Ljcooper Fitness

Carbs are your friends!

In a nutshell they;
🥯Feed and fuel your brain. Your brain lives off glucose, don’t starve it 😢
🥯 Provide your biggest source of energy for everyday activities and training.
🥯 Provide a hell of a lot of fibre, maintaining healthy bowls and gut microbiome.
🥯 Are an essential part of your diet.
🥯 Are just bloody delicious.

❗️Diet Industry Cycle❗️

Okay so we’ve touched on the history of and the but now let’s just go over how they suck you in and why, essentially, they’re a load of s**t.
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Diet culture and the diet industry thrive and survive on the abstract relationship they’ve created between the “thin ideal,” and happiness/success. They continuously associate being thinner/slimmer with being attractive, successful, in control and happy. If, therefore, you are a normal person and don’t mirror this “thin ideal,” you’re clearly none of those things and doing something wrong 🙄

That’s where the guilt comes in. They play on your shame and guilt because if you don’t meet the “thin ideal,” criteria (usually airbrushed and unsustainable) you should feel bad about it. You’re clearly unhappy, unsuccessful, out of control, and unhealthy. (You’re not, btw 😘)

So THEN they offer a miraculous solution, and they make it seem like it’s an emergency situation. Most will make you lose 10lb in water weight, give you headaches because the brain needs carbs (we’ll cover this in more detail) and have you gaining more weight when you come off plan.

And that’s the next part. Because these “quick fixes” don’t work in the long run and are not sustainable, you ultimately “fail.” And then you feel bad, and then you feel guilty, and there’s the diet industry waiting patiently for you to come back, probably with a celebrity endorsing the latest fad who definitely hasn’t done the diet and probably has a PT and a personal chef.

So you enter this viscous cycle of repetitive dieting which ultimately damages your mental and physical health, never leads to happiness and throws you so far out of control in your relationship with food that disordered eating and eating disorders are a typical by-product of the diet industry.

The sooner you (and we as a society) can ditch this ludicrous value attached to body image, the happier, healthier and more successful we’ll all be!

A brief history of diet culture part 2.

The cultural desire for the ideal thin body began to influence medicine by the 20th century. Health insurance companies started to use the Quetelet scale to categorise people by weight and healthiness. It was an early version of the BMI scale and was based solely on the data collected from white European men 🤔

❗️1930s - the age of the diet pills. Highly toxic and dangerous, and the advertisement of ci******es as a way to stay thin.
❗️1940s - lull in diet culture as the country is encouraging people to finish their food and the introduction of food rationing. But by the end of the decade the “Lemonade Diet” arrived (sounds great 🙄)
❗️1950s - Marilyn Monroe sparks a new body ideal and the first weight loss surgery is done.
❗️1960s - Hello Weight Watchers and Slimming World, the giants of the diet industry.
❗️1970s - welcomes Dr Atkins and his Low carb/High fat diet. His influence since this decade is unbelievably strong.
❗️1980s - sees the tide turn for low fat foods and low calorie meal options.
Hello Lycra and Jane Fonda.
❗️1990s - the “heroin chic” era 🫣 and Atkins is back.
❗️2000s - a new wave of fad diets; South Beach, Paleo, Medifast, Dukan.
❗️2009 - Alli, a diet pill approved by the FDA sells thousands. The scrutiny of women’s bodies explodes in the press and magazines.
❗️2016 onwards - the diet industry begins to be challenged by the body positivity movement, but it simply rebrands.

It is rooted in our history and entrenched in our culture. It’s hard to navigate, and confusing and deliberately attractive. BUT if you can learn to feed your body what it needs, to love your body for what it can do rather than how it looks.

A Brief History of Diet Culture Part 1

On average adults in the UK will (unsuccessfully) try two fad diets every year.

I mean, it’s not surprising, there’s an abundance to choose from. From Atkins to Paleo, to The South Beach Diet to Slimming World and a seemingly unlimited amount of shakes, pills, powders and now even injections 😡 you cannot turn a corner without the culture of diet and the industry that has boomed from it staring you in the face.

So what is this culture, and what is it doing?

Diet culture is simply a set of beliefs that puts thinness and body image above all else and equates it with happiness and success.

The diet industry in turn then capitalises on this narrative by selling products promising to achieve the ‘perfect body shape,’ and demonises certain foods and food groups in an ongoing cycle.

It hasn’t always been this way though, the “thin ideal,” was not a thing many moons ago. In fact, it was considered a sign of health and status to be overweight.

But throughout the 15th-17th centuries, being overweight started to be questioned, and experimental diets began to be popularised by men such as Poet Lord Byron, William Banting and Dr William Harvey.

And thus, slowly the diet culture was born. And it was born alongside the mass production of clothing. But this meant something had to change.

Producing clothes on a large scale meant that individualised sizing and tailoring became inefficient. People would now have to fit into clothes rather than clothes being made to fit, and by the 1950s a sizing scale similar to the one we recognise today was born….

Did you know?

You may not feel it, but you are!

Your hormones are favourable for performance once your period starts.

I mean it kind of makes sense, once your body knows it doesn’t have to support and grow another being it relaxes and all the energy systems used through the high hormone phase of your cycle are yours to do with as you wish and are ready!

You’re also likely to feel less pain and are prone to faster recovery.

So don’t be afraid of training during your period - in fact this could be a time for pbs! Paula Radcliffe broke the world record for the fastest marathon in Chicago in 2002 whilst suffering menstrual cramps.

Obviously if you’re not feeling up to it at all then maybe focus on something less taxing and more relaxing, but you won’t be weaker just because you’re on!

👉🏻B E L T U P👈🏻

Most people think “abs” or “six pack” when they think of “core.” But your core is your foundational strength and includes your abdominal, back and glute muscles.
You know those weightlifting belts? Well you have a natural one of those and that is your “core.”

Also abs are genuinely made in the kitchen - we all have abs, you just need a low body fat % to see them. They might look great, but having abs doesn’t mean you have a strong core, which is far more beneficial.

You’re always using your core (or should be) when performing compound lifts especially, but it’s important to train it for stability and strength too through focused exercises.

*Tips*

Core movements should always be slow and controlled - rushing through core specific movements will not train your core.

You want to focus on more than just your abdominal muscles too - pick a few exercises that strengthen your back and glutes as well.

Use your breathing! Most people want to hold their breath when doing abdominal/core exercises - don’t! Always breathe out on the hardest part of the movement.

Increase/decrease difficulty in a plank by narrowing/widening your stance respectively. The same goes for any exercises - the wider your stance the more stable your base!

Core strength and stability will provide the base for your overall strength. It is the foundation for all your movements so make sure you pay it some attention!