Hello and welcome to this episode of the ESG Fitness Podcast.

I'm going to shock a few of you now and I'm going to say that I quite like aggressive diets in January.

Now, I know that's probably not the most popular of opinions and you might be thinking, but normally you go on and on about moderation and not over-restricting.

And I'm going to come on to the fact that I'm not actually talking about over-restricting.

But I also think sometimes we push back too much and we miss out on what is like quite a cool wave of motivation that most people feel

in January. So the problem with more aggressive approaches generally is lack of support and no long-term

maintenance plan rather than the approach itself. And by that, I mean like

dropping calories a little bit lower. So I often diet clients harder in January on lower calories

with more steps, maybe some extra cardio in there, maybe a slightly harder training program.

They might have more structured and strict regimes around morning routines and extras that I might

add in. And that's because most people are highly motivated in January. They can do more. They

want to do more. They've also usually overindulged throughout December

and are pretty satisfied, if not like overly satisfied and quite happy to get back to kind

of healthy eating and to forego the higher calorie foods and they probably don't want to look

at another minced pie and they don't

really want to drink for a while like as an example of this a lot of my clients choose to do

dry January and it's not because they are abstaining or over-restricting it's because they're like

I've actually had enough of drinking for a while and I think it would just do me good and I want to

just have a period of time without that. Great, lean into it. I think it's silly to push

moderation on people when they actively don't want it. Like, don't, like, it's a strange society

that we live in, but alcohol is not good for you.

Now, even when people are like, oh, but red wine, yeah, some of the antioxidants from red wine might be good for you.

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