Thursday 29 December 2011

P90X Workout & before photos


I can finally say that I have finally decided to stop being intimidated and finally pressed the play button.

I did my first workout (the Chest & Back video) on Thursday 22 December and it felt great. I was a bit scared as to how much I would be the following day. The next day came and I was fine. Minimal pain and I could still move.

Tried the Plyometrics video on Christmas Eve and holy mother of pearl it was challenging. I only made it through half of the workout. Going to try it again though.

As they say ‘keep pressing play’.

I pressed play again yesterday and it was time to redo the plyometrics workout. I was determined to complete it this time. Though I have to say that towards the end I did opt to not do some of the workouts as I was complete wiped by then. The trainers of that workout were right. That is ‘the Beast’ of all workouts. I am definitely not looking forward to the next time I have to do that workout again.

Here’s my before pictures.  It's very confronting to see these. Here’s to better looking pictures in March 2012.






Weight update post Christmas


Well Christmas has come and gone and the post Christmas eating weight gain results aren’t too bad. A gain of 600 grams, raising my total weight up to 95 Kg.

Glad that it was a small weight gain but now it’s time to get back on track with the workouts and get moving again instead of just moving my mouth to put in food and to chew.

It will be a bit hard to get my diet back on tract after yummy foods over the holidays. I have somehow gotten use to having dessert after main meals over the lapse of the Christmas and Christmas Eve. Now I get little cravings after dinner which have been hard to kick.

Have you been able to give up some of the yummy foods you have eaten over the holiday period?

Sunday 25 December 2011

Saturday 24 December 2011

Weight & Measurements update


I have been a MIA for a few weeks now and it’s mainly due to the lead up to Christmas and also trying to find a new job.

I haven’t had much reduction in weight or my measurements in the last fortnight. I only lost 300 grams, weighing in now at 94.3 Kg. Then again my eating hasn’t been all that great lately, only having 2 big meals a day instead of 6 small meals and satisfying my sweet tooth a bit.

This small loss made me think about how horrible I am at sticking to my goals in terms of getting healthy. I guess I always seem to choose the ‘doing nothing’ option or ‘doing something’ option.

So in the spirit of reinventing myself with a new job, I am going to try and reinvent my workout regime too. I have been considering doing a vision board as a motivator to have in my room.

Let me know if you have tried doing the whole vision board thing and if it has or hasn’t worked for you.

Tuesday 6 December 2011

Goals for December


To ensure consistency with my exercise and diet this month I thought I would keep my goals small and simple.

Fitness
  • Eat 6 small meals a day.
  • Walk 10,000 steps.
  • Restart Couch to 5Km program.
  • Start P90X program.
  • Walk the distance from Sydney to Melbourne on the treadmill (approximately 963Km).

I’m hoping to improve a few things on the personal side too.

Personal
  • Find another job.
  • De-clutter and re-organise my wardrobe.
  • Become more organised at home.
  • Get back into the dating scene.

What are your goals for this festive month?

Wednesday 30 November 2011

Review of November Goals


How quickly has time flown by? I don’t believe that it is the end of November already!!! Soon we will all be celebrating Christmas and New Year.

At the beginning of this month, I set out some goals that I wanted to achieve. Let’s see how well I went with sticking to them.

Eat at least 6 small meals every day of November.

I accomplished 90% of this goal. I have recently stopped eating 6 meals a day due to becoming ill.

Do a daily morning treadmill meal workout of at least 45 mins prior to breakfast.

50% completed. It would depend on how hungry I was in the morning.

Have 2 days a week of no carbs.

I think I only accomplished this goal once or twice this month.

Commence the Couch to 5Km running program.

I have started week 1 of the Couch to 5Km program but I have abandoned it due to not having enough hours in the day to fit it all in. Will be recommencing it again next month.

Walk at least 10km a day with a rest day.

50% completed.

Hit target of 10,000 steps at least 5 days a week.

