Finally a post from me…and more pics

Its been a long time between posts again. Life is just busy in the lead up to Christmas and although I’ve been declining a lot of invitations and have stayed committed to my fitness, there still doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day. My friend mentioned the other day how great it would be if we didn’t have to work and could spend every day at the gym improving ourselves! Yes what a great life that would be – I think I need to marry a rich man for that to happen, or win the lottery!

So my weight has pretty much stabilised – I’ve sat on 57.2 kgs for the last 5 weeks, when suddenly it dropped to 56.3kgs. Bizarre.

Last weekend I took more pics of my continuing transformation, one month into my Lean & Strong program. Here are a couple:

And here is a side by side, taken one month apart:

I think I am definitely improving my muscle tone. I am in the “bulking up” phase at the moment and I am really keen to get shredded and lean out, but that phase doesn’t start for another 3 weeks, so its an exercise in patience.  Today I am particularly sore as I really worked the legs and glutes hard yesterday and did sprints today, so I’m feeling it!

My nutrition has been up and down. I’ve been eating too much sugar (lollies, chocolate) the past few weeks, then I follow with a few days of clean eating and then sneak more sugar in. Ugh!  I think I have to cut more carbs out of my diet as well, such as bread and pasta. Not that I eat massive amounts of it, but I’m going to increase my greens and decrease the grainy carbs.  I also don’t think I’m eating enough protein, certainly not with each meal as I should be. All of these things I’ll be tweaking after the New Year – I’m away for a week and a half in Melbourne so it will be interesting to see how I go with keeping up training and sticking to a reasonably healthy diet.

Wishing everyone a very happy Christmas and best wishes for 2013!

Accelerator day

So I’ve decided to reintroduce Accelerator Days back into my nutrition plan. I know these are technically not introduced for another couple of weeks yet in the 12WBT but I feel I need to start them now. I have had a number of red flag days in the past week or two and need to get focused on my nutrition, especially as I am now down to the ‘pointy end’ of my weight loss and am tackling the stubborn, hard to shift areas of belly and thighs!

Accelerator Days are one day a week (Tuesdays before weigh-in Wednesday) where you don’t eat carbs including fruit. It is a day high in protein and designed to accelerate your weight loss for the week.

I have mixed feelings about Accelerator Days. They do leave me feeing fuller because of the high protein but I struggle with not having fruit or complex carbs like mountain bread, oats etc. I certainly wouldn’t be able to maintain this kind of eating all week. However I understand that this kind of strict eating is whats required for competition level body shaping – so I may be writing a whole other post about my struggles with it later on! That said, if it was for a goal like a comp, I think I would cope with it better because there is a reason and motivation behind it.

Anyway, this morning I had a fried egg, tomato and lean bacon. I’ll probably have a can of tuna for afternoon snack and a protein shake for mid morning snack. Lunch will be my low fat butter chicken and I haven’t decided on dinner yet – it could be veg cannelloni which is technically not an Accelerator Day meal but it should be okay for one night.

Yummy breakfast