Week 46 runs from Monday 9th November — Sunday 15th November, 2020.
I am currently following Chloe Ting’s Get Peachy Challenge program. For this challenge, I always start the workout with Natacha Océane’s 10min Warm Up. I won’t be listing it under ‘videos completed’ every day anymore because I literally use this warm up every single time.
For more information on what, why and how I’m tracking everything, including my health & fitness goals, please click here. To skip to the end of week summary, please click here.
The Week in Fitness & Food
11/9 – Monday. Rest.
I wasn’t planning to rest today, but I guess I got distracted this morning and then the day kinda disappeared from there. I also haven’t slept enough for the past couple of days so I dunno, maybe I’ve been low energy. I’m not really feeling sore from yesterday’s workout, which is quite a win though :)
It looks like I’ve been eating at maintenance fairly easily lately, though I feel like I was sort of careful with my diet last week, so I am a bit surprised I haven’t lost any weight. However, my period is coming up and I have no doubt that I’ll be retaining extra water weight at least until next week, so we’ll see what happens after that.
I’ve been eating very happily and satisfactorily with my sushi, protein bars, wraps, burgers — oh that’s right I had Habit Burger twice last week okay no wonder no weight loss happened HA. Nevermind!
I was very proud of my before/progress photo though! If you haven’t seen it and want to, please check it out here.
Week 45 runs from Monday 2nd November — Sunday 8th November, 2020.
I am currently following Chloe Ting’s Get Peachy Challenge program. For this challenge, I always start the workout with Natacha Océane’s 10min Warm Up. I won’t be listing it under ‘videos completed’ every day anymore because I literally use this warm up every single time.
For more information on what, why and how I’m tracking everything, including my health & fitness goals, please click here. To skip to the end of week summary, please click here.
Originally I was planning to do Elizabeth Chu’s weighted ab workout after Chloe’s workout but, again, I vastly overestimated how much energy I would have left haha. I think today’s workout length was really good for me as well. I exercised fasted and it took me about an hour to finish the workout. That was plenty for the day.
Why did I exercise fasted and what is up with that crazy weight gain, you ask? Wasn’t I 119lbs yesterday and all of a sudden I’m 120.6lbs? Hahah. Well, last night Jacky and I decided it’d be a great idea to eat instant noodles and ice cream at like 1am. So, yep. I was not hungry at all when I woke up, and half of that junk food is still in my system. It should be gone after I finish digesting today though haha.
That said, I will be expecting increased bloating and water retention in the next week or so, because monthly bleeding… yay. <– I jest. It is a pain (literally) sometimes but the fact that I am a menstruating woman means that I have an opportunity to become pregnant, should God ever choose to gift us with children one day.
The older I get, the more I realise this is not to be taken for granted. So, I may joke about it, but in my heart I am very thankful that I still have regular periods. And I really don’t mind having another reason to eat some hearty soul food every month hehe.
Week 44 runs from Monday 26th October — Sunday 1st November, 2020.
For more information on what, why and how I’m tracking everything, including my health & fitness goals, please click here. To skip to the end of week summary, please click here.
Wow it really looks like my period bloating went down because apparently I am 118.6lbs as of this morning. I was expecting to drop into the 118’s this week but I didn’t realise it’d be that fast, especially since I hadn’t really eaten diet foods or exercised much last week.
However, I was trying to eat at/around maintenance and tried to ensure I did not overeat. I also played piano a few times last week, which increased my NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis; basically calories I burned outside of exercising). I didn’t think it’d burn that many calories but maybe it does because my Apple Watch counted exercise minutes and a few hundred additional calories burned from my piano playing. I was sweating after playing for an hour or so, I guess.
I almost didn’t work out today but in the evening decided I still really wanted to exercise, so I ended up doing today’s videos after all! I’m glad I did because I felt much more energised afterwards.
I used 5lb dumbbells (with a 4lb extra weight for the squats) and a light resistance band for today. I think that was enough; I don’t think I trained to failure, but I didn’t want to over-exercise and be so sore I can’t do anything the next few days.
Tomorrow I will still be aiming to follow Chloe’s schedule with the 6 Pack Abs video first, but for Day 11 I will try doing her 2 Week Abs video after the arms video so I have enough strength to properly work my arm muscles first.
Food-wise I had a large pasta dinner with a protein bar and a decent sized brunch with coffee, plus a small smoothie snack between the two meals. Not sure how that will affect my weight tomorrow but we’ll see. I think it will remain about the same?
Either way I am so impressed to see 118 on the scale. I’m pretty sure the last time I weighed less than 119lbs, my body composition was very different and I was two dress sizes larger. I think it was something like 10yrs ago. Only 3-4lbs left to go to reach my initial target weight of 115lbs, but right now I’m not actually counting calories, nor do I feel like I’m on a diet, so I guess I can just keep tracking to see when my weight loss plateaus.
To clarify though: I did track my calories for about a week (I even weighed out my food), so even if I’m not tracking these days I still have an idea of approx calories I’ve eaten. Every few weeks I sort of track for a day just to make sure I’m still fairly accurate with my estimates.
