Posted on September 25, 2014 by Jenny Cromack

In a time when many of us are obsessed with the scales I think the picture above shows, as I’ve blogged about before, that as personal trainers we should also use other yardsticks to measure success such as inch loss, dress/waist size and how much fitter, stronger and healthier our personal training clients feel.

So, I’ve decided to start writing about our personal training success stories and celebrate the fantastic achievements of our clients.

Donna is definitely one of motive8 North’s personal training success stories of this year.

In January 2014 Donna joined one of the Wellness Groups we run for a corporate client, she had decided no longer did she want to be the size she was and 2014 was the year to do something about and boy has she done just that!

Donna was a stereo typical newbie to motive8 North. She went to the gym and did tonnes of steady state cardio thinking this was the best way to lose weight (after all the Cross Trainer was telling her she burned 300 calories per half hour so it must be right!) and followed a diet which she thought was pretty healthy but didn’t realise that the amount of processed foods and unhealthy carbs she was eating was hampering any kind of weight loss she desired.

I’ll be honest, I was confident that with the correct education I could easily change these habits and get good results but the biggest obstacle I faced was that Donna told me she didn’t like a lot of different foods (and she didn’t seem willing to try anything or change this!) and therefore she would ‘give the Wellness Group’ a few weeks and see how it went…..oh how I wish I had recorded that conversation and could play it for her now! Donna is a now a different person, not just in the way she looks but also in her attitude towards food and exercise, in fact her whole lifestyle.

At the start of this blog I said Donna was one of our biggest personal training success stories of the year and the main reason for this is that Donna absorbs all of the information we discuss in the Wellness Group like a sponge and applies it. For Donna, this isn’t a quick fix, it’s a lifestyle change and at motive8 North that is what we believe our nutritional plan is….something which can be sustained in the long term, leading to maintenance at a weight or dress/waist size you are happy with rather than yo-yo’ing up and down.

Donna’s Typical Diet Pre-Motive8 North:

Breakfast – None

Lunch – Chicken Sandwich (white bread) or jacket potato with cheese

Dinner –  Anything that was quick, pizza, something and chips/potatoes

Snacks – Crisps, chocolate, cakes

Donna’s Typical Diet Now:

Breakfast – Scrambled or Poached Eggs

Lunch – Salad with prawns or Tuna and seeds

Dinner – Grilled steak or chicken  and lots of vegetables

Snacks – Satsuma and nuts or berries with nuts

As part of the Wellness Group we have a group personal training session to give everyone who attends the chance to try exercises and training methods they may never have used before, and in Donna’s case this has worked a treat, changing her training from steady state training to include weights and interval training has achieved the results she was looking for.

Donna’s Typical Workout Pre-Motive8 North:

Cross trainer for 20 mins, treadmill for 20mins and rower for 20 mins

Donna’s Typical Workout Now:

Lots and lots of interval training, boxing and circuit training with weights.

So, apart from now being able to fit into one leg of her old pair of trousers, what else has Donna achieved? Since (08.01.14) she has lost 2stone 7.2lb and 31.25 inches which is immense. Donna started life with motive8 as a size 16 and is now a size 10.

Well done Donna!