Proactol Blog

Staying Trim This Christmas

Christmas… New Year… it can be hard to stay in shape and lose weight over the holiday season when supermarkets are ram packed with naughty puddings and mountains of chocolate. Read more »

Are you sabotaging your diet through emotional eating?

Even the best of us, sometimes turns to food to help distract us from emotional or stressful events. And the scary thing is, most of the time we don’t even realise we are doing it.

The number of times I have turned to chocolate when work or even my weight loss has got me down is astonishing. Almost absentmindedly I would reach for all my favourite naughty foods and begin munching away before I even realised what I was doing.

The problem is foods such as chocolate are ripe with ingredients that promote mood elevations, which – even though temporary – can makes your mind associate it with comfort, calmness and happiness.

Now if like me you too are fed of sabotaging your diet by giving in to emotional eating, then being able to recognise your triggers can be the first step to stopping them: Read more »

10 Tips to Creating Leaner Abs and Preventing Stomach Fat

We would all love to have flatter more toned stomachs, but the problem is no matter how many sit-ups we do or how much we cut our fat content, our stomachs won’t always completely tone. Read more »

Thin-heritance – is it real?

I was reading an article the other day about a mother who put her 8 year old daughter on a diet to help her slim back down into a pageant dress, and this really got me thinking about how much of an influence we as parents have on our own children’s eating habits.

Now I am not so much talking about the meals we feed them every day – although showing them good eating habits is always important as it teaches them how to take care of their bodies when they are older.

No… I am on about how our eating habits end up being reflected in our children – to the extent where our eating obsessions, become their eating obsessions.

What is ‘Thin-heritance?’

I was reading another article in the Daily Mail – I know I read too much lol – about a mother who regretted passing on her obsessions about being thin to her daughter.

In this article she was able to trace all her own self image fears back to her mother and over the course of her self analysis came up with the theory of ‘thin-heritance’. A trait where as role models we pass on our eating habits and fears directly onto our children.

And I have to say that I agree with her analysis.

Think about it a moment…

Surely it is not good for our children to see us flicking from one diet to the next and obsessing about our bodies. Surely, it cannot be healthy?

For this reason I thought I would blog about ways to diet without actually having to go on a diet. I know it may sound like a contradiction ‘how can I diet without going on a diet?’ But there are a number of tricks you can use that will promote natural, healthy eating within your family, and make you the role model you want to be: someone who is not preoccupied with their body image.

Come take a look:

1. Don’t make exercise clinical – going to the gym isn’t the only way to ensure your body remains fit and healthy. Going for a walk, a swim or a bike ride can help you to achieve a healthier body whilst keeping exercise fun.
   PLUS you can do any one of these activities with your children – helping them to comfortably take care of their bodies in the future.
2. Bring variety to the meal table – the key to healthy weight loss is following a balanced diet. This means not cutting out fats, proteins or carbohydrates, but maintaining an equal equilibrium that keeps your body functioning at optimum capacity.
   One trick to keeping your diet interesting, fun and varied is to experiment with your meal choices. This ensures your children are open to the idea of trying new foods and do not get into the mind set that carbohydrates or fats are bad.
   As long as you show them how to maintain a balance and eat healthily, they will too.
3. Don’t make food a sin – when you are dieting it is easy to label certain foods as ‘sin foods’. That is why from the offset it is important that you do not remove the value of the food you eat, but simply put into perspective which ones need to be limited.
   For example, we all know that it is not healthy to eat bars upon bars of chocolate, biscuits or cakes every day. However, this doesn’t mean that you have to cut them out of your diet completely. Simply eat them occasionally and you can reduce the temptation to binge eat or yo-yo diet.
   Make chocolate into what it is meant to be: a treat.
4. Don’t judge eating habits – one of the biggest things I learnt from this article is to not be judgemental about the foods you or your family eat.
   It is here where ‘thin-heritance’ really kicks off. Where criticisms of our own bodies become reflected in our children’s own eating habits. Now, I know this is incredibly hard, after all we too have had it drummed into us that this, that and the other will make us fat, but it is essential that you remain unbiased towards food and don’t start categorising them into ‘comfort foods’, ‘ naughty foods’ etc…
   It is only when we make food into a ‘problem’ that our children do too.

Okay, sorry for the rant today, but both of these articles really put into perspective the impact ‘dieting’ can have on our children and I felt it was important to get this information out there.

I hope you find it useful.

Rowena xx