Getting Wedding Fit & Healthy

Every bride wants to look her best on her big day and there are heaps of fast weight loss diets and boot camps out there promising amazing results. However, losing weight should also be about getting healthy and I have always believed that is most successful if it is an enjoyable process, sustainable and done within a realistic time frame.

So I was thrilled to meet and chat with London based health and fitness expert Tuomas Isaho – founder of Clay and Lime and get his thoughts on how brides could best approach their fitness goals.

Tuomas challenges conventional and trendy training methods – his philosophy is “To train smart. To get fit, not broken.” He typically trains brides for 3 to 6 months preceding their wedding, but has found that many continue with the programme after their wedding. He has also trained a few brides and grooms together in the lead up to their big day – finding that by motivating each other they are able to achieve great results.

Tuomas’ top five tips:

1. Start moving, now. Walk 10 000 steps every day – it is the only smart and proven way to boost your metabolism – even if your date isn’t set yet. Pedometers are cheap to buy and a great way of measuring how you are doing.

2. Clean up your diet – unhealthy foods have somehow become a daily feature in our diets, and that isn’t how it should be. The bulk of your diet should be made of healthy, nutritious food. You can allow yourself two unhealthy items – not whole meals – a week.

3. Don’t diet. Conventional diets focus on quick weight loss, but they fail in one essential area – keeping the weight off – they are not about promoting health which should be the core goal. And therefore they are generally not sustainable.

4. Add resistance training into your weekly routine. Aim for 4 times a week, 25-30 min at a time. Focus on your posture to get the healthy, lean and strong look – choose exercises that work your upper and lower back, obliques (sides), bum and legs – with some rear shoulder and arm moves. I don’t believe that women should ever do press-ups and no one should ever do abdominal crunches.

5. Live by the above 4 rules – make it your lifestyle. It is how we humans were designed to live. You’ll be fit and healthy – and remember that the healthier and fitter you are, the happier you will be in the run up to your wedding day.

I was really impressed with the passion Tuomas has for what he does – he genuinely cares about helping his clients. And it is refreshing in an age where we are bombarded with the next ‘in’ way to lose weight to meet someone who is taking it back to basics – looking at what our bodies were designed to do – and with health at the heart of it.

To find out more about Clay and Lime, see http://www.clayandlime.com/ or follow @clayandlime on Twitter.

Exclusive personal training and tailored programmes are available from 4-52 weeks.

And best of luck with creating a healthy new you!

Sangeeta x