​I have recently posted a poll on my Instagram stories, asking my followers if they were staying on top of exercise.
 
“No” was the most popular answer.
 
In another poll, I asked “Why?” and offered two options: “No guidance” and “Low motivation”.
 
“Low motivation” received an overwhelming 100% response.
 
What many of us might not realise is that your initial motivation is fuelled by a sense of novelty and inspiration to achieve success.
 
Unfortunately, neither of the two lasts long.
 
Your shiny new training program becomes old news in a couple of weeks.
 
And your long-term goal of losing 50lbs can seem too far away when you step on the scale and you’ve only lost half a pound this week.
 
Once your starting levels of motivation are running low, don’t wait to wake up one day and find them miraculously restored.
 
Spoiler alert: It won’t happen.
 
Instead, become the architect of your own motivation.
 
One way to do this is to accomplish a workout when it’s the very last thing you want to do.
 
This will boost your confidence and thus perpetuate a positive feedback loop of success, followed by a sense of accomplishment and renewed motivation, followed by repeated success.
 
In this article, I will cover my top tips to do exactly that.

​“How can I stay full on my diet?”
 
In this article, I am going to do a deep dive into this topic.
 
First of all, a hard pill to swallow: Tips can help make you feel full for longer, but they will not completely stop the hunger.
 
The thing is, being hungry is your body’s natural response to a caloric deficit. When there isn’t enough energy coming in, the body triggers the release of hunger hormones, which in turn generate a desire for food.
 
Your body is trying to keep you alive. This simply happens to be very inconvenient when you are trying to stick to a fat loss diet.
 
So being hungry is an expected consequence of dieting, not the end of the world.
 
If you understand that some hunger is part of the process and that food will always be there, dealing with it mentally can become much easier.
 
That said, there are indeed food choices we can make and behaviours we can adapt in order to reduce the discomfort of an empty belly. Let’s get into them.

​In fitness, expectations can make or break your motivation.
 
When my clients want to embark on a fat loss or muscle-building diet, I like to give them an overview of the changes they might experience, especially in the first few weeks.
 
When something unexpected happens, or when they encounter their first bump in the road, they feel much more confident if I told them beforehand that this was a possibility.
 
In this article, I’m going to cover what could happen in your first few weeks of dieting for fat loss.

​Full disclosure: I don’t like meal prep.
 
Nevertheless, my nutritional goals are to improve body composition and to support training performance whilst training clients in the gym, working as an online coach, producing online content like this blog, and spending some “me time” with my partner or pursuing my hobbies.
 
For this reason, it would be counterproductive to simply throw meals together as and when, therefore I have found ways to make meal prep fit into my lifestyle rather than the other way around.
 
Do you feel overwhelmed at the prospect of spending all Sunday making meals for the week? Then read on!
 
In this article, I aim to outline a number of strategies that have helped me and my clients tailor goal-appropriate nutritional choices to a hectic lifestyle.

​It’s January 1st and you haven’t thought about exercise or nutrition for two weeks.
 
You have been eating a lot more than usual, drinking a lot more than usual – and I don’t mean water – and sitting around a lot more than usual. Maybe you feel bloated or sluggish and you think it’s time to “get back on track.” How do you do it?
 
In this article, I intend to cover some strategies to incorporate healthy eating and exercise back into your life after a “holiday layoff.”