The Great Shift

Hi I'm Sam :) I live in New Zealand and have done all my life. Great country to live in!
I made a decision not so long ago to concentrate on my health and fitness as opposed to concentrating on my weight. (This isn't to say I don't want to lose weight)

I was considered 'obese' at the age of 12. I don't have anyone to blame for this except myself. At 13 I weighed 98kg. For a few years my weight went up and down. I didn't take too much notice during this time. I only remember hating the people that called me fat (and every other name under the sun). At 17, over the christmas holidays I lost 15 kg after I made friends with a really lovely girl who I started getting out and walking with. At 18 I joined the gym and dropped down to 74 kg, and then stopped because I couldn't afford it anymore. My weight crept back up to 78 and thats when I came to the 'health and fitness more important than weight' realisation. As I said I've never really been pre-occupied with the number on the scales, only the way I felt. So I made the decision to make how I felt better.

How I felt about exercise? I'd stopped doing it altogether, so that was obviously the first thing to change. I'm one of those people that loves the feeling they get from exercising so I love doing it. I've started a 9 week program "couch potato to 5km runner". And I went back to the gym (that I still can't afford to pay for) where I asked if I could clean there for an hour or two a week for a free membership and they said yes (pretty sweet, huh?). And I do two resistance weight trainings there a week, an hour each time. This was a good starting program for me.

How I felt about food? Well that turned out to be a little bit of an iceberg of an issue. I started examining and analysing my eating habits and realised several things about myself.

• I'm an emotional eater. I not only eat when I'm sad, I eat when I'm angry, happy, excited or stressed.
• I binge eat. In other words I eat more than I need to fuel my body.
• And I eat when I'm not hungry (aka bored).

I decided that to begin changing my eating habits I'd have to start writing down everything that I eat. So I've been doing that. I've also been checking myself physically when I reach for food if I'm hungry or actually bored, stressed, tired, angry, happy, sad (or any combination of these). If its any of the later I stop myself and find something else to do. If I'm seriously needing a pick me up I drink a cup of tea with sugar alternative and low fat milk (it's enough to get me past the 'gotta have it' phase of things).

So that's all the catch up info. I thought I did a pretty good job of summing that up :)

Status Report

Where I'm at now? Well I'm in my second week. I've had my first weigh in (weigh in days are mondays) And I've lost half a kg so far. I didn't expect to lose anything as I usually gain muscle mass faster than I lose fat. But yay to the half a kg! My running is going great. I'm only in the first week of this but I have seen huge improvements already! Same with my food eating. I don't mindlessly shovel food into my mouth anymore. I'm far more aware of it now :)
So many good things are going on at the moment I just had to start sharing so here I am. I'll hopefully be updating daily, on my victories and defeats for the day. So please come back soon!