Waist train, lose gains

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend who told me she has bought a ‘waist trainer’. To those of you that don’t know what this is, it’s essentially a corset which is supposed to serve the purpose of giving you a smaller waist. If you remember Keira Knightly in Pirates of the Caribbean (I believe it was the first one) fainting due to her excessively tightly laced top, you have the right idea. Khloe Kardashian recently uploaded an Instagram of herself wearing her waist trainer, an idea she apparently got from the seriously bizarre Blac Chyna (Tyga’s baby momma aka the only woman with a faker ass than Nicki Minaj).

 

 

It is becoming increasingly unavoidable to check your social media site of choice whether that be Pintrest, Twitter or Instagram without multiple accounts or photos coming up of girls who look like they are straight up from a Drake video. Everyone is obsessed with asses and getting a curvy, hourglass figure, with butts bigger than planets and waists tinier than my little sisters wrists. The situation is fuelled further by image obsessed celebrities, particularly creepy rappers who appear to be solely motivated by women’s bottoms. (Jason Derulo is great, but ‘you know what to do with that BIG FAT BUTT? REALLY JASON?)  The world has gone curve crazy.

 

So when a friend of mine – who already has a body that makes Kim Ks look bad – told me that she had bought a ‘waist trainer’ corset, I was SO BAFFLED. ‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ I asked.

 

 ‘Kind of, I had to take it off the other night because it was so uncomfortable’, she replied. ‘It kind of feels like you can’t breathe’.

 

After she confirmed my suspicions, I decided to check out the hype further.

 

I literally cannot get my head around why anyone would do this to their body, if they had any idea of what it does to you. Corsets went out of fashion for a reason – they can literally kill you!

 

A waist trainer works something like this: crushing your ribcage and stomach slowly and rather uncomfortably so that your appetite and actual bones shrink down a few sizes. It’s so unnatural and wrong! If you were meant to have a tiny waist, you would have been born with a tiny waist. We have got to stop aspiring to be like these women who have bodies that are totally different to ours! Know your own body type and own it! And celebrities who know they have a huge influence on younger girls and their body image should be fucking ashamed to promote something which is so bad for you all in the name of vanity. They could be promoting healthy eating and working out, which would be a much more sensible message to put out there for young women and girls. But they’d much rather get their ten percent and instead show off a totally unhealthy and damaging piece of equipment all over the web, which effectively promotes laziness and not much else.

 

  – THIS IS SO BIZARRE 

What is the problem with going to the gym and putting in some work to reach your goals, please explain to me!! Shame on you, Khloe Kardashian! First it was workout rants and squat photos, which is all very well and good, but now this? Whyyyyyy!!

 

Much of me thinks this is part of a much wider issue which many people (particularly escorts on Instagram….bitch you ain’t no model….we know you’re selling pussy stop lying) seem to be affected by, which is basically laziness, aka paying for multiple surgery operations to make it look like they workout a fuckload but really don’t. It’s sad! Because if you do that, you’ll never actually get any of the benefits that you should from exercising, such as a stronger body, a happier and healthier mind, stress relief…the list goes on.

 

Also let’s be honest, does anyone want to look like Blac Chyna (or whatever she is called) when they’re 80? Unless you’re going to go into a weird kind of porn industry, I would vote no.

 There are plenty of examples of women who (literally) work their asses off to have small waists and amazing butts. These are the women to aspire to for this kind of training! My favourite people to follow on Instagram for these tips are:

@lyzabethlopez (she created @hourglassworkout and honestly her bod is just the best thing ever

@alexandrabring

@michellelewin

Also, if you get a chance, check out Brett Contreras, who has a page on Facebook, and a whole book on how to build your body and butt up, which I bought, and my ass is thankful!

 If waist trainers and corsets were beneficial to work out with, don’t you think you might have seen them in the gym or at sweaty betty? I think there’s kind of a reason they’re only sold on dodgy internet sites halfway across the world…

I think curves are amazing…I just don’t think they’re worth crushing your body to gain.

 

 

 

 

 

Why I workout: My fitness journey

If there’s a month in which people decide they have to get their shit together, it’s January. I guess, in the most part, this is due to gluttonous Christmas binging – which we are all more than partial to – but I think it also has a lot to do with the fact that having a date (January 1st, in this case) in which you know you have to start something allows that idea to become a goal you might actually commit yourself to. Therefore, I have decided to write one of January’s latest blogs about (cringe) my ‘fitness journey’.

If you know me, you will probably have been a victim of one of my many fitness rants. I am constantly told by my family how ‘boring’ and ‘obsessive’ I am with training and clean eating, but I will persist in lecturing everyone about their bad habits and failing metabolisms until I am blue in the face. In my opinion, ‘obsessed’ is a word lazy people use to describe the dedicated (suck it, mum!) and in my defense, I’m only trying to help a brother out – literally. Sorry I’m not sorry, bitches!

If I have children, particularly girls, I will always encourage them to be active and fit. In a society in which we are constantly scrutinized for the way we look, it’s so easy for people – girls especially – to fall into a cycle of crash dieting, eating disorders, and have a negative body image. I used to be one of them – at 14, I barely ate a thing, believing this was the best thing to do to be skinny. Loads of my friends went on crazy diets, with their weight yo-yoing. There is a certain element of snobbery about people who work out a lot, because they’re deemed as ‘vain’, ‘obsessive’ ‘boring’…the list goes on….but whilst I don’t disagree I initially went to the gym for vanity, my training has become much more than that. Training literally saves my sanity. Whenever I feel stressed (which is quite a lot!) I train, I leave, I’m a different person. My health is so much better. I’m almost never ill, I have so much more energy, focus and drive. I’m more confident and happy. I eat more than I ever have before, and ironically I’m the slimmest I’ve ever been. I LOVE food, and I enjoy it 500 times more now. Especially on Fridays when I eat what I like!

