The Body Coach 90 Days SSS – Taking the plunge

Hey ladies! Hands up if you’ve tried every single shitty diet going. You have? Join the club! If it promises quick results, instant fat burn, to give me an arse like Beyonce or legs like Taylor Swift (which is physically impossible considering I’m 5’2″) then you can guarantee I’ve tried it. And failed.

I’m now 28 and ever since I was about 14 I’ve obsessed over what I eat. This is pretty naff for several reasons:

1. I’m not overweight. My BMI has always hovered around 23 and I’ve been a size 10 for the most part

2. I LOVE my food. Whether it’s cooking it, eating it, talking about it I just can’t enough of the stuff. A life without food is, quite simply, wank.

3. What the bleeding hell is wrong with the world when a 14 year old feels the need to diet?!

But regardless of this I still step on the scales every, single day and beat myself up and the thought of getting into a bikini often makes me feel like I might do a little sick.

In the past couple of years I’ve made some progress by discovering the wonders of exercise but I’ve always been on the hunt for the holy grail. That diet, or more importantly lifestyle plan, which will stop me worrying about every single pound on the scales and quite honestly sort my shit out. And then someone introduced me to this chap on Instagram…

Enter…The Body Coach.

Image via @thebodycoach on Instagram. Follow him – he’s funny. And a bit fit.

Joe Wicks is the man behind the fitness world’s most recent revelation – The Body Coach.  As a qualified personal trainer Joe’s mission is to get you to eat more and exercise less. No – that’s not a typo. Eat MORE and exercise LESS! This caught my attention…

Joe’s 90 Day SSS (Shift, Shape and Sustain) programme is broken down into three sections and as the name suggests, aims to help you shed the fat, tone up and then adjust your lifestyle to maintain your results. Each stage is tailored to your personal needs and throughout the programme you’re assigned your own coach, who’s at the end of an email should you need them.  Usually I’d be with all you cynics out there, shouting, “He’s mugging you off!” but a few weeks of following his Instagram (which I would recommend to everyone simply for the BRILLIANT recipe videos!) and seeing the frankly incredible transformations and I was more than a bit curious. Add to that several friends and colleagues extolling the virtues and a couple of hours spent trawling the internet for ‘real life’ blogs and I was ready to hand over the cash.

The plan itself is nothing short of intense. When you place the order (either £149 in one go for the whole plan or £49 monthly for three months) you get sent a login to your personal online profile. There you complete an extensive questionnaire about your current lifestyle, food and exercise habits and a week’s food diary. I’ve always known my problem is the weekends, but seeing it in black and white really highlighted the fact that five days of healthy eating and exercise can be massively undone by a weekend of cider, cheese, burgers and hangovers. Finally, you have to submit three photos of yourself in your underwear – hopefully not because The Body Coach is a massive perv, but more so you can see your progress month on month. And before you ask absolutely no chance – ain’t nobody need to see pictures of me in my pants!

Once you’ve pushed the button and submitted your details The Body Coach will review your details and a week later your bespoke diet and training plan lands in your inbox. And what a surprise that was…

I’ve always had a healthy appetite, to the point that I was often nicknamed ‘Hollow Legs’ as a kid. But one of Joe’s first observations in my plan was the fact that if I’d been eating as my week’s food diary detailed for a prolonged period of time I was effectively starving myself. The lack of calories were ‘seriously compromising my metabolism’, so much so that my Cycle One plan had been designed to incorporate 20% fewer calories than usual. I was pretty flabbergasted.

Food wise I’m feeling pretty positive. Depsite the sheer volume of the stuff the menu doesn’t look at all bad. As someone who always cooks from scratch and is a big fan of batch cooking and prepping my meals in advance it all works in my favour, and with dishes like chicken and cashew nut curry, stuffed spicy peppers and Mediterranean fish with polenta I think I’m going to be just fine. The science behind Cycle One is you eat three meals a day – two low carb, high protein and high fat and one high carb, protein and lower fat – strictly only to be eaten post workout. This refuels your body and allows your metabolism to increase, hence burning fat quicker – sounds good to me.

Image via @thebodycoach on Instagram.

And exercise is where it gets even more exciting. If like me you’ve ever ran on a treadmill for hours, bored off your tits and wondering if it’s all worth it then according to Joe it’s not. Following The Body Coach’s plan you workout five times a week, for no more than 25 minutes at a time! All workouts in Cycle One are HIIT (high intensity interval training), which in short means pushing yourself to the limit for 30 seconds, then resting for 30 seconds – repeated for 20 minutes. You can find all of Joe’s workouts for free on YouTube and having done a few of them so far I can confirm they don’t half get you sweating! This, combined with your diet plan, should be enough to kick start your body into upping it’s metabolism, boosting your fitness and fingers crossed, shedding fat.

So, with Day One starting tomorrow here’s my promise to you. I’ve told you what I think on first impressions and I’m going to tell you what I think at the end of each cycle. I’ll detail what I’ve eaten, where I’ve slipped up, and most importantly, share my progress. As someone who has the willpower of a nit I’m not expecting it to  be a breeze but hey, I’ve paid the cash now so I’ve got to do it!

Wish me luck!