Sweet Enough Already - Why I'm Cutting My Sugar Intake

Last week I posted about my exercise goals. I had intended to follow it up fairly quickly with a post on what I am aiming for in terms of healthy eating but work got the better of me during the week and I'm only getting around to this post now!

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A couple of days before I started this blog, I watched a documentary on Netflix called "Fed Up". Believe me when I say that this documentary changed my life! Now, I have been known to exaggerate from time to time, but this is nothing short of the truth! Fed Up is a documentary on the obesity problem in the US, specifically among young children. They begin by comparing the level of obesity in American children today (1 in 5) to 40 years ago (1 in 20). The number of cases of type 2 diabetes in children in the US today (almost 60,000) was also compared to 40 years ago (0). They also showed a surprising link between the rise in the number of people joining gyms and the number of obese people. Surely if one goes up, the other must go down? This is slightly reminiscent of my own problems with losing weight in the past, that I spoke about in my first blog post - I was eating what I perceived to be healthy food and exercising so why wasn't I seeing a change? With people becoming increasingly interested in losing weight in the 70's and 80's, companies began to introduce more and more "low-fat" and "zero-calorie" products to the market. But, if you remove the fat from food you're also removing the flavour, and companies compensated for this by adding more sugar. 

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My exercise goals

So this week is going to be my first official week on my journey to a healthier and happier me (hopefully this new and improved me will also have a nice ass :D). In this post, I want to talk a little bit about the type of fitness routine that I've finally decided to take up now, that I've gotten rid of the misconceptions I had when I first started into an exercise regime. I will be posting details of the actual workouts I do, but this post is about my reasoning behind the types of exercises (cardio, weights and yoga) I will be doing.

Having the time and motivation for an effective fitness routine has always been a problem for me. This time around, I have the advantage of knowing where I fell down each time I gave up before. Working out for me was mostly based on running for as long and as far as I could; this always seemed to me to be the most important exercise as I wanted to lose weight. I couldn't have been more wrong! This was never going to work for me. I was getting bored while running and there was nothing to distract from how out of breath I was, so I would eventually end up walking. A steady state run is great for building endurance but will use a relatively small amount of energy only while you are running. I would have needed to be running for at least an hour to burn a significant amount of energy. It is important to include cardiovascular exercises in your exercise plan (whether that be running, cycling, rowing machine, dancing etc.), as cardio improves lung and heart function, does wonders for your mood and, of course, aids in weight loss. However, if you are interested in weight loss, high intensity intervals have been shown to be an effective workout for fat loss. This was seriously appealing to me as switching from high to low intensity during my run would mean better results and less time running! My idea is to try to be efficient and balanced with my run, so I will be mixing up my runs by adding intervals of lower and higher intensities. I'm hoping it will help to get more out of my workout and also stop me from getting bored!

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