I found this goal the most challenging. I don’t know if my pedometer is bogus or it’s me that doesn’t know where to wear it but one more than one occasion the pedometer would not record my steps. The day that I had walked over 18Km the pedometer showed that I had only done 8000 or so steps. I goggled the number of steps taken over 18Km and the answer I got was over 22,000 steps.

I think I need to trade the pedometer I currently have for another and give this goal another try.

Eat at least half a plate of vegetables for dinner at least 3 times a week.

Goal achieved :D

Do at least 30 mins of the cardio Twister 3 times a week.

This goal was a complete and utter fail. Since I only assign 30 mins to this I kept telling myself that I had plenty of time to get around to doing it later in the day and then it just never happened. I really want to give this another go.

Record and monitor meals eaten throughout the month.

Goal achieved thanks to the My Fitness Pal app. It has really made me rethink some of the foods that I eat.

Lose 10Kg and an overall of 10cm throughout my body.

Goal not achieved. I think an overall of only 1kg has been lost. But at least that a step in the right direction.

Overall, I know that I have had my highs and lows trying to meet my goals. I know that I get the exercise completed but I have noticed that my real issue is to do with consistency. Looking back over this month, I have had some great days then 3 days of slacking off. Something that I will be working on next month.

Weight and Measurements update


This week started out with a fear of weight gain as last week was full of eating on the mini break and no exercise. A great aunt made some brioche and I’m sure I ate over 5 of them on Tuesday.

Jumped onto the scale to find that my weight had remained stagnant. A lovely outline of 95Kg was shown on the screen. Yay no additional weight gain. Measurements are telling a different story though. I have gained 5mm to 1cm on my arms, thighs, chest and hips.

This week looks like yet another week of taking it easy as Monday night while having dinner with friends I started to feel slightly dizzy and had a funny tickle in the back of my throat. Woke up Tuesday morning with a sore throat feeling like hell. As the day progressed my nose started to run and I now officially have a cold. I tried to workout yesterday, I put on my slacks and my workout shirt and as soon as I moved I felt dizzy. I sat yesterday out and today I slept for most of the day. Doubt there will be much working out this week.

Do you still manage to exercise while you’re sick?

Distance walked within week 3


Well last week has been a complete and utter bust!

Mid week mini break was great but it rained the entire time I was at the beach. Which meant all the plans of long walks along the beach with my dogs all evaporated. Luckily the apartment rented was lovely and had a great time with friends. Lots of eating and late nights left not a lot of motivation to go to the laptop and start doing the P90X workouts.

I don’t know what it is with that program but each time I go to do it there always seems to be something stopping me. I know 90% of it is that I’m stopping myself from turning it on and doing it but I am really intimidating by it, which is a first for me since not much intimidates me.

Hopefully I’ll get over it soon.

Using My Fitness Pal App


While attempting to appease my boredom with a random search through the Apps Store on my iPhone I came across quite a few apps that could be used for fitness and health. The app that caught my eye was the My Fitness Pal app. After downloading it and figuring out how to operate it, I gained quite a lot of knowledge. The most important of all was the number of calories in certain foods that I had been deemed healthy. The second would be that I was eating well above the recommended amount of calories that I needed to.

The app has been great to track what I’ve been shoveling into my mouth and the amount of exercise that I’ll need to do to burn it off. The issue that I had with it was being able to find particular foods that were of other cultures. For example, chicken biriani (an Indian spiced rice with chicken). Within the app I would only be able to find one of the components and then would have to improvise or add anything close to the other components, that I am sure did not give me an accurate calculation of total calories consumed.

I have to admit that I haven’t used the app religiously. I have often been days without recording my food intake and also forgotten to record the progress of my weight on there. But all that has changed as of late. I found that a close friend of mine also had downloaded the app and we have been keeping each other in check to record our food daily and get in a workout. The feature of the app that appeals to me the most would have to be the weight prediction that it gives you after you have submitted your daily intake. It really puts things into perspective and makes you think whether eating that devil’s delight pancake at pancakes on the rocks was really worth it.

