Congratulations Chris Evans!

When I heard that Chris Evans had scooped two of the top awards at last night’s Sony Radio Academy Awards I couldn’t have been more delighted. Voted by 100 industry professionals, Chris won the Music Radio Personality of the Year and Entertainment Awards. Brilliant! He completely deserves both awards in my view.

I love listening to Chris Evans on my way home from the office. His happy and positive attitude, makes me smile. He always sounds as though he is experiencing the best day of his life and his positivity is infectious. I love the way he is so encouraging to everyone who guests on his programme, from industry executives to the children who ring in with their news of the thing they have ‘done for the first time today’. He is gentle, compassionate, enthusiastic and intelligent.

Having a positive attitude to life is probably one of the most valuable personality traits we can learn. Complimenting people that we meet, seeing the good in folk, looking at the lovely things around us and vocalising our positive thoughts is a habit we can learn. And when we are positive to others, we become happier in our soul too.

One of the benefits of being in the business of helping folk to lose weight and become fitter, it is easy to find positive things to say and to encourage folk. Whether it’s a ‘well done for losing 2 lbs this week’, ‘you did so well with the exercises tonight’ , or ‘you look so much slimmer now’, it is a delight to see people ‘grow’ in their confidence as we confirm they are shrinking. We can help people who have little respect for themselves find their self-confidence and ‘grow’ as individuals.

If you wish you had a more positive attitude to life, why not start exercising and losing a few pounds? It is a great way to start. If you go along to one of our classes, you will find a bucket load of positivity waiting to be showered upon you. And remember to tune in to Chris Evans on Radio 2 on your way home from work to get you in the mood!

The only person who can make you lose weight is YOU!

Obesity is a hot topic and more people are obese than they realise because we have become so used to seeing people being bigger than they’ve ever been. You only need to watch some TV footage of the 70’s to realise that everyone on the screen is slim! These days most people are carrying at least a stone, if not three or four, of excess weight and we are just getting used to it.

Being overweight isn’t just about how we look. Being overweight has a profound effect on our health. We are aware of the risks of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer but we all think these won’t happen to us. It is impossible to know in your everyday lives whether you have high cholesterol or high blood pressure. We only find out if we have them if we go to the Doctor and our GP checks it. But the other, often ignored, effect is to our joints. When we’re young we don’t even consider aching limbs when we get older - bad knees, bad hips, bad ankles. These are conditions that are considered part of getting older and yet if we were slim, most of these problems experienced in later life would disappear. Of course, we can suffer injuries from sport, but even those damages to our body can be helped by keeping our weight down and staying active and fit, not to mention the added bonus of the likely prevention of the life-threatening risks of heart disease etc.

Our body is like a savings account at the Building Society. The greater the investment in healthy eating and keeping fit , the greater the dividend. Invest in reducing your weight and in becoming fitter, even if it is just walking for 20 minutes a day.

Take a look at our magazine, Rosemary Conley Diet and Fitness. The latest issue is just out and it features a lovely guy called Kevin Austin. Kevin has lost 9 stone and now weighs 13st 6lbs instead of 22st 6lbs.
While we were driving to M & S to buy the clothes for his photo shoot, Kevin, who works in a care home for young people, told me how he used to wear a pair of jogging bottom trousers and had just one smock-type shirt. Every night he would wash it and hang it out to dry ready for the next day. Nothing else fitted him. His knees were hurting so much it made walking difficult.But Kevin realised that his condition was within his control and he decided to take action and enrolled at one of our classes. Just look at the photos of Kevin in our magazine as he is today to realise that losing weight is an amazing investment into your future.

If you have any problems finding our magazine, call us on 01509 620444.

The youth of today can be our inspiration

Last night I had the privilege of watching six teams from Leicestershire Schools battle it out at the Young Enterprise County Finals. They had already progressed from the Area Finals and here they were, in front of a panel of Judges selected from leading businesses, to excite and impress.

Each Young Enterprise ‘company’, is set up near the start of the academic year and pupils have volunteered to participate. They set about forming a Board of Directors including finance, marketing, HR, IT and so on. A Managing Director is appointed from the pupils to head up the operation. They decide what business they want to create(sometimes they make products and sell them, or their business could be offering a service for which they get paid) and set it up under the guidance of an external volunteer business adviser and their link teacher.

