugar! Juices may seem tempting but you are better off having a glass of water and a piece of fruit.

- Set yourself a ‘beer o’clock’ time: Alcohol does massively impact weight loss and will cause weight gain very quickly. If you skip lunchtime drinking you can save a load of calories, plus you will feel much better for it. Keep the alcohol to a pre-dinner drink and then while you are eating.

- Alternate water with alcoholic drinks: You will thank me for it when you wake up feeling fresh and able to enjoy your precious vacation! Plus you will halve the calories you take in.

And we haven’t even got to the food!

- Choose lean protein and fruit and veg first: If you have access to a buffet breakfast you are onto a winner: fill up on the good stuff first then if you must add the starchy carbs keep them to a small treat afterwards. You will still enjoy the taste but won’t need as much. If you don’t have time to make omelette and veggies at home you can ‘treat’ yourself to this when someone else is cooking!

- Enjoy new foods: Try a new fruit and vegetable each day!

- Have healthy snacks to hand: Buy fruit and unsalted, unroasted nuts to have as snacks throughout the day. If you are unprepared you will be more tempted to eat the treats that are everywhere.

- Enjoy the treats: Savour every last mouthful of the things you wouldn’t normally have: there’s no need to eat ice cream all day but make sure you fully appreciate it when you do!

- Think of it as ‘damage limitation’ so you can enjoy yourself without feeling deprived whilst also coming back from your holiday looking even better than when you left.

- Make sure you get straight back on track as soon as you get home, too. Consider a few weeks of extra-focussed nutrition and training to reverse any weight gain, or even to boost your results even further.

You often find that after a week off, or a period of ‘maintenance’ (holidays are usually a little over maintenance) you actually lose at a faster rate, so make the most of this turbo-charged window of opportunity!

If it’s good enough for them, surely it’s good enough for you?

If you think you can’t possibly use something that is for such elite athletes, then you are in for a surprise, as you can use the kettlebell for fantastic results, even if you are a complete beginner to fitness.

So regardless of who you are, there are many reasons why a kettlebell is well worth adding to your workout arsenal:

The unique way you hold a kettlebell compared to a dumbbell means you challenge your core and stabilising muscles a lot more – so you get strong from the inside out. The kettlebell achieves this as it has an offset centre of gravity. You will become truly strong and balanced, not bulky, and reduce your risk of injury.

The ‘classic’ kettlebell exercises are dynamic and have a cardio effect – in fact, with a kettlebell in your possession, you will never need to use another piece of cardio equipment again!

Any dumbbell exercise you can do with a kettlebell – some exercises that feel awkward with a dumbbell feel much more comfortable with a kettlebell (so you can perform them more effectively) and others are more challenging with a kettlebell (so you get much better results).

There are so many exercises and methods of training available that you can’t possibly get bored – this means motivation to exercise is no longer an issue. The workouts are fun and varied, so you will be looking forward to your next workout, not dreading it.

You can exercise at home – you only need one kettlebell to get started and although you will probably want a collection you can adapt exercises to make them harder without having to increase the size of the kettlebell.

This means you no longer have to pay gym membership or waste time driving to the gym, or waiting in the gym for equipment to become available.

The dynamic kettlebell exercises are perfect for tightening the classic trouble spot – your butt! The exercises, such as the swing and snatch, require explosive power in the hips and therefore emphasise all the neglected muscles of the back of your body, shaping things up that you thought were beyond repair. Even cellulite will be reduced.

You will get flexibility, balance, strength, endurance and co-ordination, as well as a hot body!

What’s So Good About Kettlebells, Anyway?

This is what I asked myself for quite a long time before I ‘saw the light’! I was based in a gym and saw one of the other trainers using kettlebells with his clients and to be perfectly honest I thought it was all a bit of hype. The exercises looked dangerous and the clients were all getting bruised! I was sceptical at best…

Even when I finally got him to give me a ‘taster’ session I wasn’t completely convinced, I had a decent enough workout but just didn’t get what the big deal was.

I can’t even remember what sparked the mental shift from cynic to evangelist. One minute I’m happy with my dumbbells, the next I’m raving to all who would listen about a shiny round chunk of iron!

