Being healthy should be uncomplicated for a seemingly rational species such as us humans. It essentially revolves around eating well, sleeping well and being physically active.  Ideally, making common sense decisions about your life should result in you leading a healthy lifestyle, so when did it become so complicated?

I worked in a commercial gym environment for over five years and during that time I met several thousand gym goers from different social, cultural, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds. They were of different age groups, had differing levels of education and different goals. I was exposed to a lot of different ideas on how to be healthy.

During my time working in commercial gyms, I have been told at least one hundred times to ditch weight training, and even pushups and pull ups for a run or cardio. More than 50 per cent of my female clients were afraid to train their chest muscles because they feared it would shrink their breast tissue. One of my former bosses tried to convince me that lifting heavy weight was contraindicated for fat loss, do not get me started on the overconsumption of protein, 1200 calorie diets for regular exercisers and chewing packet after packet of artificially sweetened gum to curb hunger cravings. Those once-a-week cheat meals plastered all over social media are consistent with the clinical definition of binge eating. This is an industry where the primary objective is helping people lead a healthy lifestyle and all these habits which present dangers to one’s health are being glamorised.

Apparently now I must consider my gut bacteria, the ph of the water I am drinking and whether or not the less than 100 milliliters of milk in my double ristretto piccolo latte came from a cow or a coconut. I spent years studying exercise and nutrition and it is an effort to keep up with all this. How can we expect the average member of our population to?  For me, my journey towards a healthier lifestyle started by walking 20 minutes to and from my local train station to get to work, eating less happened incidentally. This motivated me to do some extracurricular nutrition and exercise research and it all happened from there.

Combatting the misinformation which has become prevalent in the fitness industry has always been my primary focus in this industry. I named my brand Body Knowledge because I believed my role was to empower my clients with the knowledge to make the right decisions regarding their well-being, rather than just tell them what choices to make. Our modern information age has created a double-edge sword- on one hand we have so much educational content which is freely accessible online, – on the other hand every person with access to the internet is able to contribute to this content, it’s easy for average person feel overwhelmed. My objective as both and exercise professional and writer is to present evidence backed research in the form of both practical advice and easy to consume information.

We as exercise professionals need to consider the longevity of a client’s relationship with health and fitness. To achieve that, keeping it simple is essential. We need to stress how attainable a healthy lifestyle is through some simple changes rather than bombard people with information. There is always something we can do to improve our health, I am not saying gut bacteria is not important, but from my experience the most tangible changes came from those seemingly simple steps that often just require applying a bit of common sense to our lifestyle choices.