Although Diets Don’t work is based in Ascot in Berkshire, we provide personal training and personal trainers throughout the Thames valley as far west as Reading and the surrounding area. We have a trainer covering the Winersh area, Wokingham and Lower Earley, trainers in the Windsor, Slough and maidenhead areas, and then out coverage continues into London, from central areas (Kensington and Knightsbridge) out to the North (Wood Green, Barnet, Harrow), South West (Richmond, Sunbury, Wimbledon and Wandsworth), and as far east as the city, including personal training in Hackney, Ilford and Stratford. We also have a new personal rainer, Harriet Goslett, who is covering the areas of Berkhamstead, Hemel Hempstead and Amersham for us.  Remember that we also focus on nutritional help and lifestyle assessment, your health and weight are a two sided equation, and only by focusing on both sides will lead to long term success.

To ahve a complete view of where we cover and the prices we charge (very reasonable!) for diferent area have a look at out contact/prices page.  

The “five a day” target for fruit and veg is only being met by 12% of Britons, a new survey by TNS has revealed. A further 12% don’t eat ant fruit and vegetables at all. On average people eat two and a half portions a day. On the upside though there is evidence that parents are making more of an effort to feed their children healthily: only 27% of them now buy their children what they want all the time, down from 41% in 2005. A majority of people are trying to eat more vegetables, and 14% moreyoung people are cooking meals from scratch. At Diets Don’t Work we are always encouraging our personal training clients to eat more fruit and vegetables (remember that once you buy a block booking of 6 or more sessions nutritional help is included, so you will have to keep a food diary and then your trainer will have a look and give you some hopefully achievable and sustainable changes). These foods not only improve your immune system, provide lots of fibre for the digestive tract, and provide micro nutrients, but they are also cheap, fill you up quickly and especially in the case of most vegetables (the green leafy ones are particularly good) they have a relatively low GI and so will fill you up for longer and have a steady release of energy into the blood stream, making it easier for you to eat well and lose weight successfully.

As with most nutritional things one of the key areas is planning-try to sort your surroundings, so that when you shop you buy mainly healthy items so that at home there is a ready supply of fruit and vegetables at hand. This takes the hassle out of eating well and makes success much more likely!

Today just a big well done and a quick mention to a few of our personal training clients. We have a few regulars who I would like to mention, and not just because of their commitment and determination but also because of their consistency. Although we do have a few PT ers who do seem to like to cancel at the last minute there are those who turn up for training wth a smile whatever the weather and even if they feel a bit tired/stressed out from work/battered by the demands of their family. In fact it’s woth thinking about the fact that exercise and therfore personal training gives you more energy both physicaly and mentally, so when you feel most likely to postpone a session or not going out for a jog or walk or whatever is actually when you need to do something the most!

First up Diana T who ran ANOTHER personal best around Virginia Water (near Wentworth) in 53:20, and who seems to do a PB almost every time she goes out. It’s also worth noting that she could only run for 64 seconds when we started with her in April! We have made her a bet that by Cristmas she will do it in sub 50 minutes, so keep it up!

Secondly well done to Gurinder W who is Mrs consistent and only ever misses a personal training Session if an arm is hanging off or something. Not surprising she looks half her age really…

Lastly well done to Wendy B for keeping going even through the sleepless nights (new nipper!) and for throwing away those chocolate biscuits! We just need to get a Starbucks restraining order now and we’re away!

Adding fish to a child’s diet before the age of nine months could lessen the chances of developing eczema.The rate of the painful skin condition has risen in Western countries in recent years, and scientists believe diet may be partly to blame. Swedish scientists tracked the health of children in 5,000 families, and said that early introduction of fish cut the risk by a quarter.The research was published in Archives of Disease in Childhood. The children were all part of an ongoing health study looking at almost 17,000 infants born in 2003 in western Sweden. Some of the families involved agreed to fill in questionnaires about diet and home environment when the child was six months and 12 months old.Any evidence of eczema was also recorded, and the results analysed. At six months old, 13% of the families said their child had already developed eczema, and this rose to 20% by their first birthday.Genes appeared have the most powerful effect – children with a sibling or mother with eczema were almost twice as likely to be affected by 12 months. Breast feeding, the age at which dairy products were introduced, and the presence of a furry pet in the home had no detectable influence on eczema. However, the introduction of fish before nine months cut the risk by 25%. The additional good news is that fish, as I’m sure you know by now, is extremely good for you; it helps maintain a smooth action in your joints (important so you can do loads more squats and lunges); it provides an excellent source of lean protein so you can build up some lean muscle and stay functionally fit as well as slim; it lowers your chances of getting cancer. As both personal triainers and nutritional advisors we encourage our clients to eat as much oily fish as they can, even if in reality and within lifestyle constraints this may only be 2-3 times a week. So go for it, buy some salmon, it’s excellent not just for you but for the little nippers too!

