Voila

Wellbeing 

After a summer break Lucinda is back with a lovely article for Voila's well being post. Take the time to read it and make a change if you feel you need to.I have found life is about choices and you make those choices and therefore what happens after is a direct response to that. When you say it like that it puts the power in your hands. So when people say to me they haven't got time to exercise thats a choice.You can choose to spend an hour doing your hair in the morning and say you have no time in the mornings to do anything else or you can make a conscious choice to say I'm going to spend half an hour doing my hair and half an hour meditating or a form of movement and stretching! 

Simply click on the recipe image at the bottom of the article to enlarge or print out and save in your recipe folder. 

   Move the body

" There is definitely a slight autumnal chill in the air these past few days and although I love the colours and light of October and November, I can’t say I feel entirely ready for it! This may have something top do with having spent five weeks in the never-ending heat and humidity of Miami during July and August. Despite the fact that every day was spent in a swelteringly hot yoga room, studying and practising until there was not a drop of sweat left in my body, I have since missed the deep bone-melting warmth that only tropical sun can bring. Stepping out into the pre-dawn morning to be cloaked in a swathe of thick breathless air brought a comfort that I can’t describe. And it certainly made my early morning practice more bearable! Unfortunately we do not live in the tropics but in the lush green verdure of rainy Britain and we have to find a way to continue to motivate ourselves on even the darkest and coldest of mornings, as moving our bodies is as central to our well being as diet is. 

      

With that in mind, I thought I would focus this month’s post on exercise, and how to cultivate for ourselves a regular and healthy routine that is sustainable through the winter months. There was a great quote doing the social media rounds a few months ago from some eligible nutritionist that went something along the lines of ‘if you need to exercise to lose weight then there is something wrong with your diet’. Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with this (a healthy diet should provide us with all the nutrients we need and no excess rubbish to gather around our mid-riffs), taken out of its greater context it could be somewhat misleading. I can see how for many people this might suggest that all they have to do is endlessly count-calories in order to be thin and healthy and to ignore and even discredit the need for an active lifestyle alongside this. This, of course, is not what was meant. Exercise shouldn’t be done to increase weight loss (a thing wholly measured in negatives – how many pounds less am I? How much thinner is my waist? etc…), but to strengthen, cleanse and invigorate our inner and outer bodies. The right nutritional intake can do a world of good towards creating a healthy environment for our organs to live in, but only good cardiovascular movement can really increase the power and life-expectancy of them. We can have the purest blood on the planet, but if it’s not pumping around our body with virility and speed, it cannot be replenished and refreshed. And although we may be beautifully slim with glowing skin and bright eyes, if our muscles are not strong and our bones are not dense our bodies will not support us into old age. Basically, if we are really serious about well being both inside and out, exercise is not an option.

For me, moving my body everyday is essential to both my physical and emotional happiness. When I was younger that meant riding horses everyday for over ten years and playing sport at school. In my early twenties I tried to justify a sedentary daily life by the fact I stayed up until the early hours dancing in a pair of deadly high-heels! This eventually wore me out and I became a mediocre runner and gym-goer. I found a great amount of satisfaction in being outside and alone with my thoughts and seeing the weekly improvement in my fitness that running gives you, but after a string of injuries I decided I had to do something to help heal my body as well. That was when I found Ashtanga yoga and over the past three years I have gradually built up to a six day-a-week practice and left running and the gym well and truly behind. My body has never felt better and I have felt all of the benefits that yoga so ubiquitously brags of. This dynamic and challenging form of yoga and its spiritual discipline suits my personality and mind, and I now cannot imagine my life without it, so much so that I am even starting to teach it myself!

This does not mean however that it is for every one. The single most important thing I would say about beginning to build an exercise routine is to do something you enjoy. There are a multitude of activities out there, from yoga to running to dance to rock climbing, karate, trapeze, hula-hooping and skate-boarding. Do not waste time doing something you hate and do not feel you have to do only one thing – a variety of activity is also really beneficial. However you do need to give any one activity time to settle in. Your first run on a cold icy morning in November will not be fun. Your first Pilates class will quite possibly leave you sore and stiff for few days afterwards. And I can guarantee that doing fifty weight-bearing squats will incapacitate you for at least a week! A month or two of regular attendance at any one thing should give you enough time to feel some of the benefits and to decide if it is something you enjoy. Commit to this and find what makes your heart sing so that it is no longer a chore!

The second most important thing is to build a routine. Exercise needs to become as much a part of your life as brushing your teeth – an ingrained habit that you don’t question or whinge about (unless you are four years old and have run out of bubblegum flavoured toothpaste). There is all sorts of advice on how much we should exercise each day or week and to what intensity. The current trend is for High Intensity Training (HIT) – regular but short bursts of very strong cardio activity that briefly pushes you to your limits. But perhaps the best and most achievable bit of advice I have found is that twenty minutes a day of movement that gets your heart pumping and helps build strength should be your target. Every day. Not an option, just a fact. Of course this doesn’t work for some people. So maybe, three days a week for an hour. Or five days a week for half an hour. But try and set the days and stick to them and have a minimum amount of time that you are going to exercise for, set at an easily achievable level – this way you more often than not end up exceeding it and feeling even better about yourself! If we chop and change too much, it is easy to let our targets slip and we often find a whole week has gone by where we haven’t done anything due to constantly putting something off till the next day or giving up before we’ve even started. Be strong and be disciplined and you will eventually build a healthy habit that lasts a lifetime.

The final piece of advice I would give is to make sure you balance the type of exercise you do with an opposing but complimentary practice. For example, in the gym every muscle you work on strengthening you also need to work on stretching and releasing. This is also true at a deeper level: if the exercise you do focuses entirely on strengthening the physical body you might want to consider adding in a meditation or mindfulness practice that helps strengthen your spirit and soul. Yoga and Pilates have had particular success because they offer a two for one – strong bodies and strong minds – but they can also compliment all other forms of exercise which often leave imbalances in the body and mind. If you haven’t already you should definitely try out Voila’s Pilates classes, as Gaby is a wonderful teacher who will challenge you and help you to build a really strong connection with your inner and outer body. And to top that she will also be able to make sure you look glamorous and gorgeous as you do it! 

So before I bid you farewell a quick re-cap: do something you love, build a disciplined routine around it, and create balance within it. But do it now, not tomorrow, and do it because you want to build your body into more than what it is, not because you want to shed the parts of it you don’t like!

Happy Autumn folks and happy exercising,

Lots of love,

Lucinda x "