In the Media
2006-01-23, The Edmonton Journal
New Year New You: Week 1
Chris Zdeb, journal staff writer, Edmonton
Regular meals will help you burn fat
Bobbi Robbins has had only three hour-long workout sessions with a trainer, hasn’t lost any weight, but she already thinks she looks better. That’s the power of exercise.
“I always feel really good when I’m done exercising,” she says. “It’s hard when you’re doing it – I’m feeling some muscles I haven’t felt for a while and other muscles I didn’t know I had – but when I’m done, the feeling is awesome.
“When you exercise on your own and push yourself, you tend to make it easy as possible for yourself, so you cheat. Alex (Alexandra Senkow, fitness director at Defining Eve personal fitness studio, and Robbins trainer) provides instruction when you’re doing an exercise wrong and she doesn’t let you cheat,” Robbins says.
Mondays are her cardio workouts, which will help her achieve her goal of losing weight. Tuesdays and Thursdays focus on functional strength training, specifically targeting Robbins’s lower back and strengthening the left side of her body.
Senkow had her use a stability ball for core strengthening.
The workouts are about what she expected, Robbins says, “I’m enjoying them immensely, it’s just hard to get motivated everyday.” Robbins spent 20 minutes working out on her own Wednesday on an elliptical trainer in her building. Her homework is to do six side planks a day, holding each plank for 20 seconds, and on her left side only to strengthen it.
Neither woman expected Robbins to record weight loss after her first week of training. “It takes time to raise your metabolism so that you can create a calorie deficit,” Senkow explains. In Robbins’s case it’s not a matter of getting her to eat less to lose weight but to get her to eat more to stoke her fat burning furnace.
Robbins estimates before the program she was eating about 1, 800 calories a day. The routine was: no breakfast; soup, water and a cup of coffee at lunch; then a supper of chicken, vegetables and salad.
“She’s taught her body to function on fewer calories which lowers your metabolism,” Senkow says. “Physical activity – so elevating your heart rate, developing muscle tone – helps raise your resting metabolism which requires more calories to maintain,” she explains.
Senkow has told Robbins to start eating every three hours throughout the day. Robbins says she’s still not eating breakfast, though she figures a banana on her way to work is doable, but she is packing a lunch – tuna, a banana, yogurt and juice, for example; snacking midmorning and mid afternoon and eating a healthy supper.
Starting weight: 199 pounds. Week 1: 199 pounds
Bobbie Robbins won 12 weeks of personal training with Alexandra Senkow, fitness director at Defining Eve personal training studio, in The Journal’s New Year, new You contest. Check in ext week on the second week of Bobbi’s fitness adventure.