I bought a few DVDs and a couple of kettlebells and the addiction came pretty quick – the sheer versatility of the kettlebell intrigued me. I always thought ‘anything you can do with a kettlebell you can do with a dumbbell’ but how wrong I was!

The shape of the kettlebell and the way the weight is held means that performing what would be a simple dumbbell exercise becomes a whole new experience as there is an additional stability factor to consider.

The fact that the bell is designed to be swung is what really makes it stand out from the crowd, though. As soon as you add in the classic kettlebell exercises, like the swing and the snatch, the power of the kettlebell to transform your body and workouts becomes clear. You can get a killer cardio workout, while loading all your ‘behind’ muscles (back, butt, hamstrings…) that are usually underworked in most people. The era of the cross trainer was clearly over – cardio was just never going to be the same again…

Any exercise you can do with a dumbbell you can do with a kettlebell, sometimes feeling more comfortable and sometimes being a lot harder. You can use your kettlebell as a piece of cardio equipment or as an extreme strength tool. You can use a kettlebell to increase mobility and stability and even rehabilitate.

And they look so good, all in a line in the garage, smugly reminding you that you never need to pay gym membership again!

If you are feeling a bit ‘worse for wear’ after a weekend that was heavy on the calories and light on the exercise then make sure you remember this feeling – and try to invoke the memory next weekend! You don’t need to deprive yourself to enjoy a weekend – you just need to improve your choices. Use this feeling to refocus and make sure you get straight back on track with clean eating and good quality exercise.

But this is of course another classic scenario – why are gyms so busy on Monday and Tuesday? 5 days of hard work and good nutrition will likely mean you feel great again by Friday, or at the very least you feel like you have ‘earnt’ some let up. But do you really want to start the whole cycle again? Or do you want to actually get the results you deserve due to all the hard work you are putting in all week? A ‘treat’ meal is usually a good idea, but a ‘cheat weekend’ will just destroy your results.

It is far better to have strategies and habits that come into action regardless of the situation – if you have given up wheat then don’t make an exception for the weekend. You’ll feel great for sticking to your goal behaviour and can still indulge on other things – but ones that won’t take you off the plan. It is a good idea to focus on a few small changes at a time, so give yourself a 6 week time frame and write down a few goals – specific behaviours you will stick to for 6 weeks no matter what, even at the weekend or at parties! Ultimately you will get quickest results by changing more but the really important thing is to build habits that you will stick to for good, and when you have done something regularly for 6 weeks it has had a good chance to embed itself in your life and become second nature.

I like to encourage people to use these 6 week chunks of time and keep the goals rolling – some 6 week chunks will be really strict to get through a plateau or boost results for a specific event and others will be more relaxed, but still ‘no excuses’. The little things really do add up – in whichever direction. So make the savings where you can and watch the results follow!

If you start a fat loss plan understanding that it will be hard, you are much closer to success. So many people start off a plan feeling really motivated and ready to get stuck in. Many people I deal with are excited at first, as they think of the end result. But unless you have acknowledged that it won’t be plain sailing, you will hit the first obstacle or hurdle and struggle to overcome it. It is at this point that those who haven’t thought it all through become despondent and demotivated. They weren’t prepared for the regular, ongoing work that was required, and they certainly weren’t prepared to have to make the odd sacrifice or compromise – which is of course essential in order to reverse the situation your current habits have created.

The first step is to set clear goals before you start and then drill down into those goals and plan what you need to do in order to achieve them. At this stage, you can identify potential challenges and come up with clever strategies to overcome them. For example you might have a friend’s birthday to attend where everyone else will be drinking alcohol. If you think it will be too hard to ‘just say no’ when you are there, you can plan to be the designated driver – so you can’t say ‘yes’!

Keep in mind the mantra: ‘it’s simple but it’s not easy’. You are bound to face these obstacles and challenges. Some of these you will navigate easily, others will be harder to overcome. Being prepared and ready for some hard work is really important.

You should also remind yourself that the reward is greater when a challenge is harder, so the obstacles you face now are what will make success seem all the sweeter when you achieve it. When you have lost the fat and are looking great, you will tell everyone how you managed it despite your challenges, so rather than dwelling on them and using them as excuses, let them make your eventual success even more impressive!

