How I changed my attitude to food and drink and raised my personal fitness levels

This is part of my blog about my personal journey to greater fitness and health, both physical and emotional.

I want to tell you that it's been a tough few years but several things have transformed everything in my life recently.

The first thing was my personal realisation that things will have to change. The second was proper investigation around health, fitness and nutrition. The third thing was finding a personal fitness trainer who could really help me to improve my fitness levels in a healthy way.

One of the great things that has changed in my life has been my attitude to food and drink in relation to health and fitness.

I used to eat junk food, Cola and lots of alcohol.

But all that has changed.

I started reading about juicing. I didn't go down the road of a pure juice cleanse, because I have read that the science is out on whether it is purely healthy or not. What I did was to juice whole fruit and vegetables, including skins, retaining every part of them including the fibre.

Doing that every morning separated my cravings for food at the start of the day.

I eradicating white refined carbohydrates from my diet. Sugar, pasta and rice all went. They were replaced with unrefined sugars in moderation, such as honey, wholemeal pasta and rice and I also substituted a lot more proteins and nuts and seeds into my diet.

In addition I cut out the alcohol and moved towards drinking water. 2 L of water every day as a minimum.

In two weeks I felt a lot better. But I won't tell you it was easy. The sugar cravings were absolute hell. That stuff is evil and it will really get you in the beginning. The biggest barrier I found to health and fitness was breaking the sugar cravings.

Watch out for your portion sizes!

The other thing I noticed was that my portion sizes were absolutely huge.

I didn't think so until I started to look around me. I realised that I had a fear of not having enough food, and that attitude was also impacting my family's health as I was dishing up large portions to them and keeping food in reserve to have seconds is available.

This is a recipe for disaster.

Buy smaller plates. Seriously. It really helps.

Don't keep food back. Dish it all up once and make sure everybody knows that there is no more.

The other great tip is to sit down and eat as a family and make sure there is conversation. That way the food will be more slowly and you will feel more satisfied afterwards.

These simple tips have really helped me in conjunction with a proper fitness program to transform my life. I've lost a huge amount of my body weight and dropped several dress sizes.

My confidence is now sky high and I am really looking forward to the future. I know there are millions of people out there feeling the way I did, it's a tough journey but unless you start the journey then you will never get your destination.