April Update!

Hey guys,
Literally have not posted since December last year which is really naughty of me! I miss writing on this blog and feeling motivated to do so. The last six months have been pretty hectic and I have managed to regain all of my weight (plus a hell of a lot of muscle) which is really quite frustrating. Although I know I've made serious strength gains, I have gained fat and it's due to being at university (college for Americans).
Being at college and trying to have a life, keep up with classes and study, and keep the weight off at the same time is fucking hard, I'm not going to lie. This time last year I was at my lowest weight because I never went out to had a good time and was able to go to the gym for 2/3 hours a day and cook proper food. That is definitely not the case this year.
I've been going out at least twice a week and the next day, the hangover day, bad food choices tend to be made instead of beneficial ones and this has been a vicious cycle for me. It's been so so so amazing to meet so many wonderful people but it's time to get my head back in the game, I'm sick of none of my clothes fitting me anymore.
I'm on a four day detox at the moment which is to cleanse my body of all the shit I've been eating over the past couple of weeks specifically (my friend's 21st, many other events and being on holiday) and then I will go back to sensible amounts of exercise and clean eating 90% of the time.
There is a part of me that wants to go back to my old routine of countless hours of exercise and eating way less than I worked off because I know it works for me but I know that's not sustainable with moving to live in France in September so I want to try something a little more sensible and lift weights 4x a week with cardio in between and mostly clean eating!
Hopefully this is the beginning of something great for me, the beginning of me feeling the best I've ever felt because at the moment I feel like I'm back to square one. I want to feel comfortable in my skin in a bikini in a few months and I want to be healthy and happy.
I know I can do this and I am going to.

Jenny xx

Update on life and weight! 5th December 2013

Hi guys,
Updated you a little bit earlier via Instagram on everything but wanted to a bigger one here. As I posted earlier, this week I've been allowing myself to lie in a bit longer because I have exams next week but I feel pretty shit about it! Slacking on the workouts and exam work and focusing on social life right now making me feel a bit crap. I have soooo many nights out coming up it's actually unreal and I'm glad because this time last year I had none and was so unhappy but I'm trying to stay positive. I'm still staying healthy eating wise just wish I had time to fit everything in!!!
I definitely feel like my main focus is my health but right now I'm enjoying earning some money and going out with friends, even if that means having a beer or two a few nights a week, if I still eat clean and workout when I can I know I'll be fine.

The main focus of this blog is to tell you my weight! I did a post after my holiday in America about wanting to be 139lbs by Christmas. I did a whole post on the fact that I was the same weight I was when I started my fitness journey but I still look a hell of a lot different. Anyways, I know that some of that extra weight was fat, especially because I'd just been on holiday. So, I weighed myself when I went home on the 28th of November and I'm done 5.8lbs from my holiday!! I know this is a bad picture but I'm almost half way to my goal for Christmas already.
In just two weeks, of keeping up my cardio (haven't had time to do my weight training because of exams and I knew cardio was my main focus) and keeping it clean in the kitchen I've managed to lose 5lbs! Obviously, it just shows that this is mainly water weight and extra fat I was holding from my holiday but it just goes to show what hard work can do.
Up to Christmas is always a hard time because there's lots of nights out and exams and all that but I'm going to try my HARDEST to get to the 139lbs I want to be. I have 20 days so every day counts. And hopefully, on Christmas day I can relax about what I eat/drink and enjoy my Christmas and get right back to it because I know how badly I want to lose the extra fat from my holidays!
Anyway, thanks for reading again and just wanted to update you guys on that :) I'm very happy with what I've been doing and how hard I've been working.

How do I even start?

Hi guys,
So I got a question from one of my followers that basically asked me to make her a workout regime as she didn't really know what she should be doing for cardio and weight lifting. She does not have access to any classes at her gym but has access to a gym so here was my response. Thought this might help any others in the same situation :)

Hi :) thanks for trusting me with it!

Well I presume you are trying to lose weight so I suppose I'll just take it from there.

First of all, as you probably know, cardio is the way to lose weight. A lot of research has been done on fasted cardio which is the only cardio I do now. Dunno if you know what that is but basically when you wake up, work out (literally anything, running, elliptical or bike - I really like doing the bike for 30 minutes in the morning) but don't eat before hand. Literally make it the first thing you do in the morning. Also don't push it too hard in the morning, obviously you need to be sweating but not to the point where you get sick. I did a whole blog post on fasted morning cardio and it's one of the things I swear by!!

Another thing with cardio might be setting yourself a goal. For example, train to run a 10k (not necessarily a race, just by yourself) by the end of the year, which might encourage you to go out for runs. If you don't have a goal, you really have no real reason to push yourself!

Next, weight lifting. There are so many beginner articles and I live from bodybuilding.com haha, it's where I took my first strength training regime from. For you, you can do a two or three day split. With the two day, it's split into upper and lower body day and is more cardio based, obviously you're working a hell of a lot of muscles on the upper body day haha.