Overall, I think it’s a pretty nifty app to have to have as your sidekick to winning the weight loss battle.

Distance walked within week 2


Week 2 started out great. Took a bit of a day off on the Monday and covered an incredible 18.12km on the Tuesday. I have no idea how I made it to 18.12km in one day but I felt very motivated to move that day. Covered only 4.80km the next day. Then it was all-downhill from there as I didn’t get back onto the treadmill again for the remainder of the week.

I know saying that the weather wasn’t great (storming and raining) is an excuse but I tend to just want to curl up with a good book or watch a great movie on those days and trying to hop onto the treadmill is just the last thing on my mind.

Since I decided to skip those workouts, I am determined to catch up and get them done this week.  I am going away for 3 days this week so I will have to say goodbye to my treadmill for those 3 days but I will be trying to get in my 10,000 steps and also all those days that I had scheduled dog walks that didn’t get done due to the rain from the week before.

I’m looking forward to reporting higher numbers in kilometers walked throughout the week and also hours of walking during my mini mid-week break.

Friday 25 November 2011

Incorporating resistance exercise

I have been researching different resistance programs for me to incorporate into my workouts. As I trolled through the net I kept coming across one in particular, the P90X program.

I YouTubed and read quite a few blogs on others experiences with the program. I was amazed by how much their body had changed over the 90 days of being on this program. So I decided to join the gang too.

So far I’ve had it for a few weeks and have just been staring at it with utter intimidation. I completed the pre-workout tests to make sure that this was the right program for me and it was but that’s all I’ve done so far. I’m not sure why I am so intimidated to put on the workouts. I have a feeling that it may be because I already in my mind that I won’t be able to complete all the exercises and if I actually partake in the workout that that will it make a reality.

Anyway I am hoping that I will be able to face the music this week and get in at least one workout. From what I can see so far the workouts are target area specific. For example, one of the videos I watched concentrated on the chest and back and another concentrated on legs and back. I noticed that a portion of the videos incorporated the abdominal workout at the end. If one was to each specific workout daily then they would be doing the ab workout every second day.

I decided to take my laptop with me so that I would be able to do the workouts from there. I thought ‘no more excuses’ especially while on my mini break since there will be quite a bit of eating with the relatives.

What workouts do you do while on holidays?

Tuesday 22 November 2011

Weight & Measurements update



After 3 days of eating nothing but crap I dreaded having to do my long walk of shame towards my juror, the bathroom scale. I knew that there definitely would not be a loss in kilos today seeing since it was almost a gorging of junk food yesterday.

I stepped on and waited for the electronic scales to stabilise and tell me the damage I had done over the last 3 days. I hesitated to look down in the event I would see numbers that put me back to where I started 2 weeks ago (96.1 kg). I took a deep breath and looked down to see 95kg (a gain of 700 grams).

I am disappointed that I have to report a gain in weight this week but I am also glad that the gain isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Though by no means am I proud of gaining those 700 grams.

In terms of measurements, there has been a gain of 1cm on the waist but no other areas have expanded. (Big sigh of relief).

I’ll be aiming at getting more cardio in this week to try and melt those 700 grams gained and some.

Monday 21 November 2011

Long weekend of trash


As the week ended, my healthy habits started disappearing. Friday was a day of eating only 2 meals instead of 6 small meals. Had a late breakfast, which would most likely be classified as afternoon tea and a large dinner of Chinese food. Unfortunately, there was minimal movement that day so it felt like I was just carbing it up and storing the fat away.

Saturday started healthily until it came to lunch-time and I had some left over Chinese food. I felt very full from lunch and skipped my protein snack. Little did I know that I wouldn’t be eating again until about 10pm that night. I attended a party and ate about 6 cheese and crackers and ate my dinner in an alcoholic liquid form. Best part and worst part of the night was when we all decided to play some drinking games. Worst part was finding out that I had lost and had to drink a cup full of tidbits of drinks that had been poured in (I think there was some Smirnoff Black, Vodka Cruiser Raspberry and Coke).

