All progress, no matter how small, is progress

So I thought I would post an update on how I'm doing with the challenge while I continue to write the information/routines/etc for the challenge proper as it has become known in my workings.

In my last post I said this was was going to be an interesting time for me personally, due to how manic it's going to get while I get the challenge up underway as well as go through it myself, and September has proven to be a bitch of a month already.

While I have yet to film any of the workouts, I have done the bare bones of the routines, and am fine tuning them ready to film them - plus I have the arduous task (not really but I like that word) of listening to reams of rock and metal to use as the background music to get the people who will be

undertaking the challenge pumped.  I really hope the music I'm picking will work for them as much as it works for me.

The end of the first week of my personal challenge saw me attend my hobby weekend of live action roleplay and usually I partake in far too much alcohol, but this year I was very well behaved on that front.  Also due to not being a staff member this year, I no longer have access to a kitchen so was forced to improvise as best as possible while still having to venture to the burger van in the evenings for dinner. Not ideal but when that is the only food vendor on site you have no other choice really.
The plus side of the hobby, is the amount of running around that is undertaken when in game. It can be none stop walking from game start at 10am to finish at 2am. I was thrilled to do a number of hill sprints and not have any niggles from the old IT Band.  It feels wonderful to be back to full strength after a year and half.

Last weekend also saw the start of my Spartan season, with the Cambridge Sprint.  I did full review of the race for those wonderful folk over at Mudstacle.  Their site is well worth checking out if you fancy doing obstacle course racing/mud runs. OCRs genuinely put the fear of the gods into me.  I have no idea what's coming up in the way of obstacles, I just know I'll be tested.  I also know that the terrain can be damned tricky to run on and I'm always wary of turning over on my ankle. The race was good fun, it always is, even when I arrive with a knot in the pit of my stomach and all rationale telling me to get in the car and just go home. But if I listened to that voice, I wouldn't be doing the job I do now... so!

The one thing I do need to invest in somehow is a rope to climb, but my ceilings are low so it wouldn't work in the house gym.  No I need a rope climb somewhere where it's going to challenge, so I may have to chat to the boys at the gym I attend.  This weekend the band has a gig in County Durham, and the morning after we are racing in Yorkshire. So another busy weekend ahead. And while I am off on the road I thought I would do an update with where I am at the 'almost' 3 week mark.

So the 'almost' 3 week stats:

• Waist 34 1/4 inches (loss of 1 inch)
• Hips 40 inches (loss of 1 3/4 inches)
  
  • Ratio: 0.85 (down from 0.87)
• Weight 159.4lbs (loss of almost 3lbs)

I'm not going to test my body fat until week 8 as I require the help of one of my fellow PTs to do the caliper measurements for me. But all in all for just under 3 weeks that's not a bad at all.  I'm very chuffed with that. As I stated before, for me this challenge isn't about weight loss it's about fat loss and building my strength.  So it's all going in the right direction, which gives me great hope for how my challengers are going to do if they work at it.  And that, I suppose is the crux, even though I've had a weekend where my options weren't the best they could have been I've still maintained the programme I set myself for the most part, and the poof is in the results.

I will probably do a week six update, although I may just post my stats a week Monday when I return from Scotland to see how I'm continuing.

Until then, if you want more information about the challenge then please see the KrissieKirby.com blog and sign up to be the first to know when registration opens.


As always be kind to yourself,
Krissie
xx

First of 4 mudpits, after a lovely barbed wire crawl!

Screw you, fire! \m/

Bring it, boys! Was in fact what I said here, for real!

 A small selection of pictures from the race on the weekend, with thanks to Epic Action Imagery.

The dreaded BEFORE pictures!

It's always the same.  I take lots of pictures of my progress and rarely put them up.  Yet for the challenge that will be launching at the end of September, I am going to be asking my awesome participants to take a series of before pictures so that when they finish the challenge they have a tangible view of how they have done, as well as a set of measurements etc.