I prefer to do a three day split (did a two day for a couple of months and didn't see strength gains/results as much as I would've liked). There are soooooooo many options so I'm not even going to give you a set regime. Sometimes I even go to the gym with my base exercises (on my blog I've posted tons on this, link is in my bio of my instagram btw haha) and then I just end up googling back exercises for example and just do some extra sets! Then some days I only do like three different exercises but tons of sets on each. There is honestly such a wide variety of stuff you can do I cannot give you a set regime.

To start, have a look at this: http://muscleandbrawn.com/3-day-beginner-muscle-gaining-workout/

I think starting a new weight lifting regime is daunting because when you go in to the gym, you don't really know where everything is and you're kind of walking around like a headless chicken. But half the battle is starting. You HAVE to start somewhere to get somewhere!!!! so please don't be scared to do it, just fricking do it ;)

Also, I think that 80% of losing weight is through your diet. If 80% was exercise, I'd be a fitness model hahaha so keep that in mind. I post literally everything I eat and so do tons of other instagrams so there's tons of information! I don't have a completely strict diet because I see this as a lifestyle and I need to bear in mind that this is a long-term thing and not push myself to a breaking point when I binge. But I base my diet around high protein/high fats and fill the rest with carbs. I find I'm much fuller on energy and just generally feel healthier when I eat less carbs! I have the worst body type for storing fat though so my body can't really tolerate carbs.

I would just take this as a basis for moving forward but not y'know swear by it. At least once a day, I find myself googling something/reading a book/reading an article about the science behind it all and my knowledge has grown so much over the past two years. What you just need to do is gradually educate yourself and learn what works best for your body. It does take time but you should think of changing your lifestyle instead of trying to lose weight for the short term. I made that mistake and lost all the weight I wanted to, and found I put it back on when I actually started eating normally because I was eating so little. So please learn from my mistakes, do not starve yourself. It is true that as soon as you go back to just normal eating, I never went crazy but I still put the weight back on!

Sorry if this is a bit all over the place, just trying to get as much information for you as I can in :) keep reading articles etc and get a good idea of what might work, try it and if it doesn't, try something else.

With your limitations on cardio classes etc I would do more outside activities like running/long walks (I'm doing a 52 mile walk next year which should help the fat shed off hahah!!) and make sure to SET YOURSELF GOALS. It's so important to do that otherwise you don't have a clear idea of what you actually want from what you're doing.

I hope you don't mind me putting this on my blog.

Hopefully this helped,

xxx

My Weight.

Hi guys,

I wanted to make a blog post because I weighed myself for the first time in a long time today. The above two pictures are taken two years apart and there is no weight difference.

In February 2013, I reached my goal weight and surpassed this and got down to about 120lbs. At this point, I was doing about two hours of cardio a day and eating around 1300 calories - basically a lot of carbs and no protein. Then, when I moved home for summer, I started doing less cardio and more weight lifting and eating more and I have put on the weight that I lost.

I am genuinely okay with this. I sometimes look back at old photos and think about how skinny I was but I remember being unhappy with my body even at that point and I wasn't content. There is definitely a large difference between the two pictures despite the fact I weigh the same, however I have definitely gained some fatty weight.

I've just come back from a ten day holiday in New York and despite eating clean 60% of the time and working out, I definitely had some amazing cheats so I reckon I'm holding 3-4lbs of water weight that I can get rid of over the next couple of weeks and I have definitely gained some muscle. I reckon over the two years I've gained AT LEAST 10lbs of muscle, so therefore only a small part of it is fat gain. I suppose you could call it a badly designed bulk ;)

Despite this, I just wanted to show that the scales do not entirely matter. I am much much healthier and fitter than I was in the first picture despite being the same weight.

I am happy with my body right now but I definitely want to lose some of this extra fat I'm holding from my holiday and things so my goal for Christmas is to be 139lbs, I don't want to lose any muscle that I've gained and I don't want to lose that much weight, just this extra fluff hehe.

I just wanted to be honest with you guys and admit that I have gained weight over the summer and I am not going to be as skinny as I was before. There is no way I am going back to eating less than 1500 calories again a day, it's not healthy for me and I don't need to be super skinny to be happy. I want to be strong and fit and I'd rather be these two than be skinny and be low on energy all the time because I don't eat enough.

I'm happy and I hope this helps anyone who is feeling down about their weight. Just remember that every single decision you make towards a healthy life, for example ordering a salad when eating out, it all helps. Every little thing you do does something and remember that :)

Cardio Conditioning Circuit 2!

Hi guys,

Was going to do the same circuit I've already posted about but decided to switch it up a little bit so here is the workout I done today. Do each set three times. For the last set on the second set of exercises, I did each exercise for 20 seconds with no break between each exercise as a kind of 'burnout' and it certainly burned me out. I'm dead. 