The team learn about the importance of communication, working as a team, relationships, problem solving, money management, and dealing with crisis. They discover their strengths and weaknesses and realise that finding other people’s strengths in the team, and utilising them, can make the difference between success and failure. It is a fantastic initiative and one that I would have loved had it been available when I was at school.

The Keynote Speaker, Luke Pulford, told us how he started his first business when he was 15 and the lessons he had learned along his journey. He is now 21 and about to launch an exciting drinks dispensing business to be available in Night Clubs. Luke has created a special cap for bottles to prevent drinks being spiked. Let’s hope it is a roaring success. But his message last evening was that running your own business should be fun and that it isn’t just about making money. If just making money is your goal you will probably fail. A sentiment I endorse completely.

We run a franchise company – Rosemary Conley Diet and Fitness Clubs – and Luke told me that while he was at University they use our franchise model to teach about franchising on their business course. Is the recession hitting us? No, because we, and our franchisees, are running our own businesses and when it’s your own, you work that bit harder when the going gets tough. You look after your customers even better, you offer them even more value for money. And if you can have a lot of fun doing all of that, everybody wins.

Check out our franchise on our website, either for classes or how to become a franchisee

Exercise has to be fun!

‘Eat less and do more’ is the simple answer to turning around the growing obesity problem in this country. And we know that’s true, but sometimes it’s hard to change our habits. Life gets in the way of our good intentions and ‘stuff’ happens to knock us off track.

Sticking to a proper diet takes time and planning and real discipline. Taking regular exercise takes effort and determination. I know it’s not easy. I’ve been there.

When we started our company we tried to find ways to make it easier for folk to lose weight and tone up and to make that process fun. If a diet is too prescriptive or restrictive, no one will stick to it. If the exercises are too hard or just plain boring, no-one will want to do them. Fact. That’s why I create diets that incorporate normal, everyday foods that the whole family can enjoy. No-one has to eat separately. And exercises – whether on DVD or at one of our classes – they are fun to do with motivating music and clear instructions.

Every one of our instructors at a Rosemary Conley Diet and Fitness Club class is professionally qualified to teach exercise to music. They are very special people who have a passion to helping folk become slimmer and fitter. But the main focus of our classes is not the diet or the exercises – it is about having a FUN experience. We want our members to look upon the evening (or morning) as special time for YOU to have some relaxation, a laugh, meet some nice folk just like you and, incidentally, learn about healthy eating and doing some fat-burning exercise that will help you slim down and become healthier. If our classes weren’t fun, folk wouldn’t come back week after week, even after they have reached their goal weight.

If you have never been to a group to lose weight or to do exercise, why not think about taking a look at our website to see if we have a class in your area. It may change your life.

Can eating at the table help you to lose weight?

Years ago I remember meeting a rather intimidating woman who owned The Golden Door health spa in America during filming for ITV’s This Morning programme. She was emphatic that every meal should be treated as a banquet. ‘Always sit at a table which should be set beautifully. Use pretty dishes to enhance presentation and eat slowly. Enjoy the experience’, she insisted. Of course she was right but busy, everyday life gets in the way and in reality we don’t take our time. And eating in front of the television has become normality.

A recent study has highlighted the fact that if we eat while we are watching television, we will not feel so satisfied, we are more likely to snack later and we will not remember as clearly what we have actually eaten. The study found that women who ate lunch whilst watching TV later snacked on more biscuits than those who had eaten a similar lunch but who had not been watching TV while they ate it. This is an important finding for anyone trying to lose weight.

To lose weight we need to eat fewer calories than our body uses up during each day and we need to try every trick we can learn to help ourselves not fall by the wayside when that first hunger pang hits our stomach. Going for the biscuits is the worst thing we can do. We never eat just one as biscuits seem to set off an immediate craving for another one as soon as we eat the first mouthful! Then we’re tempted to eat the whole packet to get rid of the darn things!