So while I am undergoing the testing and planning phase of this challenge, before I launch it on 12 excited people, here are my 'before' pictures.  In general I am pleased with where I am, but there is always room for improvement and I do feel that I could do with getting rid of some of the fat that I have around my body.  I want to feel tighter and less floppy (as I told you before it is a highly technical term that...floppy).  Also by being very public about my own trial of the challenge, I am forced to practice what I preach, as all of us personal trainers should to be quite frank. Why on earth would I have you pay me to offer something I wouldn't do myself? Just doesn't make sense.  Also this is most definitely about what the individual wants/feels for themselves, so before any comments of 'but you look great' come through - thank you I feel great, I just want to feel even better and that's no bad thing :)

What will be fascinating, on a personal level, is that during this 12 weeks, I have a hobby weekend, 3 Spartan Sprints, a Spartan super, a half Marathon, my best friend's wedding, and a whole host of gigging on top of working with clients, teaching bootcamps etc and all the daily paperwork that goes with owning your own business. So juggling this challenge and all that as well as getting all the background for the challenge set up is going to make for a VERY interesting and exceptionally busy time. In short of I can do it.... remember, NO EXCUSES! ;)

So here goes, these were taken on August 14th and I shall take the final pictures on Sunday 3rd of November.

If you are interested in learning more about the 12 week Challenge which will be starting on Monday September 30th 2013, and you'd like to register your interest, then please visit the Official KrissieKirby.com Blog

Until the next time, be kind to yourself always

Krissie
x

O Brave New World...

I was going to title this blog 'When one door closes...' but to be honest, it's me who has closed the door to open a great big french window on a brave new world.  So to say when every door closes another opens would be slightly misleading in the context of this post.

Farewell desk job!

Today I have handed back the keys to my lonely office.  I have taken all my posters down, packed up my posessions in three large boxes and removed my kitchen gagetry from the corner, where they have been for the last 2 and half years.  As I cleared out the office this week, I found things that I had brought with me from the last office that I'd not looked at in all that time. Needless to say, there has been a lot of decluttering going on, and I have found it so very cathartic, almost as though I am cleansing the stress that this place has imbude upon me from my whole system.

While the job has been great in terms of money and experience within the office and the Higher Education environment, it has also been slowly sapping all the joy out of the bulk of my day.  I have to be honest, I had come to seriously dislike the person it was turning me into.  I suppose I have learned that to be happy, I do not need material things that a well paid job will bring.  I have more spring in my step now that I know I will be helping other people change their lifestyle habits with food and exercise; that hopefully some of my passion for fitness and activity will rub off on those who employ me to beast them in the gym/outdoors on a regular basis.

Here's to making it memorable :)

For years, while I was on this journey of re-self discovery, I strived to find where my happiness lay and I think that it is something all of us, at some point in our lives, will go through (not necessarily the weight loss but definitely the seeking of happiness).  I honestly thought that by losing some weight I would suddenly turn into a happy person and be completely content with my life. And for a little while it did and I was.  Once the inital 'yes I'm now a normal weight' honeymoon had worn off, I realised that I was still as miserable as sin on the inside.  No matter what I was doing, I was just desperately unhappy.  Now I had to look less on the surface and start really doing some hard work on the inside.  And that was when the lightbulb moment hit. Work was making me unhappy. Every day I would whine about things that had happened at the office or that someone had done that, while to me common sense said otherwise, they had done the exact opposite.  I realised that I was at the head of culture change in an environment that didn't necessarily want it. Now for those who know me well, you will know that change is something that doesn't frighten me in the slightest.  If it did I wouldn't have lost the amount of weight I had, and I would be still sat on the sofa indulging in 6000+ calorie meal on a Friday night.  I had to accept that while I embrace and welcome change, others view it with distrust and in some cases distain and no matter waht I did to help make the change easier to swallow, it was fought against in such a way that the anger and frustration was directed at me on a continuous basis.And that was where the unhappiness stemmed from. While I know their anger, frustration etc wasn't about me as a person it got to a point where it had become too much.

That still makes me grin like an idiot

This realisation that change was the over arching factor, lead me to look at what change I really needed to make to find my own happiness.  After a set to with a colleauge one summer and really assessing what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be in life, i realised I had to sit back and take stock.  And I think that is something everyone must do at somepoint in life.  Whether it instigates a massive life changing event or just allows us to continue on the knowldge that we are excatly where we should be is neither here nor there.  The important thing is that we are able to accertain that we are happy or not. If we are happy, more power to us, and if not then a change, on some scale, needs to happen.  For me a big change needed to happen.  I needed to find my bliss, something that would make me wake up looking forward to the day, not filled with dread and loathing. And boy have I found it.

I start officially on Monday (April 8th) when the final website goes live (only 16 months after I purchased the domain) but I'm already excited. I have 3 clients already, and a few more that are meeting me to see if I'm the trainer for them.  And while I have been offered jobs at gyms (and big gyms at that), I don't think that is the path for me.  I joke a lot about wanting KrissieKirby.com to be a global brand name.... but what if it was?  I may as well give it a shot, because what do I have to lose? Nothing really, but everything to gain. And I have never been one to live by 'what if'.

