Kylie (SCHF Admin): Would An 8-Week Challenge By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet?

Just about every business in the health and fitness industry offers ‘challenges', be it 6, 8, 12 or more weeks. The businesses often have success stories plastered all over their advertising, like ‘Jesse lost 46 kg in 12 weeks’. The general idea of these programs seems to suggest that you, like Jesse, can achieve complete transformation in a few short months. This got me wondering… Did Jesse have a day job? Kids? Did they devote every waking moment to weight loss and only eat a quarter of a carrot every other day? Or where these results the norm with a bit of encouragement and guidance. As the ‘everyday’ person of the Sunny Coast Health and Fitness team, I made it my mission to find out!

Of course, experience is subjective and everyone will have different outcomes given the millions of variables that effect our lives and ability to reach our goals (or indeed, what the goals were to begin with). To understand my experience and outcome, I guess we need to travel back a few years to where my health and fitness journey began. About 5 years ago, I was ‘morbidly obese’. It makes me cringe to admit that, but if we are being honest that’s exactly what I was. I weighed in at 130kg, infertile and the extreme level of self-loathing drove me to get worse and worse. For me, the much needed catalyst for change I had been searching for came from my tertiary studies in psychology. From this point I learnt to ‘cut the crap’ so to speak, cut the crap food, cut the bad attitude and most importantly cut out the excuses and external blaming. And you know what, it worked. Without stepping foot in a gym or spending a cent on trainers I lost 55kg and unbelievably fell pregnant after 10 years of trying.

At this point I should add, I was dedicating 3-4 hours a day to exercise to achieve these results and was restricting my diet quite heavily (which I only recently learnt tracking calories and macros during this challenge). With my little miss turning one, and turning 30 myself in February, I decided it was time to get back on the bandwagon and try something new.

Having formed SCHF, I have had the amazing opportunity to network and meet a wide array of trainers on the Sunshine Coast. I believe picking a personal trainer is a highly personal choice, and not one to be made lightly. Mitchell Knight of Accelerate Health and Performance was the very first person to join me in my mission to create this community. The combination of experience, education and ability to bond over The Lion King was what sold me in the end. To be honest, I dragged my feet for a while about getting started at the gym, I'd never really used one and the idea made me somewhat uncomfortable. But it was definitely time to push myself out of my comfort zone and give myself a goal.

As luck would have it, not long after I'd made this decision the ‘Jetts 8 Week Challenge’ was due to kick off, and I figured it was kind of two birds, one stone situation. I can try training in a gym environment and give personal training a go all at the same time. So off I marched in with all the enthusiasm in the world for my first ever Rapid Bio-scan. This not only measured weight, but a ton of information about body composition. Suffice to say, after the scan I sat in the car and cried, ready to drive to McDonalds and eat all of the ice-cream I could manage. But after being talked off the ledge by Mitch, I was reminded that this was only my starting point. We only had that scan as a point of context for what was achieved over the next 8 weeks. My post baby body was a setback, but with enough effort a lot could be done about it.




On top of weight loss, I was aiming to get stronger and definitely work on definition. Seems I'd gained a nice little ‘pouch’ where my baby used to live (affectionately coined the ‘Baby Burrow’) that had to go. Of course, I expected to be some kind of lifting pro straight off the bat. Having never done ANY kind of strength training it seemed reasonable at the time... But most of all, I needed to get back on track and start the journey again after pregnancy.

Week 2: Gives you a pretty good view of the post-baby pouch

After a few deep breaths and a couple of days to settle down it was time for my very first session with a personal trainer. Walked in thinking ‘I'm in reasonable shape, I can squat, how hard can it be?’ WRONG. Turns out, despite my great intentions of exercising on my own, I was doing nearly everything wrong. As a complete gym rookie, we had to go back to the start and learn how to do things properly. I was well aware that Mitch was a stickler for technique, but I thought I'd probably not suck quite as hard as I did. My expectations of being an expert on day 1 were in tatters. The first few sessions ended similarly. Although I could feel it was working (every inch of me was aching), I still felt like I sucked at everything I tried despite Mitch’s encouragement, patience and persistence. I was sticking with my macros and eating fairly well at this point but we found out moving house urgently was on the cards. Dammit, there goes my limited spare time.  

In Week 3 I turned 30... Cue cocktails and cake... Whoops...    

But in Week 4, I dragged myself out of bed for our usual 5am session. I'm not sure what possessed me, but I decided to go and do my hour of cardio before PT. So I rocked up to Jetts Mooloolaba at stupid o’clock and plonked myself on the bike for a ride. When it came time for PT this amazing thing happened. I completed all my sets without falling over or screwing them up. I had actually learnt to do something properly! Yay! Finally, I was starting to relax and find my stride in the gym environment and from there I wasn’t upset when I couldn’t do something, just more determined to get it right. And guess what? I was getting muscles… For the first time in my life I had visible muscles in my arms and my quads were getting somewhat toned. Woohoo!   

Drawing towards the last couple of weeks of the challenge, I was concerned I wasn’t exercising nearly as much as I should. I loved my time in the gym, that little bit of time that was set aside just for me. But between the thousand unexpected curve balls I experienced during the 8 weeks, I was finding it virtually impossible to get away and dedicate myself to training. I contacted Mitch and shared my concerns. I told him I was disappointed in myself, because I knew I was capable of much more. Probably the most profound thing he said to me throughout the entire course of our 8 weeks, was that capability isn’t just about physical ability, but also time and emotional availability too. It was at this point that I knew my faith in Mitch was 110% justified, because he was absolutely right. This put an interesting new spin on my experiment, would 2 sessions a week and a fairly good diet be enough to make a difference? 

Week 8: Feeling stronger than ever...

At the end of the 8 weeks it was time for another Rapid Bio-scan, and to be honest I was more nervous with this one than the first. I knew I hadn’t lost huge numbers on the scales only training twice a week, but was still hopeful all my hard work hadn’t been for nothing. The results were in… I'd lost less than 2kg in scale weight but had lost 14cms, 6 of which were from the ‘Baby Burrow’ region. These may not seem like huge numbers to you, but to a time starved sleep deprived mum like me who had EVERYTHING possible go wrong, this was just the motivation I needed to kick-start the next phase of my health and fitness journey. After all, any progress is good progress.

Even with very little time to exercise... The 14cm difference is definitely visible

So the moral of the story, are these types of challenges worth it? I say heck yes! Each person will have different experiences and different goals. But I really couldn’t recommend challenging yourself to try something new, push yourself out of your comfort zone and aim for change. We may not all kick ass like Jesse in the promotional poster every time, but who cares? Weight management is a very personal journey and can’t always be measured by the physical results alone. The value of support and guidance of a great trainer, along with the mateship of other people in the challenge is immeasurable and can be the difference between sticking with it or giving up before you have even started. The next 8-week challenge kicks off at the end of May. I've got to say, I'm really excited to do this again as a part of the #acceleratefamily, with new goals and a new opportunity to try my best.

Kylie
Instagram: @alifestyleproject