I am lucky that I don’t experience the dreaded hang over because I had also enjoyed 2 Jager bombs and some pre-mixed drinks the night before. 

Started out Sunday quite well until I caught up with a friend and went out for the day and indulged in an array of junk foods. We ate a burger from Hungry Jacks, a devil’s chocolate thick shake, some hot chips with tomato sauce and coke. Dinner was pizza. 

I felt so heavy and bloated when I hit my bed that night. I just felt like I was expanding. Luckily we did lots of walking around that day but I think that may have only burnt some of that Whooper that I had.

As we were driving home, I was telling my friend that I was actually craving some vegetables as my body just felt polluted. My taste buds were most likely screaming in disagreement but broccoli was on my brain all night after that pizza.

How did you spend your weekend?

Photos of some of the yummy salads eaten this week

Thought I would share some photos of some of the lovely salads that were prepared by my beautiful mum prepared for me throughout the week.

Baby spinach with tomatoes, cucumber and broccoli salad and breast chicken

Chicken drumstick with baby spinach, cauliflower and cucumber.

Chicken thigh with cauliflower, broccoli and baby spinach.

Gaylarn (Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce)

Baby spinach, cucumber and chicken






Sunday 20 November 2011

Distance walked within week 1




Week 1 of getting back into being active has been tuff but after reviewing my calendar I found that I had managed to hop onto the treadmill for a walk of approximately 45 mins on average for 4 days in a row. I think that within itself is a great achievement.

After tabulating the total kilometers achieved over those 4 days, the grand total came to 15.55km. A great start for someone who was quite sedentary the week prior.

Hope that I will be able to beat my total kilometer score for week 2?

Thursday 17 November 2011

Weight & Measurements update


A week has come and gone. Time to jump onto my bathroom friend and reveal the magic numbers.

A sense of excitement overcame me as I patiently weight for a few seconds and then I look down to see; 94.3kg, a loss of 1.8 kilos. A small win but at least it’s a win and I am not going backwards. Only 5.3kg before I get into the 80kg range. I can’t wait to see those scales start with the number 8.

In terms of measurement, I haven’t lost much, only 1cm on the thighs, chest and waist. Shrinking very slowly. As mentioned previously, I have been listening to a podcast called “Cut the fat”. On the podcast they mentioned that weight could be lost at a greater rate if both cardio and resistance training was incorporated. I will be doing some research to incorporate the resistance exercise that I need to melt my wobbly bits.

What type of resistance exercise do you do?

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Wednesday 16 November 2011

First restaurant meal


Went to dinner at a Thai restaurant on Saturday. I am so proud that I was disciplined with myself and was able to say no to the lovely looking spicy Thai fried rice.

I ended up ordering a lovely prawn salad and some stir-fried pork with vegetables. 

Prawn Salad

Unfortunately I could not pass on the dessert, which was fried ice cream with caramel topping.

The fried ice cream was quite different to the Chinese version as it had banana in the batter. I am glad I didn’t feel guilty. It felt as though it was a small treat even though the dessert wasn’t exactly smallish.

Fried Ice Cream



Portion Control


Found this great article in the Body & Soul pages of the Sunday Daily Telegraph about portion control and how to eat a balanced dinner.


Friday 11 November 2011

Shopping list for weight loss phase


I am so excited to be creating this shopping list. I have been dreaming of lettuce and cucumber since day 2 of the carb detox.

So here is my wish list of food to eat for the first week of incorporating good carbs in the form of vegetables back into my diet.

Chinese Broccoli

Broccoli

Olives

Bok Choy

Asparagus

Watercress

Cauliflower

Spanish Onions

Mixed Lettuce

Baby Spinach

Capsicums (aka Bell Peppers)

Oh I can’t wait to eat a yummy salad.

What do you put in your salads?












