Health & Fitness: Week 34, 2020

Week 34 runs from Monday 17th August — Sunday 23rd August, 2020.

Image credit: Pexels.com

Hello hello! Firstly, yes… that’s right, I’m very sorry I didn’t complete the Chloe Ting 2019 Flat Belly Challenge – but please do read the end of that post as I have a very good reason for it. It’ll also provide more insight as to how I want to be documenting my fitness journey moving forward, which is…

I’m trying out something new: weekly updates, which will include fitness in the week, sleep throughout the week, approx diet throughout the week, and a weight tracker. I’m not sure how well this format will work, so it’ll likely change as I refine it in future. But for now, tracking everything in one place should help me better understand my body and why it’s doing what it’s doing.

Obviously if there are weeks I haven’t exercised as much, then the post will be much shorter, so I may combine a couple of weeks into one heh heh heh…

So here’s how it’s going to work:
(I’ll only be explaining this one time so subsequent fitness posts will be much shorter, don’t worry. If you want to skip past the explanation and get straight to the tracking section click here. If you want to skip to the end of week summary click here.)

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Health: Intermittent Fasting for 9 Weeks Challenge

Image credit: Pexels.com

This post was last updated and completed on 8/16/2020.

If you know me or read my blog at all, you probably know that Jacky and I love food. Not just a little, but really loooove food, so dieting was really never going to happen for us. However, we both independently heard about intermittent fasting (IF) and the health benefits it supposedly provides whilst not restricting one’s diet in any way whatsoever.

It only required us to eat all our meals and snacks mindfully between certain hours of the day, which actually sounded doable for us. Our physician friends have confirmed that it’s perfectly healthy and normal to do, so Jacky and I decided that we would start it together after July 4th, so here we are!

We’ve been guilty of getting hungry late at night and snacking on baked goods or instant noodles or even having a full-blown meal just before bed. Often times, one of us will get peckish and start eating and then the other will follow, even if we’d resolved to not eat any more that day. We know that’s not good for us, so now that we’re both in this together hopefully we’ll be able to overcome these bad habits.

I know we’re taking on a lot of challenges at the moment (sleeping/waking early, exercising and now this), but we consider them less to be short-term challenges and more lifestyle changes that should provide long-term health benefits.

Please note: we are only taking on this challenge as neither of us have ever experienced eating disorders or exhibited signs of an unhealthy relationship with food. If you have a history of disordered eating or are triggered by such topics, it may be wise for you to stop reading now.

I am also not using this post to recommend IF – every body is different and every person’s history with food is different, please be kind to yourself as you are already beautiful in your own right. Especially as we’re all stuck indoors these days, please take every opportunity to love yourself more.

I am, however, trying to document this journey on my blog to keep myself accountable since I tend to have problems with perseverance and tend to give up easily. If you are considering starting IF, I hope my experience can provide some interesting insights for you. If not, I hope you’ll find it somewhat entertaining haha.

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Health: Cutting Excess Sugar From My Diet

Image credit: Unsplash

Edit: This post was completed and last updated on 6/9/2020.
Jump to end results and final thoughts (spoiler alert: I failed).

Back when I was trying to lose weight for my wedding, I cut out sugar and exercised a lot more. I practically lost 2lbs in a week just from cutting out sugar alone. I felt healthy and strong.

Lately I’ve been having anxiety on/off for no good reason recently, as well as bizarre, anxiety-inducing vivid dreams. My husband said he heard me gritting my teeth while sleeping last night, and I’ve had a headache since going to Costco yesterday.

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Week 2 Recap

Hm I seem to enjoy writing the most on Mondays, after I get home from dance class half-dead. Interesting… Not sure what that says about me but yay. Post!

This week I:

Exercised 2x. Okay, last week really kicked my butt. My body couldn’t take it. I slept like 12hrs on Saturday. I think going from 0 exercise to 4x/week was a bit too much of a shock to my system. Also, Simon Says is actually killer (killer, killer, killer… no, but seriously).

Yireh tends to cut our lesson a little short but I’m kinda glad she does because 30mins in, my body is shaking, I can’t breathe or guzzle water fast enough and kinda just want to curl up at the back of the room in the foetal position and not move for an hour. 45min in, my stamina is depleted and I resign myself to keeping my limbs as close to my body as possible and doing the minimum required turn to make it still look like I’m somewhat moving.

I have a new-found respect for NCT 127. I also hate them for making the dance look so easy.

(For some reason I decided to watch the dance vid again just now, I dunno why, maybe I like torture? But my body is hurting just looking at what we have to learn next week. I think I might cry.)

Ate at least 5 vegetarian meals! This wasn’t really a new year’s resolution although I joked about it with Jacky a few weeks ago. However, in general I like eating vegetables and I’m not sure my body always agrees with meat, so I guess this was a way of trying to eat clean…er…

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The Military Diet – Results & Stuff

Whoops! Slightly belated, but I guess not bad for an update. I completed the military diet aaaand… after weighing myself the next morning, I had lost around 2.5kg in total.

Which is pretty good, right? :)

Shortly after, I did put back 1kg, but a final total 1.5kg weight loss that’s kept off is definitely not bad. It’s been almost 2 weeks since and I may have even lost a little more as my appetite’s decreased and I’ve been making sure I don’t overeat. My scales are currently broken though so who knows.

I actually enjoyed some of the meals so much I ate them again outside of the diet plan. I’m trying it again this weekend so we’ll see how it goes!

No ‘after’ photo yet, but here’s a pic from when I was back in Spain, which would be a fairly accurate ‘before’ I guess…

Bobbie in Murcia

I’ll post the rest of my Spain trip pics soon, promise.

Want to give it a go? To make our lives easier, I’ve compiled a list of everything I ate, how I cooked it and a shopping list. I’ve used carefully calculated substitutions based on calorific values of the approved substitute foods.

If you’d like to go for the original diet plan, it’s here. Calorie values here, approved substitutions here.

Let’s begin. Read More