Christine and Eric Harrop train with Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ player, Nick Setta, and personal trainer, Jon Dubberley.

TEAM: Christine & Eric Harrop

As a couch potato and the least fit member of her family, Christine has decided that it’s time to be motivated to make a change in her life and in the life of her husband Eric.  This is the “kick in the butt” she’s been looking for, and she and her husband want to set the right example for their family and for all families to follow.

Overall Experience

It is hard to believe that it has been 4 weeks since we started on this CFL challenge to improve our overall health. Nick Setta has been a wonderful coach and has provided us with useful tips to stay focused, on track and interested. His upbeat attitude, passion for fitness and ability to teach has helped us keep on track with meeting out aerobic and strengthening exercises. He has given us each individual tips to deal with our deficiencies and shown us and modeled for us simple exercises that we can do. Nick as well discussed with us the importance of healthy eating, and talked to us about quantity and quality. We have put into practice eating in the morning, something Chris has had difficulty with, and following the guideline of waiting 3 – 4 hours between eating again. This has helped us steer away from spontaneously snacking.

Our personal trainer, Jon was very thorough in providing us with guidelines to meet in targeting our maximum heart rate and obtaining the highest cardiac benefit from our program. He certainly has given us a challenge to meet the expectations of exercising 4X a week, and a strengthening work-out at least twice a week. This has been very demanding and challenging, but we feel that we have met the challenge. The handouts, he has provided not only from a nutritional perspective, but from a tracking system has assisted us in recording our progress.

The call we received from Rita the dietician in reviewing our 2 day food record has been very beneficial. Even though we did not have to make major changes to our eating, she did encourage us and showed us how we could get more healthy fats (omega 3’s) into our meals by eating more fish, and using olive oil more. As Chris is trying to lose some weight, we were surprised to hear that it is best to eat fruit instead of juice, since it took just a third cup of juice to equate to 100 calories. The fruit would be more fulfilling with the added benefit of fibre.

Even though, we have not had any heart problems, we have family and friends who have.

By becoming active again will certainly help us be heart healthy through fitness and eating. As well, we have been able to educate those individuals who have had heart attacks of the steps they can take to their road of recovery. We have discovered from Jon that the Hamilton General Hospital has a wonderful cardiac care program for individuals who have had bypasses and heart attacks that will assist in their road to recovery. We encourage anyone who is in this situation, to ask for a doctor referral to this wonderful program. We encourage everyone to take this challenge for a long and healthy heart and life.