Start 2024 By Nourishing Your Mind, Body and Gut With Offiss’ First Well-Being Event

Offiss has started off 2024 on the right track with our first-ever free well-being event!

Held on Wednesday 17th January 2024, three businesses who are part of our Offiss family shared their knowledge and tips for promoting well-being at the start of the new year.

Firstly, we were motivated to start our fitness journey by the wonderful team of Genna Bell and Adam McKinley of AG Fit, before cooking up a healthy dish with Wendy Hill, Nutritional Therapist of HillStart Nutrition Health & Wellness, and finished the session with some inspiring meditation and affirmations from Katy Farr of Katy Farr Coaching.

Step into your fitness journey

Genna and Adam began by sharing the short and long-term benefits of training, such as becoming more fit and muscular, and improving your mental health. The long-term benefits include increasing muscle mass - after the age of 30, individuals who don't have an active lifestyle lose 3-8% of muscle mass per decade. To prevent this, just 30-60 minutes of strength training across a week ensures a 10-20% drop in causes of mortality.

Following the benefits of training, the next question they answered is - how do we get started? Surprisingly, only 16% of people in the UK have a gym membership, and many of us say we just don’t have the time to exercise. AG Fit shares that the best way is to start from the basics - it can be as simple as going for a walk, then finding something you enjoy such as swimming or a class. You are much more likely to do an activity if it has that enjoyment factor!

You may have heard that consistency is key, and in this case it’s so true! While motivation is what gets us started, it’s not something we can sustain every day when we are stressed and life takes over. There’s a misconception that you have to enjoy every workout, but actually it’s important to just show up on a regular basis and work within your lifestyle.

Linking into the next section of the evening, Genna and Adam also gave advice on supplements - how to avoid the gimmicks, the misconception around buzz words, and what you actually need to take (for example, you don’t need to drink protein beer!)

You are what you eat

Next, Wendy Hill gathered us around the table to sample two dishes and a dessert while she gave valuable nutrition tips. The four ingredients you need on a healthy, well-balanced plate are: protein, fibre, fat and colour. Every cell in our body starts with protein, so it is the most basic nutrient. Fibre is vital for healthy digestion and to clear out toxins, while healthy fats give us the nutrition we need, and aren’t bad for us in the way that glucose is. By aiming to eat the rainbow everyday, this boosts our veg consumption and means that we gain a range of phytonutrients.

Wendy’s approach to nutrition focuses on intuitive eating, rather than depriving yourself. Everytime you eat, even if it’s a snack, your digestive system thinks it’s a full meal, so it’s important to treat it as such and incorporate all four ingredients to gain all the nutrients we need.

Wendy whipped up two delicious dishes, which tasted unbelievably good considering their simple ingredients - lentils, rocket, tomato, olives, avocado, lime juice, pomegranate seeds, cress, and some bacon for the meat-lovers! Everyone was also eager to tuck into her salted chocolate bites for dessert - made with oats, dates, dark chocolate, sea salt, coconut oil, tahini, and ground flax seed. These scrumptious bites have no sugar or dairy in them, but still taste like they do!

Manifest your mindfulness

The event finished with the inspirational Katy Farr giving us some life coaching tips to take away and implement into our lives to start the year off. The Key Programme focuses on the creation of positive spaces and opportunities in each area of your life - health, wealth, business, finances, etc.

One of the ways to do this is practising gratitude daily - in 21 days we can rewire the connections in our brain to reset the negativity bias we have. This can be as simple as being grateful for a good cup of coffee, and can be as formal as writing in a journal or thinking about it in the shower.

Another vital point is to be aware of the vibrations we are giving off and whether these are positive or negative. Awareness of the vibes you bring into a space and to the people around you makes a big difference to the opportunities you create - if we’re not aware we can’t make changes, as we believe that things in the world happen to us instead of creating opportunities ourselves.

We finished with a meditation focused on deliberate creation, a higher level of awareness, thinking, ‘I create my life by what I give my energy, attention and focus to’ and choose whether this is positive or negative.

This mindset links into everything we were told by Genna, Adam and Wendy - if you keep telling yourself you have no time or motivation to go to the gym and eat healthy, then you won’t. You won’t see results overnight, but it is about practising patience, gratitude, accountability and creating those healthy habits.

Following the success of this first event, featuring a wonderful turnout of people eager to start their journeys for the new year, Offiss will be hosting more events throughout 2024. Our next event will focus on networking, so stay tuned to our social channels to find out more!

If you want to find out about any of these businesses, you can do so at the links below:

AG Fit - https://www.instagram.com/gennabell_fit/

HillStart Nutrition Health & Wellness - https://hillstart.me.uk/

Katy Farr Coaching - https://www.instagram.com/katy_farr_coaching/

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