So the door on the office has closed, and here I am, hands on the push plate, ready to throw open the french doors on a brave new world.

This should be fun, hard work and long hours, but fun.

Be kind to yourself, as always

Krissie
xx

Slip not slide

Argh, I slipped!

This weekend I over indulged.  I freely admit that this Easter Weekend was a time where my brain and I fell out and emotional/boredom eating won out.  I haven't eaten that much chocolate in a long, long time or drank that much cider and though I enoyed consuming every last morsel at the time, by late Sunday evening I was sick of the sight of chocolate.

And sometimes we need to have that binge, that blow out weekend where we say 'to hell with it, I'm in this mood and I need this and this'.  That's fine.  In fact, that's only human.  The trick is to recognise it and stop the slip becoming a slide.

Get thee behind me Sugar monster!

Pandora was back with her usual snipes too. And my skin has told me what it thinks of the extra sugar in no uncertain terms, and thought I had the intention to do lots of working out my poor, tired, brain just didn't want to.  So, in true fashion, I sucked it up like a grown up and I put my trainers and kit on and headed to the gym early Saturday morning, for the first time since February (I can't wait to get in there more now the main bulk of studying is over).  And I felt MUCH better for it.  Sunday OH and I, with a bevy of polers and pals, all sauntered off to the local wetlands centre for a long walk, and much silliness followed by the feeding of a LOT of ducks.  Again having done some activity I felt a great deal better, and being out in the sun was much needed.  It does make a difference when you spend half your time couped up.

Yesterday I intended on going to the gym but found the programme I had written for myself was doable on the equipment I have at home. So a full 1hr 30 min session with long stretch was done and the gym room cleaned ready for my first clients next week.  I also gave myself a stern talking to and reminded myself that although this weekend had been over indulgent, it was just one weekend out of 52 and that I obviously needed to cave to emotional eating.  March proved to be a tough old month with Easter weekend as my only real weekend off, and even then it wasn't a true weekend off as the business kicks off next week so much was done to move towards the launch.

It really is ok to start over!

That being said, I recognised that I was having a slip up from my usual healthy eating habits and that's fine. It's part and parcel of healthy eating. When you adopt a healthy lifestyle, you will get instances where you stumble off the plan you've set for yourself, and that's fine, it's going to happen.  Life's stresses get in the way and there will be times when you just need to have a blow out in whatever manner it takes.  Just don't let it continue on for too long or you'll slide back into old habits and undo all the good work you've done.  This isn't a diet, this isn't something we pick up and put down then harrang ourselves with because we failed.  There is no failure in healthy living, there are just slips every now and then, and we learn to recognise they are needed.  There is lots of trail and error, and figuring out what works for you and how you can plan your time to make things work.  But that's not failure in the form we usualy recognise, it's the type of failure that preceeds success because some parts of the attempt worked. All we do now is refine the process until it works for us, because everyone is different in their mindset. There can never be one size fits all, we are all so very different.

So yesterday my emotional eating trigger got a bollocking, and today I feel far more positive and back to my usual happy self.  I've had my slip, got a little bruised from the fall, and picked myself up, dusted myself off and looking towards a bright shiny new week....my last one in the full time grind (that might also explain the week starting out in a very positive fashion ;) )

So slip, don't slide, give yourself a break for having the slip, mark it down to one of those days and then get back on then healthy wagon as quickly as you can.   You will soon notice the slips become far less frequent andthe slide non-existant.

Have a great week all and as always, be kind to yourself

Krissie
xx

Following your dream......

So today I resigned from my 9-5 desk job (or, as it has been recently, 7:30 - 6).  This is a huge step, this a definite leap into the unknown. But it's been something that I know I've been heading towards for the best part of two years.

When I started this blog I was already getting questions from people on Facebook, about how I had lost the weight and what I recommended. That gave me the inital idea for No More Mrs Fatty McFat; a hope that by documenting my weightloss and the pitfalls, highs, the education I gained etc that there would be information enough for someone to find and say 'That's what I needed to hear, that's the same as what I tried' etc.  I realised through answering some of the emails and comments that I got through, that there was a plethora of people (not just women) that wanted someone who understood what they were going through to help give them some solid advice. Most had said that when they have joined a gym, some lythe young adult not long from Sports Science degree at Uni was asigned as their inductor at the gym. The person that they were trying to get to understand their issues had never been fat, had never suffered the utter deflation that these people had, and to them it was exceptionally off putting.  Many never went back to the gym after that inital induction and are debating still if they should return.

