The Start Of Amanda’s Fat Loss Journey

For as long as I can remember I have always carried weight, and to be honest it never really bothered me, it bothered my parents as I do remember them expressing their concerns to me, I tried diets, I lost a lot of weight eating chicken and rice for a couple of months, not exactly an ideal diet as I put all the weight back on when I began to eat properly again.

My weight escalated after I met my husband Gavin, I began studying and was at home on my own during the day and I found myself eating what ever I felt like at the time and that was a lot of KFC, McDonalds other take aways. After Gavin and I got married in 2005, we moved to Australia and Gavin began surfing and inline skating, and of course he wanted me to join him, me being over weight protested every chance I got.

I don't like the beach

I just don't want to go

This caused plenty of arguments, I was always too hot, too tired and tried every excuse I could think of. In 2009 I went to the Doctors for a check up, and discovered I had high blood pressure, I was put on medication. I had my heart set on starting a family and the doctor told me that being on blood pressure medication meant that I may have some difficulties during my pregnancy if I was to fall pregnant at all! That was when I decided that something needed to be done, I needed to start taking care of myself.

I joined a gym and was given a free personal training session, this is where I met Dave. Dave and I talked about what I wanted to achieve, and then I had to do what every overweight person is terrified of doing, getting on the scales. I weighed in at 120kgs and was absolutely devastated not to mention embarrassed. Dave and I trained twice a week and the rest of the time I trained on my own following a plan that Dave had done up for me, some of the exercises were cardio, but we did do weight training, not really using any weights just my own body weight, and believe me this was enough weight. We weighed in every week and the scales began to drop, and because they were going down my excitement went up and was more eager to train and loose the weight.

Dave moved to another gym and I stayed where I was, but this wasn't the end of our training sessions. We met 2-3 times a week at one of the local parks.

Dave had a great imagination, so I found myself doing some pretty interesting types of exercises, he found a shopping trolley and got in, and then insisted I pushed him, my reward at the end was that he pushed me. We used hills to run up and down, we used seats for step ups, dips and push-ups, ran around trees, boxed, lunged, squatted, we used signposts (the metal ones) to do military presses and overhead lunges. You don't have to go to a gym to exercise, you just have to look around and there are so many things you can use, you just have to use your imagination. We continued to weigh in each week and I continued to loose weight. I gave myself goals to achieve and Gavin supported me, when I reached my first goal which was to get down to 110kgs he bought me some flowers, I found a pair of boots that I fell in love with so I made a goal, if I got down to 100kgs I could get them. And I did.

More of Amanda's Journey to come in future posts.