Claire's FAT journey Part 1

Hi everyone!!

I am feeling totally honoured and excited, not to mention a little bit spesh to be asked to do this health and fitness blog for F.A.T! The purpose of this blog is to capture my meal planning and prepping and my exercise during the week via photos, videos and stories. I will share my successes & failures – we all have them.

Firstly I will introduce...My name is Claire, I'm 33 and I am just your everyday, ordinary wife and mother to Casey and two gorgeous babes, Aiden, almost 5 and Amelia, 2. I do not consider myself to be any sort of guru on the subject of health and fitness but to honest it has become a real passion on mine since starting my weight loss journey over 18 months ago.

My journey began when my sister became engaged in November 2014 and asked me to be her maid of honour. This was the motivation I needed to lose weight. I started by tracking what I ate using an app called My Fitness Pal and slowly the weight came off. By September 2014 I’d lost 14kgs but wanted to lose more before the wedding so joined F.A.T and the goal of losing 20kgs and being pre-baby weight for my sister’s wedding became reality. Before joining F.A.T, I’d always hated exercise – it was always boring and repetitive – two things F.A.T is definitely NOT! I’ve gone on to lose another 12kgs since her wedding and have lost a total of 32 kgs so far. I would like to lose approximately another 5kgs. But ultimately, I am happy where I am and feel amazing. I get so many complements now (which can be a little embarrassing) but it is lovely to have my efforts acknowledged and I have received lots of support and encouragement along the way. I couldn’t have done it without the help of my family and friends and the awesome trainers at F.A.T.

I look forward to trying to help many of you on your weight loss journey and hope to inspire and motivate you to become a healthier, fitter version of yourself! We are all here to support and help one another and this is a great way for me to give back the help and advice that has been given to me along the way. Seriously if you want something bad enough you can do it. If I can, anyone can...I was well over 100kg (something I never divulge to anyone!!) It isn’t easy – but nothing worth it ever is!

Claire xo

SCROLL DOWN TO SEE MY MEAL PREP AND WEEKLY WRAP UP VIDEOS

Meal Planning & Prepping Sunday, 5 June 2016

Hi fellow F.A.T! members and members of the public,

Hope you’re all having a fantastic week, staying motivated & smashing your fitness goals – it sure gets harder as this cold weather creeps upon us!! I know some of you are having trouble staying focused with your eating and feel like you have your exercise sorted but your eating is letting you down. In these blogs I am just stating what knowledge I have gained from my experience with nutrition and exercise. I said it in my intro blog, and I’ll say it again – I am no guru on the subject of nutrition & fitness but I feel like I can help you guys achieve your nutrition goals (along with your commitment and dedication), because I have been there, I have been through it…actually I am still going through it. My journey over the last 18 months has seen me lose 32kg. The first 14kg was done with proper eating alone and no exercise. So imagine what you guys could achieve as you are already exercising! I can not stress enough how important planning and organisation is in regards to staying on track with your eating. Eating is the clincher if you want to lose weight. You cannot out-exercise a bad diet. You need to get serious about your eating if you want to see results. Exercising is awesome and will only fast track your results but without a calorie controlled eating plan, it’s just not going to be as effective. I find if I have paid good money for food and spent my time preparing it, there is much less chance of me making bad food choices during the day!

In both my written & video blogs, I am going to share my meal planning and prepping and how I go about organising what I eat and how I prepare it. I do what I call ‘Meal Prep Sundays’. I grocery shop on Saturday or Sunday and spend a couple of hours on Sunday cooking and preparing lunches and snacks for the week. I am the type of person who doesn’t mind eating the same things each day and it does make prepping & calorie counting easier. It’s up to you though, lots of dishes can be frozen so you could make multiple dishes and freeze them so you have the option to have different lunches each day.

Breakfast: Every night before I go to bed I prepare breakfast in the form of ‘Overnight Oats’. I love these and there are so many variation on them. Your imagination is the limit. My favourite recipe is quite simple. I mix it altogether and put it in the fridge overnight and the oats soften in the milk. They can be eaten cold or hot and in the morning you can add toppings such as, slivered almonds, granola, fresh banana or strawberries or shredded coconut. See…it’s limitless! And so delicious!

