The Ultimate Body Plan. Gemma Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ is something most people have gone through or will go through. My mum and dad divorced when I was ten and my mum has told me since that it was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. She said, ‘I would have left sooner but you were so young. I couldn’t do that to you.’ But I said, ‘What about yourself, Mum? Why would you stay with Dad if you weren’t compatible any more?’ She said, ‘When you have kids yourself you’ll understand.’ And some of my friends have stayed with men that weren’t right for them and I’ve thought, ‘But you’re miserable and wanting to kiss other lads at the weekend when you’re drunk because you’re so unhappy. How can that be better than leaving? Isn’t it better for kids not to live with two sad parents?’

      Bottom line is: we have no idea what anyone’s going through or dealing with. People could look at pictures of me at the time and think I was on top of the world. Work was going well, I looked ‘great’, I was young, single and free. Supposedly. When actually I was incredibly unhappy.

      When things weren’t getting any better, my sister Nina sat me down and said, ‘You lost Dad five years ago and you dealt with that – and that’s the hardest thing any young girl can deal with. So who the hell is an ex-boyfriend in comparison to Dad?’ I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s right! If I can get through losing Dad – a man who loved me unconditionally and who I assumed would always be around – I can get through losing a guy I’ve spent two or three years with.’ It made me realise that I was stronger than I knew. That although I might think, ‘I can’t cope with this’, I can. I’ve got through 34 years of both my best and my worst days and I’m still standing.

      I had to channel those thoughts again when things kicked off in the press in exactly the same way after I called off my engagement to Liam Richards in 2013. Actually, that time was worse because they now had two ‘failed engagements’ to pin on me. Liam and I were together for three and a bit years, but split because we were both working so hard we rarely saw each other during the last year. The headlines screamed: ‘She has the career, she has this and that, but she can’t find love!’ Or ‘What’s wrong with Gemma? Why can’t she hold on to a man?’ All the time I was thinking, ‘But I ended it! Maybe I didn’t want to settle for something that wasn’t right?’ Mum said, ‘You’re getting stressed about something you have no control over. Will them saying this about you matter in five years? No. So why waste five minutes on it then?’ That five years-five minutes rule is one I’ve carried with me throughout my life.

       Working things out

      I still assumed that to be fit the aim was to see numbers drop off the scales. That if I exercised like a demon, I’d look as slim as I did when I was heartbroken, but actually feel great too, rather than wanting to crawl into a hole and cry. But lo-and-behold that didn’t happen. No matter how many miles I sweated away on the treadmill or half-hearted dumbbell curls I did, I was still a 5ft 9in woman with muscly legs and broad shoulders. Who’d have thought it, huh? The saddest thing was that I hated my body for it. I was still convinced that to look good, and to look fit, I needed to be smaller – somehow less than I was now. It never occurred to me not to want to get smaller.

      Everything changed for me when I started exercising with personal trainer Olly Foster in 2014 at the Ultimate Performance gym in Mayfair when I was working in London. Olly said to me, ‘If you could look like anyone, who would it be?’ and I said right away, ‘Kylie Minogue. She’s tiny and petite. She looks great.’ He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You are NEVER going to look like Kylie Minogue. NEVER. You probably looked like Kylie Minogue when you were 12 years old. Let’s be realistic.’ My jaw dropped. How could he say that?! I was incredibly offended. It was this man’s job to make me look like Kylie Minogue.

      But then I looked around that gym – at all the women weight-lifting and loving it – and realised they weren’t using their bodies to look a specific way, they were using them to improve their health, posture, stamina and mental outlook. To improve everything. They were putting looks aside and prioritising how they felt. All different shapes and sizes, all mucking in, grunting and sweating and looking like total badasses! Then it hit me: of course I’m never going to look like Kylie Minogue. It’s ridiculous! And nor should I want to, because I’m simply not built that way.

      ‘Oh my God…,’ I said, and sat down, kind of stunned, as Olly started working out a programme for me. It’s like someone telling you, ‘The entire way you see yourself is messed up’ and realising they’re right. Olly said, ‘You’ve got really strong legs, maybe we could up the weight and you could use them more’, and again I was speechless. Instead of saying, ‘Let’s try to slim down your thighs’, he wanted me to make them more muscly?! Hell yes he did. He understood that my ‘thunder thighs’ could be a good thing. A great thing even. That my body could work in my favour. That instead of trying to be incredibly thin, having drainpipe legs and a pancake bum, I could have strong legs that would carry me further and faster, below a curvy bum. I realised that before now, I’d not only not been using my body to its best advantage, I’d been actively working against it, punishing it for looking the way it did, trying to bully it into being smaller, weighing less, being less. While all the time, all these women in the gym were doing the total opposite.

      Think about that for a moment: think about how much you punish your body – treating it badly, hating on it – for not looking like something or someone else. You will look your absolute best – not my best or Kylie’s best – when you accept what you cannot change and start working with your body, not against it. I learned an incredibly important lesson that day – I shouldn’t want to get fit to look a certain way, but to feel a certain way. Looking good means nothing if you don’t feel good.

       Good things come to women who weight(lift)

      Repeat after me: ‘weight training will not make me look like a man!’ You won’t become ‘too big’ by lifting weights. Women have nowhere near the amount of testosterone they’d need to ‘bulk up’ to the point that they look masculine. All weight training will do is make you leaner and fitter so you’ll still look and feel like a woman, but a warrior woman who can carry all her own bags, thanks very much.

       Here are just a few of the benefits of resistance training for women:

      1) It burns more fat. Yes, it’s true that while you’re actually performing the exercise you’re burning fewer calories weight-lifting than you would doing two hours on the cross-trainer (no, thank you). However, you’re actually increasing your metabolic rate, which means you’ll be burning more calories for longer afterwards.

      2) You can eat more. Your muscles will get denser and bigger, so you’ll need to eat more to maintain them. Or, looking at it the other way, you can handle a lot more calories. Result.

      3) You’ll get stronger bones. The pressure weight training puts on your bones encourages your body to invest in making them stronger and sturdier. This counteracts the natural propensity for women’s bone density to decrease from their 30s onwards.

      4) Your immune system will thank you. People who lift tend to have better eating habits and better quality of sleep, lower stress levels and improved circulation, all of which makes you healthier, period.

      5) You’ll feel like a combination of Xena, Jet and She-Ra.

      Please remember that the photos you see of me working out in the gym are taken when my muscles are swollen with blood to help me lift the weights. That’s why people СКАЧАТЬ