Apologies for the picture quality of the "before" - it was just a wee snapshot taken at a Halloween party 18 months ago.
If there's one thing I regret about this... (I hate this word but I'm going to use it anyway)... "journey"... it's that I never took a proper "before" picture of myself, but it was just because of the way the whole thing started.
Believe it or not, I didn't just wake up one morning and go "hum, I think I'm going to lose a shitload of weight today". The changes were all a bit more gradual than that. First, I started running. Then after about a month or so, I came across MyFitnessPal (which deserves a whole blog post in itself, so I won't go into it here). Then a couple of months later, I realised the importance of resistance training. A month or so after that, I got introduced to the wonders of Zumba. Then I thought I should learn to swim... and so on and so forth.
Sure, I do quite a lot of stuff now, but I took on each element of my current lifestyle organically, bit by bit. One thing just kind of flowed into another. Okay I know I'm starting to sound like some kind of zenned-out hippy now, but you get my drift.
To be honest, I'm kind of glad it happened that way. I think if I had tried to take on everything at once, I would have just been so completely and utterly overwhelmed. I doubt I would have lasted a week. To be perfectly frank, I think that's why so many (another word I hate but gonna use anyway) "diets" fail. People think they can change their entire lifestyle overnight, but I know for sure that I couldn't.
Anyway, I just went on a total tangent there. Sorry. The point I'm trying to make is that I didn't have a definite "start" point in my weight loss. So I didn't weigh myself, take photos or do any of that stuff. I remember going onto one of those crazy machines in Boots around 2-3 weeks after I started running, which told me I was nearly 13 stone (182lbs for my American friends, 82.5k for everyone else), but I still maintain to this day that those scales were wrong. I reckon I was closer to 12 and a half stone (175lbs, 79.4kg). If I was to believe the Boots machine, I had a BMI of 29.2. That was 0.8 of a BMI point off being obese. OBESE.
I knew I was a little chunky, but I didn't know I was so close to being OBESE.
I also paid the extra 50p or whatever it was to get my body fat composition measured. That was a laugh. 35% body fat I was. That's pretty bad. Or so the slip told me anyway.
I wish I had kept the wee receipt as a souvenir but I was so disgusted with the numbers I chucked it as soon as I found a bin.
However, I did go on another one of those crazy machines at the pool last week, and I got another slip. Let's take a look at what it says for a comparison:
Okay, that's nowhere near as clear as I hoped it would be. Silly computer camera.
Basically my weight was 10st 2lbs (142lbs, 64.6kg) that day, but I tend to bounce around the 10st mark. My BMI was 22.6 (healthy weight, yipee) and my body fat percentage was 23.3%. According to the slip, that's slap bang between "good" and "excellent". I know that 35lbs in some people's book is pretty small fry, but to go from over a third body fat to less than a quarter... well what can I say, I'm chuffed with that.
And if I can do it, anyone can.
No comments:
Post a Comment