As I am so close to hitting the magical barrier of 73.2kg, I had a look at pictures that were taken a few weeks before I hit my back. It was a bit of an "oh my god" moment for me. It really sank in that the reading on the scale really is just numbers.

The pictures on the left are from July 2012. I was roughly 73kg.
The pictures on the right are from today. I currently am 74kg.

Last year I didn't do exercise, all the exercise I did was at work, lugging a hoover around, carrying heavy bin bags or moving furniture around. No proper cardio, no gym. This time round, I've really dedicated a lot of time to working out. Ever since January I've been doing all these workout DVDs at home and been going to the gym for the past month. I feel and look better and thinner than I did a year ago. I can quite honestly say that I'm in the best shape of my life and I'm only getting started.

Just by looking at these pictures I can really tell that building muscle has done wonders to my posture. My shoulders are back and not hunched forward. It's a very good feeling to see this kind of change in yourself.


This top has always been quite tight for me around the chest. But then again, I'm not getting any less chesty in the near future I don't think, that fat is holding onto my body like it's the end of the world!

I wanted to do a little dance on the scales!! :D 10kg I never want to see again. Considering that I've done next to no exercise this week because of my knee and a day out yesterday (water weight could've built up + some alcohol), this is incredible.

If my memory serves me correctly, I'm 800g away from being the same weight I was last July before hitting my back. :)

I've been so preoccupied talking about bigger things on my blog that my actual day to day stuff has been pushed aside a bit. But now, time for a bit of rambling again.

Another injury, yay. Just because my ankles playing up in May wasn't enough to screw up my progress, now my knee has done itself in! It actually happened on Tuesday, I just simply knelt down on the floor to wrestle with out dogs and I just felt something pop in my left knee. Ever since it's been a real task to straighten my leg, I keep getting nasty little stings when I walk and I've just ended up chair bound most of the time. Really not what I want to be doing right now!! I feel like I'm slacking and like I'm just using a small injury as an excuse to not exercise. I know that's not the case, I need to rest my knee or I'll just damage it even further, but it's really annoying me. I'm so into my workouts right now that having to skip gym is just awful.

I will probably end up doing a small arm workout to compensate, though. I want to do SOMETHING! Just sitting down, doing some simple stuff like bicep curls and shoulder presses, just to get the calorie burn going.


With my potentially low calorie in mind I kept lunch pretty light. I cubed some baby potatoes and green peppers, sliced carrots and threw it all on the pan to fry in a little olive oil. Once that was done I threw in two salmon fillets, seasoned and added some sweet chilli sauce. I called it a very posh pytt i panna (a Swedish potato & sausage dish) as it did quite look like it but with a more fancy meat on the side.


And being all proud and happy about a light lunch, we then ended up having a bad dinner. Naughty us! We had to pop out for something and on the way back we started talking about what to have for dinner, I had a "bright" idea of going for KFC as it was on the way. I originally just wanted a Krushem but we thought that might as well have dinner so I don't need to stand in the kitchen and cook with my knee being what it is. While the sodium load was quite massive (just with that meal I've eaten nearly 90% of my sodium intake for the day), I've still kept my calories on target - currently I'm at 1100 (with my total calorie burn for today being at 1280 right now). I'm still going to eat something small during the evening just to get over 1200.


Time to start thinking what kind of a workout to do then!

I started thinking about a possible interview situation last night. I've applied for a part time job at this big health food & supplement store and I just created a small scenario in my head - what could they ask me, how I would respond and so on.

And it really got me thinking about my reasons behind applying for such a job. Ever since starting my own weight loss journey back in January, I've started valuing the healthy lifestyle a lot more. I think it's incredible that we have a store we can just walk into and ask for advice and find products to support the lifestyle we have picked for ourselves. It's great that the high street acknowledges the fact that people are getting more and more unfit and tries to prevent it going any further.


