So, in this episode I’m going to talk about my key changes in a bit more detail. As you can see from my picture, I had a huge tyre around my middle – heart attack waiting to happen right! (These pictures are taken 2 months apart) Well this was always my most hated area. I get asked a lot of questions about how I tackled this area. The truth isn’t what people want to hear, because there is absolutely no ‘quick fix’ here. No waist trainers or spanx will fix this problem. Its all about diet and pushing yourself in the gym.
SO I want to talk about Carbs. Carbs Carbs Carbs. Lovely addictive Carbs. I don’t know about anyone else here, but I used to eat Carbs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My brain would tell me I wouldn’t be full unless I had consumed some form of carb as part of each meal. The truth was that I was addicted to them. I had to knock this on the head. In the beginning, I took most carbs out of my diet. It was tough but necessary. They stick to this middle tyre like a magnet. Being an all or nothing kind of girl, I went cold turkey and stripped them from my diet almost completely, bar vegetables, fruit and grains. I’m talking the big bad grizzly kind – Potatoes, bread, cakes, rice, pasta, Pizza – you name it, I stripped it. After I had dropped a lot of weight and started to build muscle, I started to re-introduce them, purely because I was burning so many calories by working out – I needed the energy. I actually discovered that the freshly baked bread I was once obsessed with (I couldn’t resist a freshly baked loaf – I’d start nibbling at the start of my food shop for the week, and I’d have to go back at the end to get another loaf because most likely, I had consumed over half on my journey around the supermarket) I now no longer liked the taste of bread! I could just taste yeast and not much else! I had actually changed my taste pallet quite by mistake in this process. If I choose to eat bread these days, its wheat free or Sour dough. I tend to only eat this on a weight training day. I find it helps sustain my energy level throughout my workout.
Of course, knocking the likes of bread (and wheat) out of my diet had a huge effect on my weight loss and I really started to see the weight drop off. I remember my first weigh in after this big change, I lost a whopping 11lbs in 7 days and cutting wheat and carbs was the main reason for this drop. I mixed my workouts up, I was building my cardio stamina with a great little app called ‘running for weight loss’, and I was doing a lot of core work. Planking, bench presses, pull-ups, crunches and push ups to be precise. I invested in some personal training sessions at my gym and my wonderful PT Adam introduced me to the world of dead lifting. Ill go into this in more detail on my next segment.
So there it is. No miracle cure, pill or surgery – just pure graft and dedication to my new lifestyle. I was feeling happier and stronger from the inside out, and I had only just started. Life was getting good.