I do eat what I want these days but much of the time I want healthy, nutritious food. Plus I love vegetables, which is very filling whilst being low in calories. That’s probably why I can get away with eating until I’m full, still have junk food every now and again, and still lose weight.
Week 43 runs from Monday 19th October — Sunday 25th October, 2020.
For more information on what, why and how I’m tracking everything, including my health & fitness goals, please click here. To skip to the end of week summary, please click here. This is my second week doing Chloe Ting’s Get Peachy Challenge.
The Week in Fitness & Food
10/19 – Monday. Rest.
I had a pretty busy and productive day today so ended up not doing a workout. However, I did do laundry and some additional cleaning. Not quite the same, nor even similar, but I’m really happy with the amount of stuff I got ticked off my to-do list today.
Also, these arrived!
They’ve been on my products wishlist for a while, and Jacky saw that they were on sale for $189 at Woot.com last week so said I could buy a pair. I had a bit of a rough start with them as the case wasn’t charging properly and it wasn’t pairing as well, but after a quick Google search on what to do, I reset my AirPod Pros and the charging case and it’s working great now.
I love the noise cancellation and look forward to going for walks with these in future!
Last night I didn’t sleep enough (we got distracted playing Sudoku till late… yes, that’s right, the numbers game… yes, we are geeks) but surprisingly I wasn’t feeling particularly fatigued during the day. It was a struggle to get up, but after I was up I was fine. There was no change in my weight between yesterday and today.
Food-wise, I had a pretty large breakfast, some leftover curry for lunch and then hot pot again for dinner. I also realised, after having a sip of diet coke for the first time in a while, that it’s possible my previous headaches could have been from diet coke withdrawal too.
I’d been drinking at least one every day for some time before suddenly cutting it out of my diet (we were running out). Then after not drinking it for couple of weeks or so my body got used to not having it again. Not sure. Anyways, I don’t plan to drink it again for some time. We only have 1 can left and Jacky and I agreed we wouldn’t buy anymore 35 can packs from Costco again.
I’m looking forward to finally doing Chloe’s Hourglass workout for the Get Peachy Challenge!
For more information on what, why and how I’m tracking everything, including my health & fitness goals, please click here. To skip to the end of week summary, please click here.
Today, I have officially started the Chloe Ting Get Peachy Challenge! After a few months of not doing Chloe Ting, I am back to the woman who kicked off my current fitness journey. And I’m excited again! I purchased weights and resistance bands especially for this and I think it’s renewed my excitement for working out.
I think I was beginning to lose motivation when my health started to wane in the past couple of weeks. Plus I wanted to do reps-based workouts and there weren’t any follow alongs. I guess Chloe must be a mind reader because she released this program at the most perfect time for me. Brett is also very reputable so I fully trust that this will be a good challenge to do.
I don’t follow her warm up or cool down videos – she’s not very flexible so she doesn’t hold the stretches long enough for me, but I’ll be following her actual workout videos. I personally love Natacha’s warm up video so I’ll be using that one for the duration of the challenge. Depending how I’m feeling after, I may follow a shorter cool down video instead.
Today’s video felt like a nice way to ease into and be introduced to this program. It was a perfect length to start and get used to the moves as well as figure out the right weights to use, in my opinion. I realised I wasn’t feeling challenged when she said “your glutes should be burning” and mine didn’t hurt at all, so I started adding in a resistance band then slowly increasing my resistance band weight.
Unfortunately the heaviest dumbbell I have is 10lbs, which I was using the entire time. I didn’t realise I’d become strong enough to need more! Yay! My arms are weak so when I was carrying the dumbbells with arm strength during time of purchase I was dying already haha. Maybe I can buy some heavier weights next time. For the meantime, adding heavier resistance seems to work well.
I think I finally got the resistance right just before the last movement because my glutes were burning but I was still able to do the movement with good form. I went from X-Light to Medium haha. I was considering going up to Heavy but Medium was enough because of the short rest time for the last move.
My one complaint would be that Chloe moves a bit fast for the second move. I didn’t realise she was going so quickly so I stopped when she said so, but in reality I hadn’t completed the appropriate number of steps for some for some of the sets. So if you’re following along too, I’d recommend ignoring her beeps and counter or you may end up short-changing yourself.
Overall, I really enjoyed day one. I’m still waking up with headaches but I can ignore them for the sake of doing exercises that I love and look forward to. We only do this exercise once a week, which is a liiittle disappointing! But that’s okay, I guess I can just do it again in my own time haha ;)
Because I did lose a little more weight recently, here are some updated physique photos:
Yes – my black sports bra is definitely too large for me now but I’m still losing weight so don’t plan to buy any new ones yet heh heh. My green one is in the wash so this one will do.
Sleep-wise, my watch says that I had disrupted sleep twice. I definitely remember the second disruption, but I’m not sure about the first one, which apparently happened around 4:30am and lasted about 15min or so. Actually – I just remembered a second disruption during the night but I don’t recall staying awake for 15min.
Either way, I could not get up this morning when my alarm sounded. I was so tired. My bad for sleeping late last night even when I was already exhausted, really. I will certainly try to sleep earlier tonight or take an afternoon nap.
