My progress and a new workout plan

It’s been a while… again. We must acknowledge that my standards for this blog slipped quite a bit and my posts are pretty irregular.

A lot has happened since I last posted. When was it? Mid-March? Yeah, sounds about right.

So, I turned 24, lost some more weight and moved house (or from a flat to a house share, but whatever). Oh, and the Coronavirus brought (most of) the world to a halt. Luckily the UK’s version of lockdown isn’t a lockdown so I’ve been able to go outside almost as and when I feel about it, given exercise can be used as a ‘reasonable excuse’ at any time.

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Oh yeah, my dad gifted me a Fitbit Versa for my birthday, which, honestly, is the most useful present (in the birthday category) I think I’ve received in my 24 years of life… apart from my childhood toy of course, which has a place on my bed. Of course, my phone has a pedometer function so I still would have been able to find this data but I can tell you my resting heart rate at any given moment, which, y’know, is cool at worst.

So, as you have eyes, you will be able to see that my step average has increased. For April I was hitting an average of 9.8K steps and in May this rose to 13.3K. To address the days that display a lack of line my watch was charging (I promise). I’m really glad that this is the case because I moved house in May, which I was anticipating to negatively impact my progress.

Total weight-loss of 9kg (11% of total starting weight)

Now, this is the part of the post where I tell you that my only exercise has been walking and 30-second sprints in a couple of attempts to make it to work on time (‘Sorry, I was sending a Snapchat’). I do want this to change, though, because we all know that walking isn’t going to cut it for defining abs and toning my arms and legs.

I recently found that a certain YouTuber, namely Chloe Ting, was trending as her workouts saw impressive results and reviews, with many others uploading videos detailing their experience of doing said ‘shreds’. Chloe has amassed a total of 9.4m subscribers on YouTube and 1.8m followers on Instagram. With these crazy figures depicting a massive audience, how could these shreds not work?

Chloe Ting’s most popular workout plan

All of her programmes are free to access (thank you) and require no equipment, with her most popular being the Two Week Shred. So I’m going to give this a go with my newly-bought yoga mat and I’ll let you know how it goes in two weeks’ time. I mean, I could check-in sooner but somehow I think that’s a tad unrealistic.

I should add that I’m still in the DietBet Transformer game and am a ‘winner’ of its fifth round (out of six), weighing in at 69.1kg and adding another $30 to my personal pot.

I won!

So, if you read my last post you’ll know that I had entered myself in a little weight-loss bet. A couple of days ago I was involved with a Dietbet Kickstarter (four weeks long) and Transformer (six months long). I weighed out yesterday and I won back the original $35 bet for the Kickstarter plus another $16 in profit! In addition to that, I won round two (second month) of my Transformer game, where my take-home is higher than last month’s $18 winnings. I’m very pleased.

That means I currently weigh 70.5kg/155lbs.

I’m debating doing another Kickstarter game, but I’m not sure how achievable that would be. I would have to lose another 4%, which is 2.8kg or 6.1lbs. I can lose 4% of my body weight, but losing it in four weeks will take some focus.

I’ve just renewed my gym membership because my sister wants someone to go with and that starts today. I want to find a workout guide and see what they recommend for weigh loss/toning your bottom half before I go. I’ve booked a stretch class so I’m hoping to give that a go, although I don’t know whether I should work out before that or if it’s supposed to be a workout in itself.

I’ll let you know what I decide to do.

 

Update – two months in

Yeah, turns out I’m really bad at keeping a blog going.

It’s good news, though. I’ll walk you through what’s happened in the last eight weeks.

With my daily walking, I found that eating well was so much easier because not only was I occupied and doing things, but I could allow myself an extra snack and didn’t need to watch my calories as closely. I also felt happier on these days, which I think is the general consensus with exercising – your body is releasing those feel-good chemicals.

I also set a goal to drink more water, which at first was fine and achievable, but I lost focus rapidly, and I think that was to do with going to work five days a week. As I work in retail, I found that when shopping after work it was difficult to avoid soft drinks and snacks. On a more positive note, though – these snacks were small in quantity.

I would like to note that I weighed myself a week before the final weigh-in and saw that I basically had it in the bag so I didn’t put much effort into the last week but was still watching what I ate.

Good news: I won the Dietbet and lost 5 percent of my original body weight! I weighed in at 73.8kg. Hurrah! 

Food notes for January (most common meals/snacks):

• Weetabix banana (2-3 biscuits) & almond milk sweetened
• Soup & half a small baguette/2 slices of bread
• Big dollop/two tablespoons of plain/greek yoghurt with grapes and blueberries
• Halo Top Cookie Dough

So, after winning my money back on the first bet I made, I placed a second.

This month I’ve got to mention I’ve had to deal with, legitimately, the worst cold. It took more than a week for me to feel better. Apart from my movement being/feeling impaired (no walking all the way to work), I had a horrible sore throat. Honestly, nothing I was taking made it feel better. I was taking liquid Beechams, Ibuprofen (just 200g) and Strepsils, which helped with everything but the throat. I couldn’t sleep properly at night and I absolutely dreaded going to work. I imagine some of this affected my weight loss progress.

The goal weight for this second bet is 70.5kg, and this morning I weighed in at 70.3kg. I just hope the weight of my phone doesn’t affect the scale too greatly! I’ll be weighing in on either Monday morning or Tuesday afternoon (there’s a 48-hour window once the game ends).

Hopes, prayers and Pepsi Max.