Your chance to avoid the Festive Flab – and make someone else’s Christmas!

Listen up fabulous people of Southampton, the Christmas box is back!

Now in its FIFTH year, here’s your chance to banish the un-needed calorific Christmas stodge from your home, by donating it to families never normally able to afford it. 

The Salvation Army un-needed Christmas food Amnesty idea came to me four years ago, after several personal training clients and boot camp attendees expressed to me how anxious and stressed they were about all the Christmas stodge that tends to ‘appear’ in their homes.

Even if none of the incessant rubbish on offer in the supermarkets’ ‘seasonal’ aisles gets put in their trolleys, toxic ‘treats’ still appear in offices, as gifts from families, at parties…often it can feel like there’s no escaping them!

Many of our current Boot camp attendees are also teachers, who recently told me how every year they share the same dilemma. They feel torn between feeling grateful for receiving an end of term Christmas gift from each pupil, yet at the same time experience feeling guilty and even fearful, to have such a huge collection of stodge to contend with over the Christmas period!

And now that these ladies have decided to make their health and fitness a priority; having unhealthy temptations in the house (especially when one is spending more time in the house) becomes an even greater concern. No one wants to undo all their hard work and results that they have achieved so far!

Then comes the annual perpetual pattern of abandoning all fitness and health efforts for a few weeks in December, ie thinking “sod it!” which results in far more work to do (or undo) by the time we reach January.

And we all know re-starting a New Year health kick and picking up where you left off before Christmas is certainly not going to be any easier with darker days, colder weather and post-Christmas blues on top of this…is it?!

If this sounds familiar, that’s the other reason for this amnesty. DO NOT GIVE UP – instead, give AWAY!

Every year on Christmas Eve, the sight of the Salvation Army’s food parcels as far as the eye can see, is beyond heart-breaking. And it makes me even angrier, considering how much Christmas stodge various corporations make available to us year after year.

Do they care about this country’s obesity epidemic? Do they help us out by making healthy foods as cheap as unhealthy ones? We all know the answers…

Please don’t make yourself another New Year cliché by buying into it. I guarantee you’ll feel miles better from:

A) not having this stodge in your house, and

B) knowing what would have once made you feel sluggish and guilty has instead gone to a vulnerable family as a Christmas treat, that they could never normally afford.

Please take a moment to consider what a box of chocolates/ tin of biscuits/anything stodgy that normally makes you feel guilty and sluggish, would mean to them.

And it’s not just food that you can donate; many of my amazing personal trainer clients and boot camp attendees have also cleared out their children’s old toys. There were so many donations last year, I couldn’t actually fit them all in the car so had to make two trips plus a third after Christmas!

The donation box is currently in the foyer of my Park Gate Personal Training studio and will be throughout December. As always, all donations will be delivered by me personally to The Salvation Army on Christmas Eve.

So to donate your un-needed food (even if it’s not Christmassy!) and/or toys, please contact me today to arrange a drop-off time.

On behalf of myself and the Salvation Army, we’d like to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to every person who has donated so far.

I very much look forward to meeting you and wish you a very happy – and now very healthy Christmas! Gen x