Week 2 Update

Hi everyone,

It's already the end of Week 2 of the Foxy challenge! That just flew by!

I have to admit I forgot about this blog last week. But the point of the blog is to keep track of my progess and share my experience so I thought I had better get back to it (besides, that would be pretty bad if I gave up after 1 post!)

So how has my Challenge been progressing? As you would know from my previous post, there are two main aspects of the Challenge: Slimplicity (food coaching) and personal training. I'm finding it hard to stick to the Slim plan because to me, it seems very strict. Instead of counting calories they use their own system of how many aspects of a food group you should have, for example each day you should have 6 carbs, 3 protein, 2 fruit, etc. So it adds on a level of complexity that I find a tad unneccessary, so I've just been making sure I keep under the recommended calorie intake for each day and making an educated guess about the other things. I do like the fact my diet has become a lot cleaner, and I'm starting to feel the difference. As a 'personal' challenge I've decided to give up soft drink altogether (not that I ever drank a lot, but cutting it out will help my weight loss and I like testing myself to see how long I can go without things) and cut right down on sugary drinks like juice and iced tea (which I LOVE).

As for my personal training, I am really enjoying it so far. It's funny how having some one on one time can make you work that little bit harder. My PT Michelle and I have similar personalities and she knows me from her Combat classes so we get along well. I have her a bit of a surprise in our first session with how much weight I could squat! As well as weight loss, I mentioned I would like to improve my upper body strength so I'm looking forward to having sore arms for the next couple of months (I love DOMS!).

One of the things that's helping me on my way to winning this competition is group fitness classes. For every class you attend, you get 25 points and if it's an allocated Foxy class you get more. I've become quite the class junkie since January. Which is good news for my points card! Pump and Cycle are definitely  my stand out favourites, but since I've been wearing my new HRM I'm looking at other classes in a new light. For instance, did you know a Step class burns 630 calories? And that was just my feeble beginners attempt. Imagine how many I'd burn if I knew what I was doing! Having the HRM is great because now it is so easy to calculate at the end of the day whether I'm in a caloric deficit or surplus. It's also a great motivator since I can say to myself - "well, you managed to burn 550 calories in Pump the other day, so you need to work just as hard or increase you weights to burn some more".

I also had a weigh in this week and for Week 1 I lost .8kg. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed, but it meant I was even more conscious of what went in my mouth this week, and I moved my classes around a bit for a bit of a change. Measurements are being taken in Week 3 (so mine will be tomorrow) and hopefully there will be better results there. I can definitely see that my lower thighs are more defined (probably from all the Pump and Cycle classes!). Once I know the new measurements, I'll post :)

Stay happy and healthy readers!

Challenge launch!

Today was the challenge launch at the gym. It's the biggest event of the year so the place was buzzing! We got given our info packs, our Slimplicity diaries, score card and a little show bag of goodies (health / beauty product samples). We got broken up into teams according to what time we train at the gym. I'm in the 6am group (lets go blue team!) and all the other girls seem nice - I've seen most of them a few times around the gym and in classes so they should be good support. I also had to get my 'before' photos taken, which was a bit strange - just standing there, with 30 people looking at you - but they should be good to look back on in 12 weeks.

There was also a testing portion of the launch to give us a baseline score in a range of areas. I had to do a beep test, a five-lever test (sit-ups), push up test and plank test. This is how I went:

Beep test: level 9.1 (stoked about this as when I did the beep test in high school I could only get up 5 or 6!)
Lever test: level 5
Push ups: 10 on level 2 difficulty (on knees)
Plank: 2min 30sec (straight arms, on knees)

Overall I'm pretty happy with those results, considering I've only been going to the gym for a few months.

I also got measured and weighed in (unfortunately they didn't give me a copy of the measurements and I can't remember any of them!) but I weighed in at 86.8kg. So happy with this! One of my goals was to be under 87kg by 21st February so I've managed to reach that early! Since the challenge is 12 weeks I think I'll make my goal weight 78kg. It's realistic and if I lose more, then that's a bonus. The challenge finishes on my 23rd birthday so I would be ecstatic if I weighed 78kg at that point!

I also have weekly Slimplicity (food coaching) sessions and personal training. My first Slim session is Monday and PT (so so excited for that) is Friday, so I'll blog again to tell you how they both go :)