Q I'm sick of diets, but I'm terrified about braving the beach this summer. But no change there: I feel like this every year. In fact, I rarely, if ever, take off my sarong on the beach and prefer to sweat it out on the sand than to remove the thing and expose my awful bikini bod. And I never paddle – or waddle might be more accurate – into the sea unless the beach is empty; which is, like, never. Please help.
Sharl
A Once we accept that exercise – regular exercise – is the fundamental element in a healthy lifestyle, we are able to adopt better, healthier habits all round, including giving up the foods that may be contributing to the waddle of which you complain.
My new ebook, The Grit Doctor's Summer Food and Fitness Plan, aims to leave you feeling good about your body and motivated to work harder towards improving both your fitness and eating habits. It is the antidote to all that bikini beach babe dieting rhetoric which is, frankly, more likely to make us waddle faster towards the ice-cream van. Our own bodies are so far removed from bikini babe images as to leave us feeling alienated and uninspired.
I don’t know why you are bothering with that whole bikini-sarong ensemble, anyway. It’s so fiddly and impractical for the beach; especially the sort of activity-centric beach holiday I have in mind for you, Sharl. I consider it to be a major perk of being a mother of two that I no longer have to worry about wearing a bikini. I’ll stick with a flattering one-piece, thank you very much, possibly with a little waddle-winching built-up middle part that particularly favours the twin mum.
I highly recommend one of these to anyone in need of a boost; it will instantly transform your beach-body image a thousandfold.
No excuse
But I won’t be using this as an excuse to eat crap and lounge about on the sofa in advance of our holiday in France. I will be watching what I eat and trying to be healthy where I can and sticking with my regular running, so that I can fully participate on holiday. I want to be able to run around on the beach with my kids and on my own when they are in bed – but, more crucially, I want to relish all those delicious French baguettes, cheeses, wine and croissants that will form the staples of my holiday diet.
Look, the real problem is not that most of us look a bit terrible in a bikini past a certain age, but that expectations of what we are supposed to look like in bikinis – or could look like, if only we dieted hard enough – have gone totally bananas.
Remember that only a minuscule proportion of the global population look like the supermodels wearing them. In fact, bearing in mind that you can count the number of supermodels in the entire world on two hands, it is a crazy comparison ever to make.
The perfect bikini babe images seem commonplace because of the level at which we are bombarded with them daily and from all media angles. You are more likely to be sunbathing next to a Nobel Peace Prize-winner than a supermodel, for goodness sake. And they get paid hundreds of thousands of euro a week to look like that, which is incentive enough for anyone to live on celery juice and fresh air.
This is why, when you actually go to the beach, you are probably pleasantly surprised that most of the women your age (no comparing yourself to girls and nubile teenagers, please) look more or less the same as you. Unless you are holidaying in St Tropez, St Bart’s or Mustique, in which case, bad luck.
Provided you are not stuffing your face and gobbling ice creams all day, that you are making whatever efforts you can to try to clean up your eating – cooking from scratch when possible; eating only at mealtimes; keeping an eye on portion control; saying no to seconds; ramping up your greens all the time; and generally being mindful about whether you are truly hungry and eating only when you are; and are willing to throw yourself into regular exercise – you are going to feel great this summer and the beach will no longer be a source of fear but a potential training ground for all those early sunrise or sunset jogs that may well become the highlight of your holiday this year. And every year thereafter.
The Grit Doctor says
That’s the kind of beach body I’m talking about. One that works, and that can run more than 500 yards without fear of cardiac arrest.
Ruth Field is the author of Run Fat B!tch Run, Get your Sh!t Together and Cut the Crap. Her new ebook, The Grit Doctor's Summer Food and Fitness Plan, is available to download at http://goo.gl/KVo6gU
