I won’t apologise if this is a non-PC word for some of you, but it’s the truth!
I am fat!
I promised you earlier in the week that I would reveal something surprising about myself on Thursday, so there we go, I said it.
In early January this year I stepped on the scales (not a habit of mine) to discover that I weighed 150 lbs. (10 stone 10lbs). My optimal weight is somewhere around 10 stone so, although that was more than would like, it wasn’t a complete disaster.
I wasn’t that surprised as my eating habits had been somewhat slack, and my normal workout ethic had gone out the window. I could come up with all sorts of excuses about the imminent opening of my new Merlin Fitness studio, the fact that I was crazily busy over Christmas etc., but the reality was that I had simply let it happen.
Slowly but surely in the intervening months since the summer of 2012, a season where I am more active and find it easier to keep the required diet discipline, the odd pound or two had crept on each month.
I hate the feeling of my clothes being too tight, having to choose between fewer items in my wardrobe, or wondering if everyone else has noticed the extra pounds.
That’s vain I know, but as a personal trainer I am expected to look a certain way, as the way I take care of myself is a walking advert for my business and the which results I get.
I wasn’t overly worried initially, as I know how to manipulate my eating, exercise and lifestyle to quickly get to my target weight if I want to. I was about to tighten things up and shed the pounds, when I had an idea.
You see, many of my clients come to me not 10, but 20, 30 or even 40 + pounds overweight. I know I have the skills to get them on the right road, but perhaps as somebody who has never been really overweight I struggled to empathise with how they felt about themselves, and the level of commitment which it would take to make the necessary changes.
I don’t think that I have ever weighed more than 160 lbs, and that was when I was at University and thoroughly miserable, just before I discovered the fitness lifestyle.
With the opening of the new studio sorted, I knew that I was going to be running a ‘90-day Swimsuit Challenge’ for a select group of enrolees to enable them to get in amazing shape before the summer. On seeing my weight, I decided there and then that I was going to join them on that journey. There just didn’t seem to be much to shout about when I only had 10 lbs to lose, so I decided to increase the size of my challenge (I don’t like making my goals overly easy to achieve, otherwise there is no point).
So, in the last three months I have very purposefully continued to be less-disciplined with my eating habits, and slowly but surely the pounds have continued to add on. I am not going to step on the scales until Monday, when along with the other Challenge participants I am going to get some baseline measurements and photos, but I am pretty sure that for the first time in almost 20 years, the scale is going to top out at over 160 lbs (11.5 stone).
The most surprising thing for me is just how easily I have added the fat.
Its know that it is all fat as I haven’t been training and eating appropriately to add any muscle. I haven’t been eating piles of junk food, just allowing myself far more frequent sugary treats and eating more processed items rather than I would on my normally clean diet.
I have always had a real weakness for sugary and salty items, and have been known to have some amazingly large binges where I consume vast numbers of calories in one sitting (more about that in a future post). Most of the time I find these desires pretty easy to control, as I just have to remind myself of how much better I feel when I eat well and don’t give into the temptation.
An odd thing has happened over the last few months. As I have allowed more of these items to get into my diet on a regular basis, I have stopped noticing how rubbish they make me feel. Roller-coaster energy levels, bloating, bad skin, interrupted sleep, constipation, irritability etc. have become strangely acceptable to me.
My once well-tuned engine feels clogged up and sluggish.
Worse still, the pain in my knees which has been slowly getting worse in recent years (pre-arthritic changes etc.) has reached a level where it is seriously affecting what I feel able to do. I avoid going down any stairs, have given up any idea of doing weighted squats in the gym, and have even started to wonder how much longer I will be able to walk with ease.
Simply put, I feel old!
It’s almost like I have adapted to a new ‘normal’, and the further away from my old self I get, the less motivated I feel to take control and sort it out. I can fully understand how people can become apathetic and feel powerless, even when they know what they need to do to get back on track. It’s hard to overcome the resistance of staying like we are.
Those excess 25 pounds have taken a serious toll on my self-esteem as well. I just feel horrible, ugly and fat, and my desire to engage with other people socially had dropped to zero. Now I am fairly anti-social by nature as you know, and hate large gatherings of people, but I have even found myself trying to avoid seeing my friends.
The most worrying feature is that I haven’t changed my lifestyle all that much to allow the weight to keep adding on. It has further reinforced for me the need to always attack weight loss from multiple angles. It’s not like I have stopped exercising all together over this period, in fact my routine has remained fairly regular in terms of frequency and intensity. It’s my eating habits which have gone down the pan, and even then, only by a bit.
It has really reinforced for me that ‘You can’t out-exercise a bad diet’ and that to be successful you have to change both your diet and exercise habits. You are unlikely to be successful in the long term if you are not prepared to make some significant changes on both counts.
If I listen carefully to my body, I can still hear it screaming at me to take action, and of course my continuing weight gain has been a means to an end. I would have cracked a long time ago and got back on track if it wasn’t part of my experiment.
To be honest I can’t wait for next Monday, when I get to start watching the fat come off. More importantly, I am looking forward to sharing my journey with the 90-day Swimsuit Challenge participants as we go through the transformation together.
There are just 2 spaces left by the way, and enrolments are going to close on Saturday night. For more details click here.
Not only am I going to be teaching the group about what does and doesn’t constitute a healthy diet for fat loss (it’s not eating low fat products, avoiding red meat, cutting calories or drinking skimmed milk by the way), but more interestingly some ‘underground’ fat-loss diet and exercise regimes which really work to accelerate results.
It isn’t necessarily going to be an easy journey, but I feel sure that as a team we will be triumphant. I personally can’t wait to take those ‘after’ photos to show off what we have achieved. I am 100% confident that I will have the best body I have ever had by June 22nd, and I shall never allow myself to feel like I do now ever again!
Again, just a reminder that there are only two spaces left in the 90-Day Swimsuit Challenge programme, but only for anyone dedicated to making the necessary changes to get results.
Your ‘soon to be thinner’ fitness friend,
Beth
