January is typically a big month for gyms and health clubs, with recruitment campaigns targeting lapsed members and people making fitness-related New Year resolutions.

Most clubs set healthy recruitment targets for January, aiming to recruit new members who have set themselves ‘healthy’ targets! Following on this month, we are running a ‘Pounds for Pounds’ campaign, effectively working with you to help reach any weight-related targets you may have as part of your own health and fitness objectives.

The whole concept of weight loss is a tricky one for health clubs to use as part of any offer or campaign. The desire to lose weight is one of the main reasons people join and use health clubs, but as any doctor or dietician will tell you there are other factors that come into play such as lifestyle and diet.

There is also the knowledge that people can try to lose weight too quickly or continue to lose weight beyond their original targets (which studies have shown to become addictive and unhealthy in itself). Not surprisingly at Choices Health Clubs, we encourage all members who set weight loss as one of their goals to seek professional advice and consider other aspects such as diet and lifestyle in addition to attending our gyms.

Having said that we do want to share some important and proven facts with you as part of our Pounds for Pounds campaign:

1. If you are planning to set a specific weight loss target then make sure you do it in conjunction with a doctor, dietician or trained professional who can advise on the ideal weight for your age, body type, and lifestyle.

2. You should not try to lose all the weight in the first week! Again, a trained professional should be able to help you structure a plan over an acceptable period, which will most likely be months and not hours or days!

3. Remember that your body weight varies naturally during any 24-hour period. This can be as much as 5-6lbs, or nearly half a stone! It is therefore important to measure and track weight loss at the same time of day and in the same food/drink cycle. It is suggested to do this either first thing in the morning before eating anything or doing exercise, or last thing at night after everything is completed including food and drink intake! You can then accurately track changes over a period of time knowing you are comparing like for like!

4. Training and exercise directly alter your body weight through a range of processes, and it is important to understand these as part of your long-term weight loss plan. As you would expect sweating involves fluid loss from the body, which has an immediate impact on your body weight. A pint of water weighs around 1lb, so it is easy to lose weight during exercise and think you have done well. But you need to replace fluids too, so make sure you don’t get too excited and keep things in perspective. Remember what we said in point 3. above in relation to measuring at the same time and over the longer term.

5. Another fact that is worth mentioning is the weight implications of fat changing to muscle as you exercise over time. It may sound obvious, but a pound of fat weighs the same as a pound of muscle, but muscle is much denser. Therefore, converting a set volume of fat into the same volume of muscle will lead to a slight increase in weight. This may set off alarm bells when you weigh yourself, especially during the early stages of a training regime, but as long as the overall trend is positive, your body volume is decreasing, and you look and feel better, then all is good!

6. The final point we want to make relates to your mental approach to weight loss. As we have highlighted above, daily fluctuations are natural. Some days you will see larger changes than others, and occasionally sometimes an increase. These are all natural, so don’t get too downbeat or hard on yourself. Look at trends and data over longer periods. Weigh yourself every day, but look at the trend over a week, fortnight or month. This will give a better gauge of how you are doing and if anything needs to change.

All three of our Choices Health Clubs are perfectly geared towards helping you achieve your personal weight loss targets, so give us a call and come see how we can help build a training and exercise regime that works for you.