17th October HIIT:

Warm up:

5 minute bike

40 seconds work, 20 seconds rest

Set 1:

1. Lunge jumps

2. Bicep curls with overhead press with 6kg dumbbells

3. Squat press with log

4. Hot hands

5. Mountain climbers

Set 2:

1. Box jumps

2. Press ups

3. Squat jumps with medicine ball

4. Plank to push up

5. Mountain climbers

Want to get 'toned'? Want to start weight lifting but don't know where to start?

Hi guys,
So I get comments quite often from people asking how to even begin weight training, because there is so much information out there, it can be really, really daunting. So, I thought I'd take the time to just give you some basic tips on how to get started.
How I got interested in 'weight lifting' was through the Les Mills Body Pump class. If you're not sure what Les Mills is, it's basically a company who offer a variety of different cardio/weights/abs classes. Google it to check if your nearby gym has it, I love the cardio classes for my morning cardio!
The reason why I put weight lifting in the speech marks is because it's not really weight training, it focuses on high reps and low weights which I think was a really good way for me to start.
The workout incorporates all the basic (compound) movements that are really important when starting weight training; deadlifts, squats, rows, presses etc. I definitely feel like Body Pump helped improve my form and has definitely helped me to start weight training.
I then was interested in it as I liked the feeling of getting stronger and adding extra weight so I looked it up myself and basically just googled a beginner's weight training schedule and that was me sorted for a while. It's good to start with basic exercises so you can get your form correct and properly work your muscles out.
I've found one on bodybuilding.com which is really simple and I think would be a great place to start (also I love bodybuilding.com, I'm constantly reading their articles);
http://www.muscleandstrength.com/workouts/3day-beginners-workout.html
I think 3 days would be enough so that you can fit it in to your schedule and get used to weight lifting every week.

The key things you HAVE to remember when starting weight training:
1. You have to work out each body part once a week, you can't skip one of the days and expect to get proper results.
2. In order to get the results you want (more toned and lean) you have to push yourself hard. If you're doing a weight that you can go higher than 12 reps on, your weight is too low!!
3. You need to have proper nutrition to support your weight training. You can't expect to lift weights, eat 1200 calories and do cardio every day to see results. When you're weight lifting, you need to give your body enough rest from cardio and eat a good amount of calories a day (this depends on your personal goals etc hence why I am not giving a number).
4. You need to be consistent. You can't do it for a few weeks and then stop and expect to see results.
5. As mentioned in a previous point, remember to REST. Your body can be overtrained and this severely effects strength gains. If you want to build strength, you need to go in to every workout with a ton of energy and push yourself to the limit.

Okay, hopefully these tips have helped you understand about how to get in to weight training a little more. You should know the masses and masses of benefits of weight training by now (and if you don't, google it) and women, noooooooooooo it will not make you bulky!!! How many times do people have to tell you that weight training will help you get your ideal body, it is practically impossible to get as big as men due to testosterone levels and such sciency things.
One last thing, your diet needs to be fresh and clean, lots of healthy proteins and good fats in order for you to see results. You cannot eat a McDonald's after your workout claiming it has lots of protein.

Now get to it!!

Conditioning Cardio Circuit

Hi guys,
Want to switch it up from just running on a treadmill? This cardio circuit absolutely killed me today so I thought I'd share since you're always asking for what I do for cardio. I just found a spot in the gym, gathered all the things I needed and started! It does involve a lot of equipment you'd only probably get in the gym so it's not really an at-home workout. If your gym doesn't have one of the items, simply substitute the exercise that uses it for another i.e. if you don't have a medecine ball, hold a kettle bell or dumbbells.

Warm-up, two sets each with five exercises.
30 seconds on exercise
10 seconds rest
Do each set 3 times
Works out at around a half hour workout :)

Things you will need:
- dumbbells (I used 6kg)
- medecine ball (I used 8kg)
- 8kg log (if your gym doesn't have this, you can use dumbbells)
- a box of some sort (the one I used was about half a metre tall)
- 8kg kettlebell

Warm up:
5 minutes on the bike, go fast and hard and you should be sweating by the end of the warm up.

Set 1:
1. Push-ups (I managed to do 5 full ones before I had to go on my knees hehe)
2. Crunch stand-ups (basically do a crunch, and then stand up, then lie back down)
3. Box steps with 8kg medecine ball
4. Squat and press with 8kg log
5. Mountain climbers
**Remember to do this three times before moving on to the next set of exercises**
Also by the end of the first time through this, I was sweating!


Set 2:
1. Squat jumps with 8kg medecine ball
2. Curl press with 6kg dumbbells (basically do a bicep curl, then an overhead shoulder press, then squat and then do it again! Really good and works lots of muscles. Thanks ShayCarl!)
3. Lunges holding dumbbells
4. Kettlebell swings
5. Crunches (sit fully up, none of your pussy crunches haha)

So hope you enjoy. As I said at the beginning, if you find you don't know one of these exercises, simply switch it for another one. If you're doing this, try to switch it for an exercise that also works that part of the body. For example, not much point in switching crunches for more squats because the point is you work out your whole body!

LOVE YOU xoxo