Knowing that it is hard means you are likely to be able to be a little more forgiving, though, too. When you think you are failing at something you have been told is easy, you will feel like a failure. Remind yourself that fat loss is hard but that one slip-up really won’t affect your success as much as getting demotivated and giving up altogether will.

Be prepared to forgive yourself when you don’t meet your own expectations, and quickly jump back on and get back on track. The common ‘all or nothing’ mentality that comes from a need to be 100% perfect is counter-productive. Allow yourself some slack and realise that staying on track consistently 80% of the time is far more successful than being 100% perfect for a week only.

Keep your strategies simple (eat clean, eat less, exercise more) but be prepared for some hard work along the way!

1lb of muscle burns 30-50 calories per day, while 1lb of fat only burns about 9 calories per day. The more muscle your body contains the more calories you burn each day. This is one of the reasons that resistance training is such a vital part of any successful fat-loss programme – it supercharges your metabolism both in the short term (by making the muscles you already have burn even more calories) and in the long term (by increasing the amount of muscle you have).

Long duration cardio, on the other hand, can actually reduce your muscle tissue and therefore reduces your metabolism! We need to think about the bigger picture when we exercise (and when we eat). It’s not about what happens at that one moment that counts, but how we are becoming fat-burning machines!

Steady, slow, long duration cardio only burns calories while you are doing it, whereas resistance training causes you to burn calories for hours after the session has finished(this is called EPOC: Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption) and is the ‘magic’ behind resistance-based training methods, as well as interval training. As you become more efficient at the steady cardio, you will burn fewer calories, too, so you can easily think you are burning more than you actually are.

Resistance training, correctly applied, will ensure you have a balanced, strong and functional body. Repetitive cardio activities can actually worsen or create imbalances, so if you are a regular runner / cyclist etc. you need resistance training to balance everything out!

Resistance training has been called ‘the fountain of youth’ – and it really is. A recent study showed that when subjects engaged in resistance training their strength increased by over 20% and their genes literally ‘reverted back’ to the same markers as ‘younger’ genes after only six months! Also, when the older folks in the study began, they were almost 60% weaker than the younger members of the study. In just six months, they were only 38% weaker.

For maximum effect, perform compound exercises that use the largest muscles and more than one muscle group at a time (squats, deadlifts, lunges, rows, push ups and pull ups). This works your body as a unit which is more functional than isolating specific muscles, and also means you burn more calories in less time!

You can’t ‘spot reduce’ fat – no amount of crunches will show the 6 pack beneath the flab – so the more of your body you work, the more fat you burn all over: the real secret to revealing those abs!

‘I want to lose weight’ is a common phrase, but the reality is, we need to lose body fat and preserve our precious lean body mass (LBM – consisting of muscle, bone, blood etc.). Muscle burns calories for a start – the more muscle we have the more calories we require to do nothing! If you add muscle and lose body fat, the scales may not budge quite as much as you might have expected, but you will look thinner, as well as more fit and toned!

Many ‘weight loss’ plans do result in significant muscle loss – if you severely restrict calories, consume insufficient protein and do a lot of steady cardio you may lose weight on the scales, but you will also be losing muscle. This is a major factor in regaining lost weight after a ‘diet’ – you have lowered your daily calorie requirements quite significantly, so what was once seen as a maintenance intake will now cause weight gain. The ‘yo-yo’ effect can be explained by this happening on a regular basis – every time you diet you lose more and more of the muscle that you need to keep your weight off in the long run! This is exacerbated by the fact that we lose muscle mass throughout adulthood unless we take action (especially resistance training) to keep it!

There are several methods to find out your body fat percentage, including skin fold tests with calipers, electrical impedance tests and the highly accurate, but highly impractical, hydrostatic (underwater) weighing method.

My personal favourite method that you can easily do at home is to use a software programme, where you take body measurements and plug them in to a form that calculates your body fat – you can find links to these by searching Google or through the links page of my website. They are usually accurate to between 1-3% and are a very simple way of testing.

Using this information, you can set yourself realistic fat loss targets based on the amount of fat you have to lose (rather than a random number you think might be nice to see on the scales!), and you can monitor your progress over time.