100 day challenge - Week 1: It's all about setting patterns

Day 1 is always both the easiest and the hardest when it comes to changing your eating habits and deciding to get fit, lose weight and hope this time you are going to keep it off.

• Easy because you’ve made a decision
• Hard because you know how long it’s going to take and you hate feeling hungry all the time.

To be fair though, for me this is not D-Day as in Diet Day. I’ve been tweaking my diet over the last couple of weeks and have noticed a bit of difference, nothing dramatic you understand, just little things, like I had a bit more energy and a couple of nights I actually slept reasonably well. For an insomniac this is a good thing. I’m also a regular exerciser. I walk every day sometimes 2 or 3 times, I aim for 3 sessions at the gym each week – circuit classes where they combine cardio with weights to give you (supposedly) an all round workout, I clean house and I am currently moving “mulch mountain” and digging out a grass bed at the same time. Which makes me wonder how I got so big in the first place. Actually, I do know – visitors – I think I must have doubled or tripled my calorie intake over a 6-week period and that was it, and I have been unable to lose the additional weight ever since. Sounds like a cop out, but ask anyone who knew me before and they will tell you the same thing, it was as if you could see I was putting on weight. Anyway that was then, this is now – me some 18-months later, obviously my diet during that time had been pretty much calorie neutral – what I was consuming I was burning off – but that was it.

So when a chance came up to work with an organisation that specialised in personal training, the trainer was a 3 time body sculpting champion (in the over 50’s category) and a nutritional expert I knew I had to take it.

I knew the first meeting would be scary. Finding out just how bad things really are can be and should be a wake up call for people who think they are doing OK, they may think they have a couple of kilos to lose and they can get back to what they’ve been doing for years. Sorry to disappoint you, but if what you are doing now isn’t working for you (as in keeping you lean and toned) then it’s hardly going to happen if you “go on a diet” lose some weight then start to eat “normally” again is it?

I had kept track of my food intake for a couple of days before the meeting, just to give Hilary an indication of my “normal” lifestyle / habits and to give her a base for preparing a new eating plan based on foods I normally ate.

Sure enough the “interview” was an eye-opener. Blood pressure was slightly elevated, I have 41% body fat (scale) and photographs were taken with a wide-angle lens. Thankfully I didn’t have any of the markers that would indicate heart or cardiovascular problems, nor do we have a family history of them. I do have though a couple of skeletal issues – namely disc degeneration in my neck and lower back from injuries but that was about it. But I do know that had I continued to do what I was doing, the results would be devastating.

Despite the fact I looked like I was going to die during the first workout, and I think Hils was being kind to me, it went reasonably well. Using a combination of weights + body weight and action the heart rate quickly became elevated and stayed there throughout the next 29 minutes. I thought I was reasonably fit having been going to the gym 2-4 times a week for about a year. Amazing what good technique and different exercises can do – apart from prove you’re not for one thing – But Hilary was kind enough to point out this was just a starting point and things would only get better.

I hoped she was right – my quads were beginning to complain.

Setting the patterns into place meant:

• Getting up to go for a walk whether I wanted to or not, or whether my body hurt or not
• Continuining with all my training and adding some more
• Not eating processed foods
• Eating smaller portions of food - at the right time and in the right quantities of the right food
• Cutting back on alcohol
• Getting the support of my partner