16 week fat loss challenge - end of week 7

Alriiight....86.1kg !!!! The last time I was down at this weight was 10 years ago!

The progress the last few weeks has been awesome. Recently I've been reading about intermittent fasting and I am going to give it a try. Actually I already did... I tried it yesterday and it felt fine. Normally for me I gobble down breakfast as soon as I wake up but this morning I 'broke fast' after getting home from my yoga class at 12:30. Breakfast (well it was really lunch but it was breaking fast in it's truest sense) felt different from my normal breakfast. I could really taste and appreciate the food much more.

So I'm going to keep the intermittent fasting up for a while and I'm going to aim for 2 days a week. The approach I'm trying is 16/8, so 16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of eating. So I'm going to have my last meal about 18:30, and then break fast the following day at 10:30.

Intermittent fasting is touted to have many benefits beyond weight loss. Once I have read more and tried it out for myself for a period of time I'll report back as to how I found it.

16 week weight loss challenge - end of week 5....

OK - so I've only lost 200 grams from my last weigh-in post 4 weeks ago which looks pretty average BUT I just spent 3 weeks on holiday so any weight loss at all over that period is pretty awesome I reckon!

I was strict on my diet on holiday and most days I did at least a couple of hours cycling and lots of swimming in a (very cold) mountain lake but it's all paid off.

So now I'm back about to get into the normal work/home routine and I've got 12 weeks to really buckle down and get down to my goal weight!

Weight = 89.1kg
Body Fat % = 21.2%

my fitness test - Cetta to Carmo Langan

I'm very lucky to be able to enjoy holidaying a few times each year in the magical village of Cetta, set 800 metres above sea level in the Ligurian Alps (Italy).

My family and I have been coming to Cetta for 7 years and it is an amazingly tranquil and beautiful place.

As you can see from the photo, Cetta looks out over a valley (national park) and it is in this valley which I have a fitness test which I do about 4 times a year.

The test is to walk or run up the old path from the river (basically the lowest point when looking up the valley in the photo) to the road (close to the highest point when looking up the valley). The path that I follow is many hundreds of years old but these days I'm pretty much the only person using it (I've never seen another person on this path in the 7 years I've been walking it).

When I first walked the path a few years before I got Lyme disease it took me 40 minutes. Over a number of attempts I managed to get this down to 36 minutes which I thought was pretty good.

Then I got sick. There was a year or two when I didn't attempt the path and when I finally tried again I couldn't make it. I had to turn around.

But I kept persevering.

In May this year on my 40th birthday party I was able to do the path in 26 minutes 16 seconds. That time blew me away. Was far faster than any other time I've done.

3 days ago (August 2014) I did the path again. It's brutally hard. It's 600m of altitude gain clambering over rocks and tree roots. If you go all out you're huffing and puffing and swearing like a trooper before you make it a quarter of the way up. I gave it by best shot and ended up completing it in 24 minutes 34 seconds. WOW!!!!! That's a full 10 minutes faster than what it took me when I was much younger and prior to getting Lyme disease.

I was pretty chuffed.

I'm going to keep training away and I reckon I can bring the time down even further. Getting below sub 23 would be awesome, sub 20 would be epic!!!


ps - in earlier posts I had talked of my fat loss challenge. I wasn't able to weight myself for the last 3 weeks (on holiday without scales) but weighed myself this morning and was 90.3kg. That is slightly heavier than a few weeks ago but after 3 weeks of holidaying in Italy I reckon that marginal weight gain is more than acceptable! I ate super clean most of the time and so managed to keep the weight under control.