The first rule of fashion – that vertical stripes flatter the figure – is a myth, according to a study conducted by scientists at York University. Women who avoid wearing clothes with horizontal stripes in the belief that it makes their bum look larger should be reassured by a scientific study showing quite the opposite. It found that horizontal stripes actually make people look slimmer. It is a common misconception that dresses or tops with horizontal stripes appear to broaden a person’s figure, according to Peter Thompson, a psychologist at York University, who is probably the first scientist to investigate a well-known optical illusion in relation to high street fashion. The illusion was described in the 19th century by the great German physicist and physiologist, Hermann von Helmholtz. Dr Thompson applied the principle to women’s clothes and found that a dress with vertical stripes made a women appear about 6 per cent wider than an equivalent-sized dress with horizontal stripes. “Helmholtz said that the horizontal stripes look taller and narrower than the vertical lines. That made me think that horizontal stripes are going to make things look taller and narrower according to this illusion,” Dr Thompson said.

“That seemed to fly in the face of another well-known belief that we have, that horizontal stripes make us look fat. So I decided to see if there was truth in that,” he told the British Association’s science festival at Liverpool University.

He carried out a study on about 20 people, who were asked to assess the relative size of different dresses in either horizontal or vertical stripes. The supremacy of horizontal stripes in the “big bum” debate was clear-cut, he said. “Horizontal stripes don’t make you look fat. It’s a subtle effect, but in fact people wearing vertical stripes look wider than the ones who are wearing horizontal stripes,” Dr Thompson said. “Indeed, horizontal stripes, if anything, actually make you look thinner. Helmholtz actually said that women wear horizontal stripes to make themselves look taller. So, in the 19th century, wearing horizontal stripes had a completely different belief attached to it than it does now,” he said.

Dr Thompson said that he did not know when the idea that horizontal stripes made women look fat came to prominence, and he also cannot explain why vertical stripes should make someone look less slim and shorter than someone wearing horizontal stripes.

“I don’t know why the effect works, and I don’t know whether there has been any good explanation for the [optical] illusion in the first place,” he told the science festival. He originally became interested in the subject when he was visiting some ancient Greek temples on holiday, which had columns that bulged out slightly in the middle. This is described in guide books as “entasis”, which is widely understood as a way of countering the optical effect of columns with parallel sides – which are supposed to appear to be thinner in the middle. However, Dr Thompson investigated this idea and found no evidence to support it. “I carried out some experiments to see if there is an illusion that columns appear to be wasted in the middle if the sides are parallel, and the answer is no, they don’t. Parallel-sided columns look parallel, or straight,” he said.

This led him to look at the other well-known visual illusion of horizontal stripes, and he again found that there was little or no evidence to support the idea that horizontal stripes make people look fat. “So these are just two illusions from everyday life where I think we’ve got it wrong,” Dr Thompson said. But are there any clothes that do help people to look slim? “Wearing black is a good thing. We know that works because we know that a black circle on a white background looks smaller than a white circle on a black background,” he said. “Wearing plain black is what you want to do – with a few horizontal stripes,” he added.

