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Posted by Sue Bryant Sep 29, 2007 |
Last week I was cruising on the very fine Emerald Princess to research a feature for a newspaper on staying fit during a cruise.
The spa on board is spectacular and the gym enormous. The menus are enticing and varied, with a lotus flower image by each dish that is considered extra healthy. The salad bar groans with 30 different types of vegetable.
Yet one thing had diminished noticeably: the exercise classes. Every day, there was just one free class and you could pay extra for yoga, pilates and spinning. I noticed at the beginning of the week that the lists for these were full, but when I joined a spinning class, there were only seven of us.
I asked Peter Shine, one of the ship's personal fitness trainers what was going on and his simple answer was that there are so few classes now because nobody comes to them, not even to the ones they've paid for. I pointed out that there were 3,000 people on board so surely the classes ought to be fuller? What are all these people doing? Peter's answer was one word: Eating. And how people ate! Huge mounds of fries for lunch and burgers as hors d'oeuvres before a five-course dinner, followed by a hefty midnight snack of pizza and cakes.
The next day, Peter held a seminar in the gym, promoted as The Faster Way to a Flatter Stomach. There must have been 70 people there, with standing room only. Even Peter looked amazed. He later told me he had taken about 16 appointments from the seminar for nutrition advice. I couldn't help thinking, though, that a fairly obvious way to a flatter stomach on a food-filled cruise would be to eat a little less and exercise a little more - no seminar required.