How long does it take to get fit and healthy?

Is there a straight road to fitness and health?

To most people’s frustration when they ask how long will it take? I give the answer, it depends. We all know there are 6-week transformation programs out there that should get you fit and healthy. Promising to give you the body you want but do they work? For some, they might work. How long can they sustain the training and the food habits that were required to get there? For some it can take months/years to get to where you want to be. I’m not only talking about how your body looks like but the mindset you have towards exercise, food lifestyle etc.

To develop the right tools to handle a stressful situation and not resort to inactivity and poor dietary choices can take time to develop. If someone has lost weight in a short period of time but after 2 years they are back to where they started, has it worked or are they still in the process of getting fit and healthy? Life happens and that’s why the time it takes to get fit and healthy depends on the person.

What obstacles do people come across?

The list is endless but here are some very common examples.

Injuries: My first and foremost responsibility as a personal trainer is to make sure my clients are training in a sensible way. Make sure to minimise the risk of injury, adjusting their training plan to keep old injuries at bay.

• Work, It’s extremely common that we work so much that there are not enough hours in the day to exercise. For example, Lets say we leave the house at 7 am and getting back at 7 pm. Then we ideally want to get 8hrs of sleep and it doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

• Overwhelmed/motivation, After the first couple of weeks when the initial excitement has worn off we can struggle to keep up. My experience is that a significant amount of people tend to drop the ball at this point. Only because it was much too soon.

• Sickness, The number of times I’ve started with a client and the first thing we do is to but the breaks on. Because they have gotten sick with in 2 weeks. I hear how frustrated they get when they have been good to go and are more than ready. In general, it might take 1-2 weeks to get back into full swing again. That feels like a long time for most of us.

What does it mean to be fit and healthy?

There is a difference between being fit and being fit and healthy, you can be fit but not necessarily healthy. To be really fit can have a price and take a toll on your overall health.  I would say being healthy is a balance between exercise/physical activity, self-care, work/life balance, stress levels, food intake and a healthy relationship with food. To strike this balance is no easy task!