So let’s learn from this study and start planning to eat away from the television and enjoy every mouthful of our food. Food needs to be kept in the right perspective as well as the right quantity and it should be enjoyed. Leaving the table after a meal is a signal that the meal is over and we should try and train our brains to not expect another meal until the appropriate time. The only exception to this is to eat a small ‘power snack’ of perhaps a couple of satsumas or a small pear mid morning and mid afternoon to keep our blood sugar levels up. If you can stick to this habit, it will help you to lose weight and if you increase your activity levels at the same time, you will lose weight significantly faster. If you need help sticking to your diet, visit our website: www.rosemaryconley.com.

Is breakfast cereal good or bad for our kids?

Over the weekend there have been reports highlighting the high levels of sugar in breakfast cereals specifically targeted at children, plus another report highlighting biscuits for babies and toddlers that contain unhealthy fats and excess levels of sugar and salt. Cow & Gate have withdrawn some of their products and Heinz have defended their range of baby biscuits on the basis that they have a lower fat, lower sugar option available. I think there are two issues here.

Let’s look at breakfast cereals first. In my view, eating any cereal is better than none though I accept some are healthier than others. Research has proven that breakfast eaters are slimmer than those who skip it, and that our levels of concentration are increased if we start the day with this important meal. If we choose to eat cereal, we take it with milk which is a valuable source of protein which helps the growth and repair of our body – a fact which is particularly important in the case of growing children. The ideal is to select cereals with higher fibre content and you can check out the nutrition panel for sugar and salt content to discover which ones are better than others but in reality, I would rather a child ate a breakfast of any cereal, with some milk, than eating a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar on the way to school.

Now on to babies. Babies have tiny stomachs and need more energy-dense foods, which includes fat, to enable them to consume sufficient calories during their early lives as they grow so fast. That’s why, when I create any of my low fat diets, I always say that they are healthy for the whole family except for children under two years of age.

Once past that stage, I would question the wisdom of always giving toddlers biscuits to eat as snacks between meals. Why not introduce them to different fruits and vegetables to acclimatise their taste buds to healthier foods at an early age. It is not good that children are often only happy eating fish fingers and chips, chocolate biscuits and ice cream. I’m not against these foods being eaten occasionally, but if we are to help our children to be healthy into the future, we should help them to understand which foods are good for us and which ones should be classed as occasional treats. This is exactly what we are aiming to do by launching our Kids 2 programme. Check out our website for details.

Is your body ready for a Barbecue Summer?

Yesterday we were given the encouraging news that in the UK we are set for a hot and mostly dry summer with temperatures anticipated to reach as high as 30 degrees. This is great for the travel industry at home and sales of patio sets and barbecues will take an upturn which will delight the Garden Centres and D.I.Y. stores alike.

Sunshine makes us feel better and we are likely to become more active if we are outdoors. So good news all round. But is your body ready to be exposed?

In the winter we can cover-up and hide under dark colours, jackets and coats but put on that cool, sleeveless summer dress and there's no hiding anything. The thin cotton fabrics will show every bulge, wobble and dimple. And that's before you try on your strappy top or even swimwear. Men can hide a multitude of sins under a suit, but wear just a pair of shorts and that beer-belly will be hanging over the top for everyone to admire.

Now is the time to take action. You have six to eight weeks to get yourself in shape and make a real difference to how you look and feel, not to mention the amazing differences losing weight and taking some exercise will make to your health.

Start today. Cut back your portions by 25% and increase your physical activity levels. Walk more, connect up your Wii Fit, dust off one of your own fitness DVD's and do it, go for a bike ride, play football with the children, mow the lawn - anything, but get moving.

If you are serious about losing your weight, and there's a Rosemary Conley Diet and Fitness Club near you, go along to our classes. It's not a gym where you have to pay a massive membership. At our clubs it costs just £10 to join and £5.50 a week, and when you go you'll not only by weighed in, given encouragement and support but you'll get a 45 minute workout taught by a professionally qualified instructor who's trained to cater for folk of all abilities and fitness levels. No-one is ever made to feel embarrassed and the emphasis is on fun. If you go, by the end of June you could have lost 1 1/2 to 2 stone, depending on how much you have to lose.

If there's no class near you, why not have a look at www.rosemaryconleonline.com which is our online slimming club.

This is my last blog until Tuesday now as I'm away for the weekend. Enjoy the Bank Holiday and get moving!