It’s all very well starting out the New Year with good intentions to shed a few extra pounds and get into shape. But good intentions all too easily fall by the wayside.

Not so when you sign up with a personal trainer, because it’s impossible to shirk when they turn up at your door ready for action.

Would I have otherwise devoted several lunch hours to toning up my body?

In all likelihood I’d have probably just kept on working, eyes fixed to the computer and butt fixed firmly to the chair.

My personal trainer, Kelly Bedford, came up with her Fitness Fox London programme, inspired by the phrase “strong is the new skinny”.

She believes women waste endless hours on the treadmill, bike or cross-trainer in the belief that endless cardio is the best method to give them the body they desire, along with switching from one low calorie diet to another – leaving them starving and weak.

Instead, by using dynamic strengthening and fat loss training protocols borne from scientific research, Kelly promises to make you feel stronger, fitter and leaner.

She helps you make dietary and lifestyle changes on top of the exercise sessions, to transform your body.

In the initial session she sets you up with the My Fitness Pal app, so she can keep an eye on what you’re eating and make sure you get the right balance of protein, carbohydrate and fat to achieve the kind of body you want.

At each meal you can scan the barcode of each food you eat into your phone, to get a detailed nutritional breakdown.

After a few days Kelly pointed out that I was not eating enough protein for someone who was doing so much exercise, and that I should be aiming for at least 60g more a day.

She promotes what she labels “flexible dieting”, in that there are no miracle weight loss foods and no benefit in eliminating food groups, you just eat whatever you want to get the right nutrients into your diet.

Kelly also set me up with a Jawbone UP motion sensor wristband to keep track of how active I was outside of the twice weekly fitness sessions, to monitor how much sleep I was getting, and the steps I was taking each day.

After the initial consultation in which Kelly takes down your body mass index and fat composition as well as seeing how flexible you are and screening your movement patterns, Kelly will tailor the package – in my case to help me tackle the diastasis recti or split down the middle of my stomach endured during a twin pregnancy.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, we had four sessions, half of which were focused on dynamic strengthening, using techniques to help accelerate fat loss whilst toning and tightening muscles, and the others were more cardio focused.

Kelly mixes up the exercises so you don’t get bored, and each session was a little bit different.

We performed full body strength exercises in a circuit, with two full lower body then upper body exercises back to back, to improve strength and also keep the heart rate elevated to burn calories whilst doing it, with press ups and then squats and reverse lunges with dumbbells.

The “cardio killers” are Kelly’s spin on high intensity interval training to rev up your metabolism and maximise fat burning whilst keeping it fun by mixing up movements, like walkouts, jumping movements, crawling movements and boxing which Kelly picked up on a course in Thailand.

“Regardless of what you read, strength training will not make you bulky, but it will make you firmer, tighter, have better posture and rock solid bones for years to come,” Kelly reassured me.

Kelly sends out weekly reports and useful action points to help with your progress and keep you moving in the right direction.

By the end, I started to feel my body was starting to change for the better.

At £496 a month the eight-week Ignite programme works out at around £62 for each twice weekly session, which if you can afford it is money well spent, to give you a fighting chance of getting into that little black dress, or losing baby weight.

Kelly very kindly made sure that I understood how to do the stomach exercises she left me to my own devices. But have I since revisited them? Sadly not, because I need a personal trainer to push me into action.

For more information see www.fitnessfoxlondon.com.