More and more I find myself writing essays to people who are asking for weight loss / exercise advice. I'm just so happy to share my knowledge with people who don't quite know what to do or just want to improve the way they are doing things. I mean I'm not an expert with all this stuff, but I've got the drive to read up on all this kind of stuff and increase my own "database". I've been gathering all this information for years, ever since I was about 14 years old. That's how long I've struggled with my self image, that's how long I've wanted to change my life around. Why didn't I do it when I was 14? Well, plenty of reasons but some of them are so personal that I'd rather not get into all of that. I also lacked the determination to do it back then.

Even though I'm still about 10-15kg off my target weight, the healthy lifestyle has definitely come to stay. And if I can be an example to people at the start of their journey, literally anyone can do the same. I'm not in the best health with my back condition and I've managed to lose a lot of weight with sensible eating choices and regular exercise. If I can, anyone can.

I just find it so satisfying to be able to help people with this kind of stuff. And if I can actually do it for a living, even better! I have considered studying nutrition and/or sports science for a while (and even becoming a PT), but only time will tell what happens. It's still such a "new" passion for me that I don't just want to dive right into it, give it a year or two to mature up a bit. I do also want to focus on what I have set my mind on, and that is the graphics design course I've signed up for (eek, it starts next week!). Maybe one day I'll combine the two somehow? Who knows. :)


I'm also a big supporter of medical research. You can't always be in control of your own health, and I have watched it happen to someone in the family. For the first time ever I've donated money to biomedial research and I feel fantastic about it. Myalgic encephalomyelitis or in common terms, chronic fatigue syndrome is still quite an unknown condition and if my contribution to their research means that scientists are able to figure out what causes it and how to treat it, fantastic! It has been very heart breaking to watch a close family member suffer with the condition on a daily basis and I really do hope they figure out a treatment very soon.

Anyways, time for me to stop procrastinating and dig into my uni tasks. ;) Nearly done, proud of myself for sticking to my schedule! Have a wonderful day everyone, go enjoy the sun while it lasts!

Weight loss is probably a multi billion pounds business nowadays. All the different products advertised on TV - low fat this, low calorie that. But how many people actually have a look at the nutritional information before buying the product thinking, that they've picked a really good product that will not harm their weight loss?

Sugar.

Yes, sugar. It's not good for you, but still all these products advertised as low fat or low calorie are loaded in that stuff. Sugar is empty calories, it's bad for your liver (as your liver is the poor thing that has to process all the sugar people consume nowadays), it damages your teeth and it will make your blood sugar spike (which in turn will make your levels crash after a while, making you crave more sugar). I could go on for ages but all the info is out there for everyone to read.

I try to avoid as much sugar as I can, for the above mentioned reasons AND because of my high risk of diabetes. But it is incredibly hard, even the healthy options have way too much sugar in them. As a rule of thumb, less than 5g of sugar per 100g is considered low in sugar, over 15g of sugar in 100g is high in sugar. I always try to aim for anything close to the 5g mark, I tend to leave the product on the shelves if the amount passes 10g.

And also the fat content of all these products can be absolutely mind blowing (especially if the product is advertised as low sugar). 5g of saturated fat per 100g is too much, 1.5g per 100g is good. You really don't need much of this stuff for it to be bad for you.

The bad stuff

All you really need to do at the supermarket is to just look at the fat and sugar contents of the stuff you think is good for you. I've pulled a few examples from Tesco's website for the purpose of just demonstrating how things we associate as healthy are really not.


The good stuff

Thankfully there is some decent options around, too! Obviously only a drop in the ocean, they are really getting better at giving us the real healthy stuff.



Be mindful of what you buy, don't let the sugar and saturated fat surprise you! Even things like Cheerios have insane amounts of sugar in them. I'd highly advise parents to read into this stuff too, it's not good to feed your children so much sugar!

And it's not just about the products that are advertised as healthy - have a look at your bottle of ketchup. You'd be surprised how much sugar you find in those.