This is another one of my favouritre meals on a Summer’s night because you can put it in the oven just after lunch and then it is ready to serve for dinner with a nice salad.

Take 1 leg of lamb with the bone still in. 

Season with salt and pepper. You can stud it with garlic cloves and rosemary if you like for extra flavour. You can also drizzle lemon juice over before adding salt and pepper.

Place in a pre-heated oven at 180 degress for about 30 mins. The lamb should start to go a bit golden by now, so take it out, place about 1 1/2 inches of boiling water in the tray and cover with foil, making sure it is air tight.

Place it back in the oven at about 150 – 160 degress for about 3-4 more hours.

Remove the foil, turn the oven up to 190 degrees for about 15 mins. Remove from the oven and you are left with the most tender piece of lamb you have ever eaten or your money back. (please see you local supermarket for money back guarantee, no reponsibility is taken by Fitta Bodies for this statement, so please don’t say my trainer said I could get a refund when you speak to the checkout person.)

There will still be some water left in the tray at the end, so don’t worry if it hasn’t all evaporated.

Serve this with your favourite salad or veggies.

This is tasty little treat I made most days over the Christmas break. It is so simple and you can serve it with any type of protein you like for a light summer meal.

Here are the ingredients for 1 person;

Baby spinach – as much as you like
1/2 punnet of cherry tomatoes – washed
1 medium sized spanish onion – chopped into thin wedges
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
Salt
Pepper

Toss the cherry tomatoes with salt and pepper to taste, drizzle over a small amount of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Place in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees for about 30 minutes. 

While they are in the oven, make the spinach dressing;

Place some balsamic vinegar into a bowl, add a small amount of mustard to taste, add salt and pepper to taste.
Start whisking and slowly drizzle in the olive oil. Make sure to drizzle slowly and whisk quickly so the oil doesn’t separate form the vinegar. Taste periodically until there is enough oil to suit your taste. A general rule of thumb is to put a ratio of about 3:1 oil to vinegar. 

If you have whisked and drizzled correctly, you should end up with a thick, syrupy  consistency and it shouldn’t need mixing prior to serving, unlike a traditional vinaigrette which need to be shaken to mix the oil and vinegar before serving.

Use a small amount of this dressing to toss through the washed spinach leaves.
Toss the onions and tomatoes through the dressed spinach. Simple!

A couple of things to add:

For more bulk, add diced pumpkin or sweet potato that has been roasted at the same time in the same way as the onion and tomato.

For something a bit naughty and tasty, add some Persian Fetta to the spinach at the last moment.

Yum!

Ok, so in Let’s get fit for summer Part 1, we discussed how many calories you could be burning off if you turn up to all your workouts. 

Now we will look at how what you put into your mouth has just as much if not more affect on your body than exercise.

Let me firsty say that yes, food should be enjoyable! But no, it should not be detrimental to our health!

Food is the fuel that keeps our bodies functioning day to day. We need to be feeding our bodies with healthy food to function properly.

Healthy food is not only good for long term health, but it is great for us in regards to weight loss, because healthy food generally has less calories. We all know that we need to burn more calories than we are consuming in order to lose weight. 

For more information on caloires, please refer to Calories Part 1 & Calories Part 2. You will be able to calculate just how many calories you should be eating.

Now, let’s say you want to lose 1 kg of fat. As mentioned in part 1, this is 7700 calories. I recommend creating a diet defecit of approx 500 calories a day in order to safely and effectively lose weight.

Easy to say, not so easy to do! The fact is, most people eat way more than they should every day. Then they exercise and wonder why they are not losing weight. If you exercise 5 days a week and burn off roughly 3000 caloires in the week, but you eat 600 calories a day more than you need to, you won’t lose any weight! This is not taking into account the weekend where you probably eat more!

So, you decide to eat well… You do this for a week, maybe 2, you start to feel better in yourself. You feel lighter, you feel less bloated, you notice a difference in your waistline. But then the takeaway food sneaks back in. The dessert after dinner sneaks back in. You start to skip breakfast again and before you know it, you are back into your old habits.

Maybe something far worse happens… you decide to go on a diet. I am not sure which one, I don’t really care which one, they are all as bad as each other. The fact is, when eventually you go off the diet, you will gain back all of the weight you lost and then some. I have the proof, hundreds of people I have spoken to who all tell me about the diet they are on or have been on and who all without a doubt, put all of the weight back on, regardless of their training because they haven’t created any good eating habits and when they aren’t on some sort of diet, they just eat badly!

Eating well is a life long habit you need to create. Weight loss should be slow and steady and acheived through a change in diet, exercise and lifestyle habits.

So we’ve looked at exercise and food, what about liquid… Next week we will look at all of those empty calories in alcohol in Let’s get fit for Summer Part 3.

Yours in fitness

Troy Shipsey

Everywhere I look these days, there is information about a “diet”. Any diet and every diet. This diet and that diet. Have you heard of this diet? Have you tried that diet? What do you think of this diet? I think I’m going to try that diet. So and so has got a great diet out. That other guy has got a new diet out. Thingy has come up with an entirely new diet. There is back log of getting product for that diet, so it must be awesome!

Give me a break! If each diet worked long term, then we wouldn’t have a million and one diet books on the shelf.

On the cover of a popular magazine I once saw Kirsty Alley and Oprah Winfrey and the headline was “The great diet showdown”. Is this how we should be thinking? Taking advice from two women who yo-yo with their weight more than anyone in the public eye!

We need to stop the diet mentality!

We need to realise that health is more about eating healthy food, not about being thin regardless of the path taken to get there!

In order to live a healthy life, you should eat a diet rich in fruit and vegetables (preferably organic if possible, but not essential). I also believe in eating fish, lean organic chicken & eggs and a little organic red meat.

If you want to eat junk food, save it for the weekend and eat it in moderation. Limit yourself to 2 junk food meals per weekend.

Remember that fruit and vegetables are carbohydrates, so this is not a carb free diet! It is a natural eating diet. No gimmicks here, just eating food in it’s natural form.

Try it, you will feel so much better, your energy levels will be higher, you will lose weight and you won’t feel bloated hours after a meal.

If we all just stopped looking for the quick fix or giving these stupid diets the time of day, we could all focus on eating for good long term health.

The only people who benefit long term from these diets are the guys who came up with the diets and sold a whole bunch of books and supplements to ingnorant people who want the quick fix.

I urge you to take control and think about the information you are being fed. Block out the con artists who want to take advantage and get rich from your desire to create “a healthy body”.

Try to eat as close to the natural form a food comes as possible and exercise regularly.

Yours in Health and Fitness

Troy Shipsey