Gearing up to start the challenge!

Well, the past 2 days have been a bit of a struggle.

With the crappy weather and the fact that I have been starving before I even get to the gym, finding the motivation to actually go has been interesting. I think it helps that I have been getting dressed in my gym clothes at work, and I have to pass my gym to get home every night, so I really have no excuse.

It also helps that I am fantastic at making myself feel guilty when I don't go, and also when I eat crap food. I haven't eaten fast food of any kind in 2 months, and although I now very rarely get a craving for Macca's or KFC, the idea of giving in and breaking that fantastic streak is enough to keep me from pulling through the drive through ever again. I also don't miss the sick feeling that either of those give me once I do eat them... They just never taste as good as I think they are going to...

I had yet another one of my "epiphanies" (as I like to call them) yesterday, as I was driving home from the gym. I often have these epiphanies whilst driving. I am constantly amazed that I reach my destinations in one piece really, cause quite often I don't remember how I got there...
Anyway, back to my epiphany. I often get what I call my "hungry days". These are days that, no matter how much I eat, I'm still starving. Yesterday was one of those days. Now, I can never find any pattern, though I always blamed it on hormones, even though they never happen at a particular time in my monthly cycle (sorry boys, didn't mean to bring that up!). The day before I had been reading the Ashy Bines web site and once again, the subject of water came up, and the fact that your body can often mistake dehydration for hunger. I have read this countless times over the years and whilst I took it on board, I never really associated it with how hungry I get, because when I have these hungry days, it's all I can do to stop myself from ripping the pantry apart and gourging myself on everything I can get my hands on (thankfully I have finally developed the common sense not to do this!)... But yesterday, I realised that the reason my stomach was seconds away from eating itself was quite simple... I hadn't consumed more than a glass of water all day! Even when I was at the gym, I had barely drunk any water, as my fantastic Lorna Jane drink bottle has this aggravating screw top that is a pain in the butt to open when you're walking at level 6 on a 9% incline, and given that I was feeling particularly lazy yesterday, that seemed like too much effort...

Now that this has occurred to me, unscrewing that lid will not be such a challenge, because I'd rather that then consuming more food then necessary (and avoiding a dehydration headache in the process). My biggest problem is when I'm at work, as I forget to drink all day (it will often take me at least an hour and a half to drink my morning coffee), so I've set up an hourly reminder in my work email to remind me to drink water. Maybe a little obsessive, but I am dedicated to this weightloss journey I've embarked on, and I'm pretty much trying everything I can to succeed. It's already worked this morning, I'm onto my 3rd glass of water already!

Anyways, enough rambling. Tonight I am off to my last Friday night Zumba class (they have decided that only stay at home mums, old ladies and unemployed people want to do Zumba at my gym, which I am very pissed off about), and tomorrow morning I'm off to a group training session starting at 7am through to 9am, followed by an hour of body pump... Man, I must be crazy... But I'm loving it!

Only 3 more sleeps til the start of Michelle Bridges 12 Week Body Transformation Challenge!

Progress so far

There are my 2 "progress so far" photos that I've used to show how far I have come between September 2011 and May 2012. The first photo in each were taken in Italy, and are the 2 photos that made me realise how unhappy I was with how I looked. The second photo in each were taken on a girls weekend in Sydney, May 2012, and really made me realise the progress that I have made so far. I am still a long way off of being happy with my photos and reflection, but I am a lot closer than I was 7 months ago.

Dry July and August

So, after a particularly nasty episode of drinking on the weekend (the drinking was fun, the aftermath was not!) I have decided that I am going to doe last 8 weeks of the Michelle Bridges 12 week challenge completely alcohol free. This means no glasses of wine on a friday night, no vodka, lime and sodas when I go out, not even one.

 

To be honest, I'm not sure I can ever look at alcohol the same way after Saturday night's effort. I have never been the type of girl who completely writes herself off, nor have I ever been so drunk that I threw up, and my hang overs are usually confined to a mild headache. Not so on saturday night. I successfully drank about 2/3 of a bottle of vodka, which I mixed with lime and soda. Normally I would have maybe 3 glasses and then I've hit my limit. I have no idea why that did not happen on Saturday night, but I had my first and only experience of drinking to the point of throwing up, having to be be helped to my bed, passing out and then having a mammouth hangover all day Sunday and into this morning - as if Monday mornings weren't painful enough!