Review of Carbohydrate Detox


I have to say that this time around it was much harder to do this detox. After 2 weeks of eating a lot of carbs in the form of pizza, pasta and bread, I found it very tough to last on this detox. I think that’s why I caved in after the first day (Monday 7 November). I am very happy that I was able to bring in my will power and stayed on the detox for the three days.

As per my previous post on this detox, I had lost 3.3kg over the 3 days. This time I only lost 1.1kg. This really surprised me this morning. The only thing that I think could have contributed to this could be the many cosmos I had consumed on day 2 and also the sudden lack of fiber over the last 3 days could have contributed to the small weight loss. I have to say though I am not discouraged by this small loss as it is still a loss and I am also very proud of myself for raising my level of activity that I do on a daily basis. I have made a great effort this week and I have hoped onto the treadmill everyday.

Even if the scales didn’t reflect what I was expecting, I do feel a lot lighter and less bloated. I am looking forward to eating vegetables and fruits again.

How do you feel after a detox?

Wednesday 9 November 2011

Restarting the Detox Phase


I restarted the carb detox phase yesterday and it didn’t quite go as planned.

I had planned a meal and exercise schedule as you can see below.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite go to plan. I woke up quite late (afternoon approximately 1:30pm) it was quite hard to catch up with all the eating and exercise that I had scheduled.

I was able to do a 30 min walk on the treadmill and also took my door for a walk for an hour. I thought I was on track and then somehow the TV dial ended up on the Food Channel. After seeing some wonderful Greek cooking, I went straight to the rice cooker and served myself some rice with some chicken, then had some Sao biscuits with cheese and butter and indulged in some fun size Kit Kat and dairy milk chocolate.

I didn’t feel as guilty as I thought afterwards but I did vow that I would not do it again and that I would stick to this detox.

This morning I woke and had to attend an appointment in another suburb and the first thing I thought of was that there was a sushi bar near the location of my appointment. I spent a good 20 minutes talking myself into eating sushi for lunch and that it was quite and that I shouldn’t feel guilty for it. After agreeing with all my good arguments and getting into the car I realised that I was cheating and sabotaging myself and that I couldn’t stick to something.

So as I reversed out of the driveway I decided not to have sushi for lunch but instead went shopping for some clean lean meats. I bought some beef steak, bacon, salami and prosciutto (I know the last few items aren’t exactly clean lean meats but they were on special).

I decided to take some of the advice that I had heard on the “Cut the fat” podcast and pre-prepare some of my meals. I cut the bacon into rectangular pieces for the amount of a 100 grams and stored them into freezer bags and stored them into the fridge. I did the same with the steak and stored enough for a few meals for the detox and put the remainder into the freezer.

Tomorrow I will be purchasing a BBQ chicken and sectioning the chicken in the same manner.

How do you prepare for your detoxes or diets?

Tuesday 8 November 2011

Weight & Measurements update


It has been a few weeks since I have taken my weight and measurements. Since I’m restarting on the weight loss program again I thought I would get an idea of where I am up to and if the last few weeks of eating refined carbohydrates by the handful has done a lot of damage.

The last time I weighed myself was on the 12 of October and I weighed 94.5kg. Today I weigh 96.1kg, which is the same weight I was exactly a month ago before I started the carb detox phase and it has resulted in a gain of 1.6kg.



There are mainly slight changes in measurements of a gain of 50mm on the chest and waist. The big gains are the hips with a 2cm gain, right arm with a 1cm gain, right thigh with 2cm gain and right calf with a 1.5cm gain.

After looking at those figures it looks like all the weight gained went to the right of my body, now making me officially lopsided. I wonder if that has a connection with me being right handed all. Oh well, I won’t linger on it for too as it’s only trivial.

I am looking forward to today being more fruitful in terms of eating and exercise. My body will be getting a big shock from the lack of sugar from not eating chocolate and also from not having big insulin spikes from the refined carbohydrates such as bread, pasta and rice that I’ve been eating.

Would love to hear some motivational or inspirational words from all of you out there to keep me going this week.