New Year – new challenge!

I hope that the start of 2015 has been good for you and that you’re not feeling the after effects of last night’s celebrations too much!

It’s inevitable that at the start of a new year people make resolutions – things they want to start or give up, goals for the year, things they want to achieve. I’m no different – the start of a year with 12 clear months stretching out ahead is a great time to pause and think about what I really want to focus on.

In my last post I talked about my strength training and how far I’d come in 2014. That’s something I definitely want to continue with in 2015 for sure. But I’m wanting to make fat loss a priority again for myself for the first few months of 2015. During 2014 I gained fat and weight during my marathon training and although much of that is now gone I’m still carrying more fat than I’d like to be.

I want to get back to running again – I’ve got a place for the Hackney Half in May. I know that the extra fat that I’m carrying will slow me down so getting rid of it is my immediate priority before I start to think about running any serious miles.

There are two parts to the fat loss equation – exercise and nutrition. The exercise part is no issue for me these days at all. Working out 5 or 6 days a week is now normal for me and I miss it if I don’t do it. I’m excited that my online PT Julia Buckley is launching her new fitness programme Challenge XXX on Monday. A 30 day online programme with a different workout on each training day it promises to be her most effective programme to date, and having got great results from both The Fat Burn Revolution and Extreme Inferno I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in. I think we’re going to be doing 3 rounds of it so with my weekly in person PT session and a four week Olympic Lifting course that’s January – March sorted exercise wise!

Nutrition wise I’m about to embark on something a bit different for me. I’ve made huge changes to my diet in the last two years but in the last few months my fat loss progress feels like it’s slowed down. I’ve tried tweaking things in my diet here and there, I don’t think I’ve got anything majorly ‘wrong’ but I feel like things just aren’t moving as quickly as they could be. I want to take the guess work out of it and eat in a way that’s going to guarantee fat loss, so after a lot of deliberation I’ve signed up for a personalised fat loss nutrition plan.

Coming from a background of numerous failed diets this is not a decision that I’ve taken lightly, but I really do feel that something structured, personalised to me and my energy requirements will be a good thing. I really want to accelerate my fat loss again and I hope that this is going to help do that. I’m also hoping that as an added bonus I’ll learn more about nutrition and what my body needs after training and on rest days.

I’ll post more about this in the coming weeks – at the moment I’ve got quite a lot to get my head around and quite a lot of shopping and then cooking to do! I’ve got to say the food on the plan all looks delicious with lots of choice and flexibility and there appears to be plenty of it. It’s not wildly different to how I usually each but there are some subtleties which may well be where the answer lies for me.

So there we go – no major resolutions for me but some new challenges for the first three months of the year which should hopefully see a much leaner Becca by the end of March.

I’ll let you know how I get on!