To shed pounds take pictures says the New Scientist this month. Slimmers sticking to conventional diets should invest in a camera; a study has shown that people who take photographs of everything they eat are more likely to stick to their diets. Apparently, the prospect of having pictorial evidence of their gluttony shames people into eating less and also encourages them to eat more healthily. “I Had to think more carefully about what I was going to eat because I had to take a picture of it” said one of the 43 volunteers who took part in the research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ” I was less likely to have a jumbo bag of M&Ms. It curbed my choices.” Another volunteer claims it helped him to see which foods were missing from his diet. ” I noticed there weren’t too many greens, which means that I should try to eat more vegetables and fruit”. The volunteers also kept a written record of their meals-these were also shown to help but proved less powerful than photos as a reminder of the size and quality of what they had eaten.

At Diets Don’t Work we include nutritional assessment and advice with all block bookings of personal training (6 or more)  and as standard procedure get clients to keep a written food diary. As part of our overall lifestyle change policy this works well but I love the idea of the photo-the camera doesn’t lie!! From now on wherever possible we will get clients to keep a food diary this way, and I’m sure the results will be effective and interesting. Watch this space for further results on what happened!    

Exposure to pollution could be making us fat, a new study from Spain shows. For a study published in the Acta Paediatrica scientists measured levels of a pesticide called hexachlorobenzine (HCB) in the umbilical cords of 403 children born on the island of Menorca. The children were then examined aged 6. The results showed that those with the highest levels of HCB were twice as likely to be obese. HCB has been banned since thse tests, but it remains in the environment. In any case, other man made chemicals may have a similar effect: research on animals has indicat ed a link between obesity and Bisphenol A (which is used in baby bottles); organotins (which is found in anti-fouling paints on ships and now present in fish; and phthalates (found in various cosmetics). Dubbed “obesogens” these chemicals are now so widespread that nearly everyone has them in their bodies.

Don’t worry this is just another motivation to eat as naturally as you can and get some effective exercise, and take care of your body-it’s the only one you’ve got. If you can’t quite gee yourself up then we of course suggest some fab personal training, even if it’s just once a week-we can also help to sort out your nutrition and so counter the effects of these nasty chemicals!

Women who try to remain too trim by dieting during pregnancy could be condemning their children to a lifetime of weight problems reports the Daily Mail. Researchers believe that if a baby is deprived of food in the womb, it’s fat cells develop abnormally, with the result that it gains weight more rapidly during childhood. “Whether we become obese is often established before, and soon after we are born and is influenced by both the eating habits of our mothers and by the nutrition we received as babies in the months after birth”, says Dr Helen Budge of the University Hospital in Nottingham. Processes set up early on in our lves can have life long effects.

At Diets Don’t Work our trainers are trained in pre and post natal health and fitness-during the pre natal period training sessions focus on a healthy and well rounded nutrition plan, keeping cardo-vascular fitness and maintaining lean muscle mass for a quicker and safer birth. It also has the added benefit of making the return to your pre-pregnancy weight smoother and quicker. We also target proprioception and balance based exercise to help keep clients physicaly and posturally balnced during the physiolagical changes that occur in pregnancy.

Adverts for unhealthy foods are still appearing during TV programmes seen by children, despite curbs introduced in January, a consumer watchdog has said.Which? said the five programmes with the most child viewers and only four of the top 20 most popular children’s shows were covered by Ofcom’s rules. These state that ads for “less healthy” foods are not allowed in or around programmes which “appeal” to under-16s. But advertisers said Which’s list included shows “not aimed” at children. A programme is defined as being of particular appeal to children if the proportion of those under 16 watching a programme is 20% higher than the general viewing population. This means shows like The Simpsons and SpongeBob SquarePants are covered, while shows like Beat the Star, Animals Do The Funniest Things and Emmerdale are not, even though they are watched by thousands more children. A two-week analysis by Which? found that ads for products including Coca-Cola, Oreos and Kellogg’s Coco Pops were broadcast during programmes popular with children but not covered by the restrictions. It said ITV’s Beat the Star attracted more than half a million child viewers during the monitoring period, but had contained ads for Coca-Cola, Dairylea Dunkers, Nachos and Sprite.

