Yoga Challenge = Completed!

I LOVE breakfast. After I finish eating my massive bowl of porridge with peanut butter/apple/banana/raisins/coconut flakes/maple syrup (delete where appropriate), I generally get really sad because it was so great and crave more delicious-ness.

When I started my 'health kick' I also started a 30 Day Yoga Challenge by DoYouYoga, not expecting to stick with it at all... but I HAVE FINISHED IT! 

There is the challenge, and it is seriously so ridiculously easy and yet challenging at the same time that doing it for 15 minutes a day feels like something to look forward to! For me personally, doing it straight after breakfast meant I soon forgot about any pesky cravings (mmm maple syrup..) and instead relaxed my body! 

Erin Motz (the instructor) is really relatable and lovely - she makes the exercises really accessible and easy to do no matter what your level, which was great for me. I did it (almost!) everyday with no yoga mat, and when I went to a class last week I was amazed at how much I have improved.

I've pretty much lost the weight I needed to now, unfortunately not from yoga alone, but a combination of seriously healthy eating and very regular exercise - a change in lifestyle, not diet. I've learned some pretty good tips along the way!

1. Do it for yourself 

This is the only way you will be able to motivate yourself to not eat that creme egg, or drag yourself to the gym in the rain. If you have good motivation (I definitely did!) then it becomes less of a chore and more of a way of achieving what you need to.

2.  Drink up!

I drink roughly 10-12 glasses of water a day, and about 5 cups of green tea (reusing the bag!) It becomes easier if you put slices of lemon, cucumber or apple in your water and have many glasses to hand at a time! 

3. Stay full

Don't starve yourself - you will end up gnawing madly on chocolate in a mad rush (guilty!). If I get snack cravings I try to have a satsuma to hand (35 calories) - it will usually kill my sugar cravings. But if it is only chocolate that will work, I'll eat a bit of dark chocolate. 

4. Stay happy! 

A way of making healthy eating/exercise a bit less awful is finding ways to make it fun! I have recently followed SO many healthy 'fitspo' blogs/instagrams and they all have such great ideas on how to get healthy and eat good food! :)

Sleep, Eat, Work, Work out, Repeat

As a model, you have to be in shape. As a stressed final-year law student, you have to have energy to do the millions of pages of reading each week and essays that come hurling at you, and your only solace is chocolate. I have to get into shape very quicky for a very important and exciting job that I really, really want so I have finally got the motivation I need to eliminate junk food and work out - hard. Also exams are coming up which means I have got to stay on top of all my uni work!

The first way of doing this is go to the gym. Obviously most people don't need to lose weight quickly, but if you want it to stay off you need to do regular exercise and eat healthily (guilty). I have been doing cheerleading which is amazing for strength building (I can now beat my friends in arm wrestling competitions) but not great for actually losing weight as there is not that much cardio in it. So I have begrudingly started running for twenty minutes a day which I really hate.



The second method is to do exercise at home - over the holidays our cheerleading posted a daily conditioning challenge which takes only ten minutes and is very effective, combining 30 seconds exercise. Here it is..

Each exercise must last a minimum of 30 seconds.

All exercise sections must be performed continuously with no breaks until all exercises for that section are complete.

1) Legs
Squat jumps (must bend to 90 degrees with chest up and arms above head)
Switch lunges (lunges on alternating legs with jumps, arm above head at all times)
Rebound jumps (straight jumps with arms above your head, pushing only with your calves and keeping your legs completely straight with each rebound)
Rock backs and tuck jump (Rock backwards onto your back with your legs in the air and immediately rock forwards onto both feet, trying to stand up and once standing up tuck jump immediately)

2)Arms
Press ups (elbows next to body, chest/boobs to floor, squeeze you bum the whole time to prevent 'sagging' and push straight up. If not normal press ups then do press ups on your knees)
Press ups with wide arms (arms at 90 degrees to body, same as before)
Diamond press ups (make a diamond on the floor using your hands (index finger to index finger and thumb to thumb) and do press ups, aim to put your chest on your hands)
Dips (hands on edge of desk/chair with body facing away, start with straight arms and bend your arms until 90 degrees, repeat)

3)Abs
Dish hold (lie flat, raise shoulders and feet slightly off the floor, hold and squeeze you abs and bum)
Sit up with twists (sit up, elbow to contra-lateral knee and lie down, repeat)
Crunches
N sits (hold dish and then tuck your body, knees to chest and then go back to dish, repeat)
Scissors (lie in dish, raise and lower opposite legs)
Plank (hold this plank with your toes UNDER your feet (i.e. do not hold plank on your toes)

