Posted on March 30, 2014 by Jenny Cromack

The last few days have been great for training. I was working in London at the motive8 Head Office on Friday, I will confess….my plan had been to get up early on Friday morning and get into the gym before catching my train at 7am. This would have meant a 5am workout, and I’m afraid that as I’d got in at almost midnight the night before from seeing Derren Brown this just didn’t happen. Remember….getting adequate sleep is also important for achieving your goals! However, you will be pleased to know that as there is a small gym at head office I packed my kit and did my strength training session before I set off on my way home. Ha! I bet you thought I was going to say I missed a workout then didn’t you?! You should know me better than that!

Saturday called for long hill sprints 4 x 3 min intervals , 4 x 2 min intervals and 4 x 1 minute intervals with the incline increasing when the time decreased. A tough session! Today was a 12 mile run, I knew my legs would be sore from yesterday but as today’s run was about the distance rather than pace I knew I’d be able to push through it. Although it didn’t help when I decided to change my normal route home and ended up adding another mile to the route! Oh well, better to do more than less I say! It was a lovely morning for running this morning and I did a nice route through Alwoodley, Golden Acre Park and Headingley. After my run I spent a lot of time on the foam roller so that, fingers crossed, I’m not too sore tomorrow!

So, back to the title of this blog, ‘Is Being Obese Normal?’. When I was travelling to London I read an article in The Metro about how the country’s chief medical officer has stated that ‘obesity is now seen as normal’. This is quite scary isn’t it? According to the article, more than half of overweight men and a third of overweight women believe they are the right weight. This is quite worrying that people do not know what the right their right weight should be. I know I have talked about this before, but the government and doctors and nurses should be educating the public about not only an acceptable weight, but also acceptable levels of body fat. I feel that more could be done to improve relationships between gyms, personal trainers and doctors to improve people’s perceptions on this. A suggestion to help with this was putting clearer labels on food, but until there is consistent labelling between all food companies then this will not work. More education is needed about eating clean and less processed foods. I think that many of us, who are into keeping healthy, take this for granted. We take time to read about healthy foods and prepare our meals and snacks. But many people still do not know what healthy is, many people still think that eating healthy is expensive and many people think that just because a food is labelled ‘light’ or ‘lower in fat’ it is good for you. Personal trainers do a great job at educating their clients about how to follow a healthy diet, but not everyone is lucky enough to have a personal trainer therefore more education about healthy eating is needed in schools and communities otherwise without this education then being obese will be normal.

Later in the paper there was a reader feedback section about how body builder Anita Albrecht had been told she was over weight and should exercise more because of her high BMI reading! If you click on this article you will see that Anita Albrecht is in amazing shape! Again, another great way of showing that BMI is not the best way to measure whether someone is the right weight or not. But I’ve talked enough about this before so I won’t bore you with it again!

Have a great, healthy week!