Mission sub 75kg

This time last week I was just making my way home from a two week Baltic Cruise. We had a great time, explored lots of lovely cities and walked thousands of steps while doing so. It was a great mix of sightseeing and relaxation and just what I needed. Sea days are amazing for just making you relax – there’s plenty to do on the ship but it’s also a rare opportunity to do not very much and so I spent quite a few hours just sitting and staring out to sea.

 

I worked out while we were on the ship. There was a spacious and well equipped gym so I got plenty of sessions in  – including completing a 500 burpee challenge that Julia Buckley set me on Instagram!

My diet was also reasonably good but of course I ate things that I wouldn’t eat regularly at home. There was a lot more alcohol than usual, most days to be honest but I enjoyed relaxing with a glass of prosecco and having some lovely wine with our dinner most evenings.

 

Holidays are a great time to reflect and this holiday was no different for me. There were a lot of people on this boat who were overweight, some of them very much so. It was really quite eye opening to see first hand the impact that their extra weight has on their mobility and ability to do some really everyday things – walking up a couple of flights of stairs, getting onto a coach, wandering around a museum for an hour etc.

Now I am not here to fat shame, far from it. I believe that everyone has the right to choose how they live their life. But seeing those people, some not that much older than me, struggle to complete what I would consider to be pretty basic tasks really made me think.

I’m in my early 40s and while I’m nowhere near as big as I used to be I’ve still got too much fat on my body. Yes, I’m strong and in some people’s eyes relatively fit. But that doesn’t mean that I’m as healthy as I could be. I have my own mobility issues, tight hips and ankles and knees that haven’t been 100% for a while now. I wonder how much of that is exacerbated by the fact that I’m carrying around more fat and therefore weight than is really healthy for my body? I don’t want to find myself in my 50s and not able to move around and enjoy life to the full. There’s a world full of places that I want to see and I do not want impaired mobility to stop me from doing that.

I lost a lot of weight with Julia Buckley back in 2013 – this photo shows what I achieved. But since then some of the weight has gone back on, come off and gone on again for a variety of reasons and I’m now not quite as lean as that photo on the right.

I talked earlier this year about wanting to get down into the under 75kg strongwoman category and since then I have lost a bit of fat. When I stepped on the scales for my first competition back in April I weighed in at 90kg, last week I stood at 87.5kg, so yes I’ve managed to lose some of the fat.

But 2.5kg in 3 months isn’t really that much and it shows that I’ve not been paying as much attention to this goal as I could be.

So all of this reflection has lead to me having a bit of a wake up call and realising that I’ve been faffing around with this fat loss thing for the last couple of years following my initial losses with Julia in 2013. While I’m generally happy with my strength and overall fitness levels it really is time to get this fat loss job done once and for all.

Achieving that is entirely down to me.I know what I need to do. It’s time to stop talking about it and time to start making it happen. So over the coming months I’ll be blogging about my fat loss journey – public accountability always helps me, and I’ll be sharing some of the things that are helping me along the way.

Like this – one of the first episodes of the JuliaBFit show on You Tube where Julia debunks a lot of the myths perpetuated by the diet industry and speaks a lot of sense about how to eat to lose fat. This was really helpful to me in my first week back to ‘normal’ eating post holiday. Hope you find it useful too.