Want to reach your fitness goals?
Schedule a nude/boudoir photo shoot for when your training ends!
EDMONTON – Personal health and fitness trainer Paul Plakas posed an unusual request to his clients last fall. Instead of putting on weight over the Christmas holidays, Plakas asked his clients to get ripped and then, in January, have a nude photo taken of the results.
Not surprisingly, most of them told him, NO! Even the ones who ended up eventually saying yes.
“We were like, ‘Are you crazy! I’m not doing that!’” Laura Skafar remembers, laughing. “We’re all middle-aged chicks.”
Plakas, co-owner of Custom Fit personal training studio, and star of two lifestyle weight-loss TV series, X-Weighted, and Taking It Off, has nude photos of himself taken in his 20s, 30s and now, in his 40s.
“I just wanted to compare and see how my body changed over the decades,” he says.
Knowing there’s a nude photo ahead of you is also a real motivator to staying focused on your goal.
Before his nude photo shoot, Plakas sees how lean he can get by eating healthfully and stepping up his workouts, usually over two months.
This year he plans to get back into bike racing. He wanted a head start by not gaining the six to eight pounds he and most people put on over Christmas, he explains. “I usually have to spend January, February and March losing it.”
He thought it would be easier if there were other people doing the same thing, a little group that would keep each other accountable, hence the invite to clients trying to lose those pesky last five to 10 pounds.
“We picked the holidays because it is the toughest time of the year to do this,” Plakas says “I wanted to prove to (my clients) if you can do it over this time of year, you can do it at any point in your life.”
Eight women — two of them stay-at-home moms with three kids each — and three men, accepted Plakas’s Get Ripped Over Christmas/Nude Photo Shoot challenge, although all of the latter passed on pictures. Three of the women found the challenge too tough and dropped out. The rest, who were 35 to 62 years old, lost between six pounds and 22 pounds over two months.
Plakas, 45, lost 12 pounds.
“It was pretty difficult,” says Shara Tardif, 35, who has three kids, “but I’m a baker and I’m a wine drinker, and (the challenge) kept me from overindulging and made me a little more accountable over those weeks of debauchery.
“I basically cut out the baking, but I still cheated and had a couple of glasses of wine every once in a while,” she confesses, laughing. (Participants were allowed to eat and drink whatever they wanted on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.)
Besides following a food plan that Plakas custom-designed for each of them, Tardif worked out three times a week at the gym. Plakas expected everyone to exercise for an hour every day.
“I’m not a really big gym person,” Tardif says. “I don’t go to the gym on my own. Even though Paul showed me what to do, I still wander around lost at the gym. I’m hopeless unless someone’s telling me what to do. But I did swim once a week,” she adds.
Tardif, and friend, Anne Glasgow, 36, also a mom of three, started working out with Plakas about a year ago to tackle the baby weight they kept talking about losing but never did anything about.
Skafar, a 44-year-old retired professional, had sought Plakas’s help to lose weight and to get strong, after becoming very deconditioned from years of sitting on the job.
All three had either accomplished their goal or were close to achieving it when Plakas approached them with the challenge.
“I was like, sure, why not, I worked hard, why not do it?” says Tardif, who has lost 30 pounds. Glasgow, who had lost 32 pounds, also jumped at the chance. “Then I was like, what did I just sign up for? I was terrified.”
The photo shoot was the source of her fear, Glasgow explains. “The work and the eating plan didn’t scare me, that motivated me.”
She quickly realized she had to start doing more than working out three times a week at the gym, so Glasgow decided to follow Plakas’s advice to start running if she wanted to lose her mummy tummy, “even though I hated running.”
She started on a treadmill at the YMCA, four days a week, “and I have become a runner now.”
Glasgow and Tardif went together to their back-to-back photo shoots for support but felt comfortable after the first photo was taken.
“It was actually a very fun experience,” Tardif says.
Neither had ever expected to be photographed in the nude, no matter how tastefully, in her 30s, and especially not after three kids.
“A year ago, I would have said, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” Tardif says. “Now I’m happy and very impressed with myself and the work that I’ve done, and I’m working hard to still keep the weight off and not go back to my old lifestyle. It’s definitely a lifestyle change.
“I went from a size 10/12 to a size 2. I always want to fit into my size 2 pants.”
Glasgow says she had always been fit and had never had a weight problem before she had kids. “This is the best I’ve looked since having children, and I love feeling so strong.”
Plakas recently posted some of his clients’ photos on his blog. Most visitors were supportive and encouraging of what the women had achieved, but some readers were insulting.
“It’s amazing how judgmental some women were,” Tardif says, “They put me down saying ‘Oh, well, she’s super skinny anyway,’ or ‘She’s a model,’ or she has this or she has that.
“I’m a real person, a regular person, a mom with three kids who is constantly running around. I worked really hard to get the results I got. I never starved myself. I ate a ton of food, I just ate healthy food. The only thing I deprived myself of was the one or two glasses of wine that I usually had after I put my kids to bed.”
“We’re not models,” Glasgow adds. “And if you’d truly look, you’d notice that we’re not perfect. I have a little more loose skin since having my children.”
There’s no question that genetics plays a part in how a person looks, Plakas says, and Tardif’s genes, especially, helped her obtain the dramatic results that she did.
“But everybody has the genetic potential to be better than they are,” he adds. “You’ll never know how much better, however, unless you make the necessary lifestyle changes, and most people aren’t willing to give up their current lifestyles to see what they can accomplish,” Plakas says.
“Most people also think they’re working out harder than they actually are, they think they’re doing the right exercises to maximize their exercise time but they’re not, and they think they’re eating less calories than they actually are.”
His clients are “true reflections” of what can be achieved with solid effort, Plakas says. And they have the pictures to prove it.
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