4)Cardio
Jogging with high knees (knees must rise above hip height otherwise it is futile)
Burpies (Hit press up position, pull legs to elbows and immediately kick back and stand up, then hit press up position etc)
Jogging with high knees again
Burpies but lie down (do not hit press up position but instead lie down and stand back up immediately, repeat)
Jogging with high knees
Tuck jumps (arms above head, chest up, jump and bring knees to chest, must do this with feet together)

This will take you approx 10mins. You can have a 30 second break in between - there is an app on iphones called 'SIT' which times thirty seconds continuously. 



The third method I am going to combine with the above two (for as long as I can manage!) is daily yoga. Lisa posted the link on her blog; Here is the challenge. Stretching is a major part of working out which is often neglected (definitely by me!)

Also I am going to attempt to drink as much water as I can, an obvious one. I wrote a healthy eating plan this morning listing my motivation, the foods that I can eat and a checklist to tick off daily (inspired by our fabulous cleaning chart which has generated world war 3 in our flat).

Hopefully by posting this I will get some further motivation/motivate others- I definitely need all the help I can get!

today was one of those days where you may as well be hungover, because you can't concentrate on anything anyway :( 

I woke up at 7 am, (as usual these days to get in lots of studying!) and had my daily museli breakfast and then just could not concentrate on anything. 
I have read every single article on the daily mail, seen every single item on asos/topshop and followed a LOT of blogs. 

2 articles on the daily mail i found particularly disgusting today:

1. Samantha Brick's article on how basically 'The world admonished Kate Moss for claiming that 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' but I'd go further. As I see it, there is nothing in life that signifies failure better than fat.' which I think is basically disgusting and she is an utterly pathetic woman seeking fame. She also posted this, with the accompanying picture of her husband.. 
'Luckily for me, there is no better weight-loss incentive than a Frenchman. Pascal would not tolerate a fat wife and has told me that if I put on weight, our marriage is over. What more motivation do I need?'

 


I hope for my sake that I do not end up married to a tubby man who would dump me if I got 'fat'. And also that I don't end up as bitter as this woman.

Diets don't work. The only diet that will work is a change in your entire lifestyle. My mum is constantly on diets, and is recently always on at me to lose weight (I am size ten and 5'11) as though it links us together (but thats another story). I think its the worst thing for your parents to tell you in such a harsh way to lose weight, my boyfriend's mum last year said that I had put on loads of weight just randomly over dinner and I burst into tears for hours. I also had the added pressure from a high fashion model agency last year which made me go into the agency every week just to get measured, and be told that 'mmm yeah you have put on a cm this week so when you lose it we will give you work again'. That is also another story, and not for right now.

So basically, Samantha Brick, we don't need to think that there lies nothing ahead but endless days of dieting, of skipping meals and 'enjoying' the hunger pains that accompany it. Last year I tried this when I was under immense pressure and ended up putting more on. This year I have started eating three healthy meals a day and doing a work out in my bedroom for half an hour (most) days and I can already notice the difference after a week. You need to keep your metabolism high. If you want ice cream, eat it but don't skip the rest of the day's meals because all your body will take in is that ice cream and turn it into fat.

The second daily mail article that made me sick today was this - an article about model's cellulite because of their 'bad diet, smoking and no exercise' which is a massive generalisation.
They don't even know the model herself, but posted a picture of her walking down the runway with the TINIEST wobble in her leg. I'm not going to repost it because it makes me sick that people are zooming in on her size zero body and looking for flaws, when she is probably seriously insecure anyway. She must be pretty humiliated at that article - and I bet her agency know about it.

I have experienced a lot in my 7 years of modeling, only subjected to the weight criticism and all the other nasty things myself in the past year. When 'newspapers' start posting articles like this it is just degrading to women and inspire Samantha Brick to write endless drivel.

If a size zero (the absolute maximum size for a catwalk model is six) model is being subjected to such criticism, how are the rest of us supposed to feel? The Daily Mail is misogynistic and I honestly don't know how it exists as a newspaper today.

Unfortunately I still can't stop myself from reading it - it is a vice I have :( but mainly to look at the comments! And sometimes we are interested in what some reality show participant you have never heard of wore out clubbing last monday in her hometown, when revision gets really really bad.