 

I may even make the entire challenge alcohol free, though I have a rather busy month in June, so I'm not sure if that will happen, but I KNOW I will not be getting drunk AT ALL!

 

The worst part was, even though I barely ate a thing all weekend (which I am assuming is a lot of the reason why I got so drunk), I managed to put on 1/2 a kilo over the 4 days. So this is just another reason not to drink whilst trying to lose weight.

 

So this week I'm getting back on track. I had spent the past week with my nose buried in a text book for a nightmare exam I had to complete on Thursday, but now I have 5 weeks of no study to get myself back into the swing of it. Part of the requirements of 12 week challenge is working out 6 days a week. As I was already doing it 5 days a week prior to last weeks little hiatus, I'll now be throwing in 2 hours of exercise on saturday mornings instead of having Saturday and Sunday free. So this is my pledge over the next 12 weeks (If I put it out there for everyone to see, I'll be less likely to back down).

 

Mondays - 1 hour boxing class

Tuesdays - 1 hour body pump class

Wednesdays - 1 hour cardio and core work

Thursdays - 1 hour cardio and weights

Fridays - 1 hour Zumba (probably followed by at least 2 hours of latin dancing in the city)

Saturdays - 1 hour group training session in the park and 1 hour body pump class.

 

This all starts today people! Watch this space :)

My journey so far

I have finally decided to start doing a blog charting my weight loss journey. I've had quite a few people tell me how much my obsessive gym check-ins on facebook and my status updates declaring how I'm going etc are all helping to motivate them to do something themselves, which I think is so awesome ( I just thought I was annoying the crap out of everyone, turns out it's only most people :p ). So I thought, a better way to both help motivate everyone AND keep myself on track is to write about it!

Since October 2011 (when I got back from Europe and looked back at the photos and realised I was not happy with the person looking back at me), I have been on a mission to get back to looking the best that I can.
I'm not doing this for anyone else, or to pick up a man, I am doing this for me, to be able to look in the mirror and not loathe the reflection looking back at me, and to look at photos and wonder who the heck that person is.

Since October I have both started and ended a relationship, gained and lost a few kilos. I am fortunate that when I am stressed or emotional, I don't turn to food (although I do tend to stop eating which is also not great). In January, I bit the bullet and joined Goodlife Healthclubs. I have been a member of a number of different gyms over the years and always stopped going after a few weeks, getting bored and losing motivation. I first started going a couple of afternoons a week after work and on the weekends, sometimes struggling to go for longer than half an hour, other times an hour would fly by whilst I worked my ass off on the treadmill, kicked butt in body combat, lifted weights whilst my muscles screamed at me in body pump and shook my booty in zumba.

In March, I began to get disheartened as although I was doing all of this, I couldn't see any change in my body. Everyone else was saying they could, but I still saw only wobbly bits.

Then in April I finally moved back in with my best friend and began to settle into a routine of doing the gym every night on the way home from work, and realised that just because McDonalds and KFC were around the corner did not mean I had to stop there! I also discovered my obsession with all things Lorna Jane and read her "Move, Nourish, Believe" book in 2 days, and have taken a lot of her words of wisdom to heart.

I went to Sydney at the beginning of May and allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted, telling myself it was only for 4 days and I was on holidays! Big mistake, I think I put on around 1 - 2 kilos in those 4 days alone!

But last week, something happened. It's almost as though my body has suddenly realised it had better get into shape because I wasn't going to stop this time. I wasn't going to get disheartened and give up like I have the 5 million other times I have embarked on this journey.

On Saturday I had a bit of a bad day and barely ate. My appetite did not return properly until Tuesday, but I had realised something, call it an epiphany. I looked in the mirror, and instead of seeing the wobbly bits, I started to see the toned parts! I pulled on my trusty work pants and saw, to my amazement, that there is now a whole lot of spare room around my butt and thighs. At first I was a little annoyed that nothing was happening with my waist and hips, until I saw in the mirror that my love handles, which I have had a close, personal relationship for the past 8 years, were almost non-existent! Now, only a week later, those same trusty work pants are so lose around the top that I find myself needing to hold them up for fear they will fall down! And I can pull them off without undoing the zip! It's almost as though this has happened over night!

I signed up to Michelle Bridges 12 week challenge today, and am excited to start that on 4 June 2012. If I can do this well, with this much determination by motivating myself, imagine the results at the end of the 12 weeks! Bring on summer and my bikini body!