Beauty Website Review: Instant Body Upgrade

With Christmas fading into a distant memory and summer holidays on the approach, thoughts often turn in January to the spare tyre sitting around our waists. How to shift it?! The problem with many diets or gyms is that we don't receive enough guidance and can easily fall off the bandwagon.

Donna Richards and Tora Cullip, health coaches, aim to provide an alternative through the Instant Body Upgrade programme, which is available for a one-off payment of £97. This payment gives access to the Instant Body Upgrade website, which supplies a host of resources and support from Donna and Tora themselves to help you get the body and confidence that you want. 

So what do you get for your £97? The three-pronged approach dealing with your mindset, metabolism and motivation is dealt with mainly through videos where Donna and Tora can talk directly to you and share their expertise. This allows you to see that their bodies really do look like the photos (!) and allows them to reassure you in a largely non-patronising way through their friendly hints, advice and tips. Inspiring fact sheets are also available for download, as are recipes to get your eating on track, and progress sheets to track your fitness and inch loss. Exercise videos, and Donna and Tora's responses to user comments, are equally valuable.

The nicest part about this programme is that it's got no gimmicks or fads attached. This is good simple healthy eating and exercise, packaged in a way that suits busy women and supported by Donna and Tora themselves. The diversity of resources available, presented using clear straightforward language, is another plus.

This is not to say that there are no possibilities for improvement. Firstly, as this is supposed to be a long-term lifestyle change, there need to be far more recipes available (rather than only a short ebook's worth). This could be easily achieved through having a recipe space available for users to upload their healthy finds and discuss recipes after trying them. Speaking of this kind of collaborative space, a forum page would be equally useful, allowing users to not only comment on individual pages but also interact with each other much more closely. However, as the Instant Body Upgrade site is merely a glorified Wordpress page, Donna and Tora would need to upgrade their website significantly to make this possible. Equally, a 'MyPlate' facility similar to that on LiveStrong would enable users to track their food intake in more detail, which is also important to a programme of this type.

Nevertheless, despite these suggested improvements and the fact that a 'body upgrade' can never be 'instant', access to this website is still worth the £97 price tag. It costs little more than a 3-month gym membership and has the added bonuses of free recipes and motivational support from professional coaches. The modifications mentioned above would make it even better value - but even as it is, it will see you well on your way to having something closer to the body you want by the time you have to hit the beach.

*Bianca's Beauty Blog was offered free website access by Donna and Tora.