I realised that I had a vantage point that the Instructors these people had been to didn't have. I have been obese, I have battled with the voices in my head that tell me I'd never be good enough, I have had those 3am binges where you eat until you are sick, I have had the angry screams at myself for allowing myself to become so hideous that I was afraid to leave the house.  I have been there, and I remember all too well what it is like to be that scared, unhappy person. So in August 2011, I decided I wanted to change my career.  I had changed jobs the year previous with a promotion of sorts in work. The job was very well paid but exceptionally stressful, often lonely and at certain points of the year had long hours (the height of festival season no less, so that scuppered the band a little) and I was utterly miserable.  I had spent so long on sorting my health out that now my inner peace and joy was being sucked out of me by the one thing that I felt I had no control over.

Wrong!  And I know fine well that that was wrong. Had I not taken back control of my health? Was I now just putting those fears onto something different? Yes, yes I was. That August, after a rather turse few words with a colleague that left me in a bit of an emotional state, I sat with OH and confessed how unhappy I was with my work life. That I had no joy in the bulk of my day as I sat behind a desk, lifelessly inputting, sorting and arranging data; that ultimately I felt as though I was being suffocated from the inside and needed to refocus my life. We sat and made a pros and cons list about giving up my job and the pros serverely outweighed the cons.  We talked at length about whether we could afford to drop to one income for a while, while I worked on building a client base etc, and I often have wondered if that was a selfish thing to ask of OH and a lot of responsibility to place on his shoulders.  But as he always tells me, we are a team, and when one of us needs to pick up the slack to ensure the other is back to a happy medium, then so be it.  (He's pretty awesome). The decision was made. I was going to re-train and become a Personal Trainer.



It really is, it's how we learn.



After much working out of finances, I realised that although I would have liked to have finished in the job sooner, March 2013 was going to be the goal. So the plan went into action. For the best part of 18 months, I have retrained so that I can offer an all round package for a variety of disciplines. I am a qualified Gym Instructor, I am a qualifed Pole Instructor, I can take small group training and am in the process of completeing the final modules for the Certificate in Personal Training as well as the Exercise to Music qualification so I can teach the myriad of cardio and strength based larger group classes that are out there.  I have done it, I have taken a dream that came from something I had once thought would never be, could never be me.  I want other people to feel what this feels like, that you can take back the control on your health and ultimately your life.  It's a pretty amazing feeling.

I was very touched the other day to get the following message from a friend, someone I met through a hobby:

Today I had a University interview, and they asked me to talk about someone who inspried me, and what I feel I could learn from them.  I told them about you, how you've changed your life in such a great way, and are now living the life you dreamed of.  I told them how inspired I've been by your determination, your kick-ass enthusiasm and how you don't let yourself be the cause of your own failure (by not making excuses to work out etc.)  You really show the rest of us how it's done, that if you want something and are prepared to work hard enough anything is possible. Thanks so much for that.

How awesome is that?  I'm so touched that she thought of me for that answer, and I'm fiercely proud that she's following her dream, and requalifying in what she honestly wishes to do.  Go Girl! It's hard to say, 'right that's it, I'm throwing off the security blanket and giving this a shot'.  But if you have things in place and support from wonderful people, (my friend has her partner's full support also, which is fantastic), and you can cleary make a run for it, then do so. Life is far too short to spend thinking 'what if...'.  Take it by the horns, life is meant to be lived.  And if you read this and think 'there is no way I could do that', then's that's fine, too. Sometimes the timing isn't right, sometimes we have to go a little further along the path to really see the exit.  But never say, never!

I'm not so naive as to think that I will walk out of this job and straight into a 10 clients, 4 bootcamps, 10 pole students a week lifestyle.  Oh no, I'm not that green!  I know it's going to be tough.  I know that I'm going to be working most of the day to drum up business and teaching very little to start, but eventually it will even out.  I know running my own business will be a challenge (I have been self-employed before) but I'm looking forward to it. Most of all, I'm looking forward to not having to think of something to make me smile when I get up in the morning, as there will be plenty to smile about.

So here's to the next chapter, it all starts on April 8th 2013!

Be kind to yourself, as always

Much Love

Krissie

x

A revamp to the website coming soon!