Well, the first meeting last night was good. I needn’t have been nervous about it at all. There are just seven of us in the group, plus our trainers Russell and Bev.
We spent the first hour going through the programme and the 9 tools that we need teach ourselves the new habits that will enable us to take back control of our lives. All very positive. The only frightening bit was getting on the scales and being measured – there was no getting away from the evidence of my expansion. But the beauty of the Pete Cohen course is that we don’t get measured and weighed every week – we won’t do that again until the end of the 8 week course, so we’ll be looking at a long period of change rather than a week-long snapshot. Encouraging.
We all introduced ourselves to each other and gave a bit of our backgrounds. What a surprise – we had all tried various other diets over the years and had put the weight back on. One girl, Eva, summed things up very well for most of us – she is extremely good at dieting as she’s had so much practice at it. The problem is she’s also good at putting the weight back on. Don’t I just know what she means!
Of the seven of us, four already know each other through their work at a local school, so hopefully that means we’ll come together as a big group even more quickly and become really supportive of each other.
After the talking, we went down to the dance studio so Russell and Bev could explain how the exercise session each week would work. It will all be based on resistance training, which basically means making your muscles work as hard as they can but not jumping up and down like a kangaroo on steroids.
Seems that all those aerobics classes I did back in the 1980′s in my trendy neon blue and pink leggings, headband and leg warmers really were a waste of time, as well as giving me a bad back and knees! Hindsight is a wonderful thing but can lead you to despair sometimes!
So it seems that arm curls, lunges and squats at the same time as holding a pair of 2kg weights is the new order of the day. Although Russell did a lovely impression of lunge vacuuming, which he apparently learned from GMTV (that’s what he owned up to anyway!). I now can’t get out of my head the mental image I’d conjured up of him in a french maid’s outfit pushing a Hoover in one hand and using a feather duster in the other. Each to his own, I guess 
. At least Jennifer Aniston is prettier.
We also learned an amazing fact from Russell – that apparently a good belly laugh for 10 seconds uses up an amazing amount of calorie s – a good few hundred I’m sure he said. No doubt someone will correct me on the facts here – and please do! But it made us wonder why diet classes don’t involve someone telling jokes, so one of the girls, suggested we all think up a joke to tell next week in between the circuits so we can keep using up the calories even when we’re resting! Russell will have to become a stand up comedian for us. You never know it might become a second career for him.
So I’ve now got to log on to Pete Cohen’s website and start doing my daily bit of work, to understand the programme better and choose which of the 9 tools I’m going to focus on for the first 21 days. There are three tools relating to food, another three to behaviours and three more to exercise. The idea is to choose a couple of these tools and stick to them for the first 21 days, by which time they will have become habitual. You then choose some more for the next 21 day period, so by the end of the 8 week course, you will have mastered at least some of them and so change will have happened. And its the change that will lead to weight loss, not calorie counting. And that’s why I know it’s going to work for me. So wish me luck.
