Sugar Sugar Sugar!!!! (General Fitness Tips)

Member Name: leebo87

Product:	General Fitness Tips
Date:	12/02/08 (75 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Keeps your bodies working-well, makes you feel and look better

Disadvantages: None

Hello everyone, I wanted to post this review to share my experiences with exercising and trying to eat as healthy as possible and tell you about some of the results I have achieved.

Before I start I guess I should give you a little background. I'm 21 and as far back as I can remember I've always been fairly active. Since I could kick I played football twice a week until I was 18, when sadly I got a bit bored of it and gave it up. This was probably about the time I got a little more interested in weights and working-out.

Now don't get me wrong I'm no fitness fanatic and usually go through spells of 'gotta keep fit' to spells of 'if I ate six fruit flavoured doughnuts in an hour than that has to count as one of my five-a-day'. So I go through phases I think like everybody does.

At the moment I'm going though a keep fit phase and as part of that I regularly exercise and I'm also trying to cut out as much sugar as I can. The reason for this is that it suddenly occurred to me as I was wolfing down a big bowl of ice-cream after my evening meal that I often started craving something sweat after every meal.

This I thought could not be good. So as any good 'wanna-be hypochondriac' would do I looked it up on the old webby web. Turn out that I could be addicted to sugar. Damn. And obviously a sugar addiction meant a lot of sugar in my diet that couldn't be a good thing at all. So I started to think back over my life and my diet and tried remember a time where a sugary snack wouldn't be a companion at some point. I couldn't recollect a single time. Seems me and sugar had been close friends since before I could say the word. So as of two weeks ago I am trying to cut out as much sugar in my diet as possible.

You wouldn't believe how hard this is though. And I don't mean in a will-power kind of way, I mean in an 'everything contains sugar kind of way!!'. Seriously you wouldn't believe the amount of sugar that gets added to or is present in our foods. For instance I buy Hovis Wholemeal brown bread...each slice apparently contains 1-2% of your daily sugar allowance. Another example, Kellogs Rice Crispies, after Rice the next main ingredient is sugar and then the one after that is something like 'glucose-fructose' or something which as I understand it is basically sugar with a longer name.

But I am happy to say I haven't had a single sugary snack for two weeks now, and coupled with an exercise regime that I've been following for about 4 weeks I'm really starting to notice the difference. I no longer crave something sweet after a meal, and I'm really shedding what I like to call the 'chritmas-podge' and toning up my abs.

I've had very intense weight training regimes in the past with usually quite a sloppy diet and have never been able to achieve that all to distant 6-pack. But at the moment I'm really starting to notice the muscles coming through. I'm going to attribute this to the no sugary snack rule. I really think its working. I'm also getting in a lot of water, usually at least 6 500ml bottles a day which I quite easy. Here's a tip you might find useful. Buy a multi-pack of say 6x500ml bottles of water, and when they are empty take them into work and fill them up at the water cooler. Job done.
They come especially in handy if you are working-out as they are easy to hold and wont spill everywhere! :p Now to my workout regime.

Per session I do the following:

1 Set = 25 straight sit-ups, 26 side-to-side sit-ups, 25 leg raises, (then onto the weights) 30 bicep curls, 10 shoulder presses and 10 tricep curls.

I do five sets a night, which usually takes me about 30-40mins.

On top of this I have a little workout on the multi-gym we have in the garage, which usually consists of about 10-20mins on the stepping machine, 80 lat presses (in sets of 20/2) and 50 straight leg raises in groups of 25 and 50 side-to-side leg raises in groups of 25.

Then I'm done and hit the shower! :D

All in all it usually takes around about an hour.

I'm an advocate of not pushing yourself too hard at first. I find when I do this I usually get tired of it in a short time and really bored. So I think it is best to start slow and gradually build it up. I also like to give myself a days rest after every two sessions. I was talking to a body-building friend of mine recently and was asking him about weights and telling him that often after weight training I don't t find I have as much stamina in my muscles as I would when I didn't weight-lift. (Obviously I could lift more, but it wasn't soon before my muscles would ache). He told me this was because I wasn't giving my muscles time to recover. Since I've started giving them a rest I've found the stamina in my muscles increased a lot. So it's not all about work :D

Any who's I'm gunna call it a day here as I think I've pretty much covered how I feel about it and what I do. If you have any questions please feel free to comment etc and I'll be sure to get back to ASAP.

Just one quick thing before I go though, I would plead to all who read to try and cut out sugar as an experiment even just for a week and see if they notice a difference. Remember there is no recommended daily amount of sugar, as our bodies don't need it nutritionally!!

Any ways thank you for taking the time to read, and I wish you the best of health for 2008 and beyond.

Lee Billinghurst

Summary: A healthy diet and an exercise regime is a must if you want to look your best! :D