Lunches & Snacks: I usually make 10 lunches (5 for me and 5 for hubby) and I make 1- 2 snack options. I also use this time to make vegies for the kids’ dinners and an all in one dish for them like spaghetti bolognaise or something as simple as the mince for tacos. Last Sunday I made fried rice & pumpkin soup for our lunches & peppermint balls for our snacks. So delicious and will definitely be making them again. I made the fried rice the week before last as well but only used brown rice – this made the calories quite high so last week I decided to add ¼ of the rice and replaced the other ¾ with of cauliflower rice. This significantly reduced the calories and allowed me to have more of it! Win, Win!!

Dinners: Dinners I also plan as a part of my grocery shop but instead of preparing them ahead of time, like our lunches and snacks, I cook them fresh most nights. I admit to using frozen pre-prepared meals or foods for convenience. I chose items wisely and check nutrition labels. Most dinners include a protein and loads of veggies, I love almost every vegetable. My favourite way of preparing vegetables is to steam or roast them. I like to use spray oil and seasoning to add flavour.

Water: Another thing I am working on is drinking more water. I did better at the beginning of the week. I like to add lemon to my water to make it a bit more interesting. I have been having 1 litre of warm lemon water in the morning when I wake up. Warm lemon water has many benefits, including helping to kick-start digestion for the day and rehydrating us. See this website for some interesting facts. http://tasty-yummies.com/2013/03/18/10-benefits-to-drinking-warm-lemon-water-every-morning/

While I am on the topic of water…drinks are often overlooked as a part of your daily calorie intake. Honestly I mostly only drink water and tea. I have the odd coffee sometimes if I am out or diet soft drink. I just don’t think they’re worth the calories – I’d rather be eating them LOL. Write down all your drinks you have in a day and see how many calories they actually contain. You might be surprised!

Below is my meal plan & recipes for the week:

Some must dos: • ELECTRONIC KITCHEN SCALES One piece of kitchen equipment you MUST get yourself is a set of electronic kitchen scales. This is vital for caloric accuracy in what you are eating, for your cooking & portion size. It might sound like time-consuming overkill to some of you but in all seriousness – how else do you know how much of something you are having without weighing it? Check any label on any food item and it will have a serving size – I weigh pretty much everything I eat or prepare so I know for sure how many calories I am consuming. You do become much better at determining weights of things once you do this for a while and it almost becomes routine to check all labels before buying or consuming them. Remember I am trying to lose weight so that is why I am so mindful of calories.

• CALORIE TRACKING I use an app on my phone called ‘My Fitness Pal’. This is an amazing app that will record all of your progress. It tracks your calories each day, water consumption, weight and exercise & has plenty more features. Check out their website to read about exactly what the app/website can offer: https://www.myfitnesspal.com/. It is a bit time consuming when you initially start using it but after a couple of days, it’s just a few clicks as it remembers foods you eat and they pop up straight away. I log my food every day so I do not go over my daily calorie intake. I also log the calories burned during my exercise (which my polar watch and heart rate chest strap tell me). This does not mean that I eat more because I exercise. It keeps me accountable and I enjoy seeing my progress and hitting goals.

• CALORIES PER DAY At the beginning of my weight loss journey I was eating around 1600 calories per day (and wasn’t exercising). This is how I lost the first 14kg. When I reached that point I plateaued. This is when I knew it was time to change things up. This is also when I joined F.A.T! I began on the 6 week/3 days a week boot camp plan. For the first 2-3 weeks I kept eating 1600 calories and my weight didn’t budge. Now this made me pretty cranky as at that time I hated exercise, I was eating well and nothing was happening. I wondered if I had to eat more now that I was exercising? I have heard that a lot – you need to eat more in order to lose weight. I decided to trial eating less (1200 calories a day) first just to see what happened. After one week, I’d lost 2.2kg. Woo hoo!! I have been doing this ever since and now am on the full timetable at F.A.T! attending at least 4-5 times per week. I am steadily losing around 0.5-1kg per week. By doing this I said goodbye to another 19kg thus far. This is what worked for me and I encourage you to just try it for just one week and see what happens. You have nothing to lose. It may not be easy, but it doesn’t have to be bad. It will be different, but you can still eat things you like, you just may need to make recipe modifications or reduce your portion size. As you saw from my meal plan I eat ice cream every night! You can do it!!