That’s a lazy title, even by my standards but I’m going with it!
At the end of the Santa Shred I was sitting at 202lbs. This was a number I’d seen before and I was so close to that elusive ‘one-derland’ magic number so there was no doubt that I was going to continue in a deficit in order to try and get to 199lbs before my 38th birthday at the end of the year. Maintaining a calorie deficit isn’t the easiest thing when you’re surrounded by Christmas food and there’s the temptation of sweet and chocolates in the office (wow, remember when we shared food?), but I did it. On the morning of 25 December 2019, before lacing up my trainers for what’s become our traditional Christmas Day run, I weighed in at 196.8lbs! I was thrilled.
My birthday night out fell a day early (thanks to football on New Years’ Day) and that morning I weighed 199lbs. I know it’s only my relationship with gravity, and it shouldn’t really be about the number but I felt absolutely amazing that night. I wore a dress I’d never been comfortable in and genuinely felt good about myself or the first time in a long time.
The new year beckoned, I had already signed up to Jamie’s next challenge, called the J8 and was ready for it. This one was 8 weeks long rather than six and I knew that I wasn’t going to see the huge numbers I had with the Santa Shred. The initial whoosh had already happened and I knew that in order to keep dropping big numbers I would need to put myself into a really aggressive deficit and that’s not me. I LOVE my food as you know!
Thst first challenge of the year saw me lose about 10lbs in total which in the grand scheme of things was actually quite a decent number. I remember feeling really disappointed at the time though. Lots of people had absolutely smashed it as you’d expect with it being the first big shred of the new year but I was now almost 32lbs down in just a few short months so it wasn’t like I was failing. The photos at the end definitely showed that I had made progress.
Immediately following that shred it was trips to Spennymoor, Middlesbrough and then onto the British Pie Awards in Melton Mowbray. I clearly remember not being able to shake anyone’s hand due to the guidelines that had been issued about this thing called the Coronavirus…
We had reached mid-March 2020 and the talk of locking the country down had started. Every morning in the gym felt like it could be our last and on Friday 20 March, that day arrived. Had I known at the time it would be my last session in DW, I would have perhaps have spent a little longer there and not taken it for granted quite so much.
I spent a few hours that evening sorting through the various bits of gym kit I had accumulated over the last few years and pulled together a somewhat reasonable amount of equipment – I was absolutely certain that the lockdown was not going to derail me!
So began a new era in my fitness journey – without heavy weights and with no machines it was time to start doing something different. I’d never been more motivated to work for something in my life. There was no chance that this situation was going to turn me into a banana bread making alcoholic – oh no – #BurpeeKates was born 😂
To be continued.
Title Undecided... 