Which? food campaigner Clare Corbett said: “The ad restrictions may look good on paper but the reality is that the programmes most popular with children are slipping through the net. “If these rules are going to be effective, then they have to apply to the programmes that children watch in the greatest numbers.” She added: “We’re not anti-advertising, we’re just against the fact that most of the ads children see are for unhealthy products, rather than the healthier foods they should be eating more of.” But the Advertising Association said Which? seemed to want to unfairly restrict companies’ ability to deliver commercial messages. Chief executive Baroness Peta Buscombe called its report “sensationalist, unconstructive and missing the point” and said the advertising industry took a “responsible approach” to food advertising. She added: “Their list includes programmes clearly not aimed at children and films screened after 10pm. “There clearly has to be an element of parental responsibility on which programmes they allow their children to view.”

At Diets Don’t Work we of course believe in a moderate and healthy approach to nutrition, whether it be the nutrition of children and adults. It’s perhaps more important that the parents who have more control over what their children want to eat than TV know the value of instilling a healthy approach to food from an early age. Banning certain ads from children’s TV is not really going to work when their parents are taking them to McDonalds on a regular basis! The government and Ofcom might want to think about “nudging” rather than telling people what to do-this means that social norms are manipulated and people are led to believe that by eating junk food they are in a shunned minority-look how sucessful drink driving campaigns have been in creating a new social standard so that driving under the influence is now looked down on by most people’s peers and social groups. Show us the positive too-i.e use marketing that can emphasise the positive gains to be had by eating healthily and encouraging children to do so too! If you need help remember that we provide personal trainers who are qualified in nutrition and that all block bookings of personal training include nutritional help and assessment.

Arthritis is a very common medical condition, estimated to affect around seven million people in the UK.  However, it is not a single disease, but comes in around 200 different forms. The term essentially means an inflammation of the joints. This inflammation makes the joints painful, stiff, and swollen, and in severe cases can significantly restrict movement.Surprisingly, even with all the advances of modern science and medicine we are still not entirely sure what causes osteo-arthritis, but here’s what we know.. Not to be confused with rheumatiod arthritis, which is a result of a malfunctioning auto immune system and can happen to people of a younger age, osteo arthritis is more commonly associated with wearing out of the joints and connective tissue that occur with the ravages of time (as we at Diets Don’t Work like to call it!).  With aging, the water content of the cartilage increases, and the protein makeup of cartilage degenerates. Eventually, cartilage begins to degenerate by flaking or forming tiny crevasses. In advanced cases, there is a total loss of cartilage cushion between the bones of the joints. Repetitive use of the worn joints over the years can irritate and inflame the cartilage, causing joint pain and swelling. Loss of the cartilage cushion causes friction between the bones, leading to pain and limitation of joint mobility. Inflammation of the cartilage can also stimulate new bone outgrowths (spurs, also referred to as osteophytes) to form around the joints. Osteoarthritis occasionally can develop in multiple members of the same family, implying a hereditary (genetic) basis for this condition.

Now the good news-there is lots you can do to precent the onset and/or live with the condition if you already have it. One of the most important things is to be as light as you can (that’s a polite way of saying don’t be overweight).For every pound you are overweight that’s 0.5 of a pound extra that each knee is having to lug around. It does not sound like much but go to the supermarket and feel how much 1/2 a pound of potatoes weighs-it’s a lot! This extra weight will wear down the smooth hard catrialage on which your knee hinges faster that it otherwise would. Secondly try to eat as balanced a diet as possible-only when your body is getting enough nutrients and water will it be able to maintain this all important connective tissue. At Diets Don’t Work we also recommend taking glucosamine sulphate with chondroitin if you think you are beginning to get osteo arthritis.Exercise is also very very important. Not only will some structured weight-bearing exercise improve your overall health but it will help support your joints and encourage adaptive regeneration of connective tissue. Resistance training to keep the muscles of the upper leg (quads, in particular the vastus medialis) strong will also keep the patella in line and prevent excessive wear and tear.  Some of the symptoms are stiffness in the joints, especially weight bearing ones (ankles/knees/hips) and especially after a period of inactivity, inflammation, or a dull to painful ache in the joints. Look out for the extremities also (fingers/toes). At Diets Don’t Work all our trainers are qualified to REPS level 3 and so are able to train special population groups including osteo and rheumatoid arthritis. Many of our personal training clients suffer from these conditions to a lesser or greater degree but with specialist tailor made programmes our trainers can really help keep you active, fit, thinner and mobile!