 Green juices at 108 Marylebone, my go to juice bar..

One thing about our society which particularly annoys me is the term ‘real women’, which is usually applied in reference to ‘curvy’ or ‘bigger’ girls. Let me just clear something up: Skinny and athletic girls aren’t fucking imaginary! ALL women are REAL women.  I read an article recently about a shop which had installed ‘real women’ sized mannequins to make a statement (I assume it was meant to be positive) about our society. On the contrary, I thought this was a real shame as the mannequins were depicting ‘real’ women as overweight, and whilst I do not think being too ‘skinny’ is healthy and eating disorders are, of course, an increasing problem in our society, yet obesity seems to be becoming more and more accepted. If 60 percent of the country ate healthily and exercised weekly, I guarantee you the billions spent on the NHS on health related issues would drop dramatically. No wonder so many people get ill when so many of us consume so many chemicals, processed foods combined with unhealthy organs due to lack of exercise!

I was active from a young age with swimming and athletics, but after I hit puberty I didn’t like getting my hair wet and training on a Friday night was SO uncool, so from about 12 – 15 I didn’t really do that much. I used to enjoy hockey but I got banned from doing that (lets just say I get a bit too passionate sometimes and it resulted in someone getting injured), so sports were basically a no go for me for a few years. Once I hit 15 and my mum started poking my biscuit belly, I decided to join a gym to get super super sexy. Trust me, none of the teenage boys were gonna know what to do with themselves once I left that treadmill. There would be request for dates at Starbucks left right and centre. Except, whilst running for 20 minutes a day at 12kph made me sweat a bit, I was basically doing ZERO for my body. I went on the special K diet which was literally the worst thing ever as it toally clogged up my body and I looked GROSS!

I believe the way in which as a young age we learn about health and fitness in the UK is so misleading. The most important things I have been taught are the following:

 

Fat is GOOD. Sugar is BAD. (Especially if you’re a girl, fat is the best best best best thing ever. If you want your skin to glow, eat an avocado. If you want your stomach to grow, have a cereal bar).

‘5 a day’ shouldn’t mean you eat 5 pieces of fruit a day, it means vegetables. A lot of fruit (but not all) is super high in sugar and fructose which = sugar rush, energy drop, dash to the biscuit tin 20 mins later. The worst culprit is probably a banana. The fattest people I know are always the ones who think they are going to lose weight by eating loads of bananas.

 

Lifting weights (as a woman) makes you masculine?: ERRR! I lift weights – heavy ones – about 4 times a week. This is bullshit. As a woman, your body doesn’t produce enough testosterone to be bulky. Lifting weights is amazing for your hormones, and makes you burn fat better, which = being slimmer. YAYYY

Bread is good? NO! Bread sucks. Gluten and wheat make your digestive system slow and soak up all the rubbish in your body, making you feel sluggish and clogged. And fat. So no, your sandwich is not a healthy meal option. Unless its rye.

 

I first started working out ‘properly’ (by this I mean like a gym work out, aka ‘training’) about 18 months ago. I began a boxercise class at my gym, ran by Martin Bugaj (http://www.fitboxpersonaltraining.com) and I was OBSESSED with it. I went every Saturday, it was an amazing workout and I started noticing the difference it made the first day after I did a class (I was at boarding school and couldn’t do ballet for a week, that’s how sore my body was!). However, I was still going out about 4 nights a week and crawling home at 8am after a million vodka cokes. This became my life for the most of 2012. In December, I watched the victoria’s secret fashion show and nearly died – I NEEDED to look like one of these people. For Christmas, I asked for 15 training sessions with Martin, who is a body transformation coach and awesome personal trainer. These sessions were (and still are!) amazingly helpful to me as I needed someone to show me new exercises, keep me motivated and make sure my form was on point in order to not injure myself. I showed him a photo of Candice Swanpoel as my gymspiration photo (obvs) and the first thing he said to me was ‘Emily, if you want to look like that, you can’t drink’. Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit!

I wanted this enough, so I agreed. My first few sessions involved using different weights and exercises to build up my body’s strength before we started boxing and kickboxing. In between our sessions I would go to the gym basically everyday and repeat all of our exercises (I kid you not, I watched the Victoria’s secret show daily beforehand) and after a couple of months my body started really changing. After my block of sessions was over I immediately signed up for more (over a year later I’m still training with him) and he also fills me in on all the right stuff to be eating, supplements, etc, which is so important.

 

Although in the beginning of my exercise regime I was working out HELLA HARD, I wasn’t eating the right things, and therefore the results weren’t coming as quickly as I’d hoped. After cutting out gluten, trying to stay sugar free and making green juices, fish, and chicken my new best friends, I noticed a huge huge difference. (When I first started working out, I was just 64.5kgs at 5”9, and I am now 56.5kgs).

I am also pretty lucky to work out at a gym which has amazing classes which keep pushing me – mainly HIT training (high intensity). So my weekly schedule looks something like this:

One day with Martin at his studio, doing circuits and kickboxing (days vary)

Mondays leg day: 1 hour and a half of different weight exercises

Tuesday sprints: 30 mins of HIT (with a very sore behind)

Wednesday strength conditioning: Using weighted barbells and body weight exercises, alternating, 45 min

Thursday: HIT cycle 30 min, abs 20 min

Friday: Treadmill tabata protocol 15 mins OR Barry’s Bootcamp

 

It’s not about having time, it’s about making time. If I have uni I go before at 7am, and if I’m working I go in my lunchbreak. Summer bodies are made in the winter! WORK IT!