The 12 Week Kick up the Arse CHALLENGE is upon me. Since the long trip to the USA and Canada last year there is no point in denying the weight has slowly been creeping back on. It feels fast but in retrospect it’s been blatantly obvious that the 23 kilos I dropped in the last half of 2011 has taken a year and a half to come back on. It hasn’t snuck up on me, it hasn’t ninja stealth approached and it certainly was not gone one moment and there the next. It has paraded back onto my body with great fanfare, a twelve piece marching band, a vibrant group of mariachi  players with coloured streamers and a cacophony of ambulance sirens to boot.

And so here I am in August of 2013 with my back problems returned in force, my plantar fasciitis causing merry hell and my dogs looking back on the agility course wondering what the hell is taking me so long. And after I drag myself past the finish on course I’m back to wheezing in that disturbing way that makes onlookers wonder if they should hand me an oxygen mask. It is decidedly NOT cool. We humans are such self destructive nits at times. But gees by golly I remember every tasty morsel of high fat, high salt, high sugar food I consumed on our trip last year and even the ones this year on the two overseas trips I’ve made. There’s no getting round it – even after 3 months of very strict extremely low fat and nearly zero sugar eating I will never change my palate enough to ever want to say no all the time to the burgers, the candy, the ice cream, the bread, the pizza. I am obsessed about a few things in this life (I can count them on one hand) and food is amongst them.

I have never let my gym membership lapse from returning in January. I need to stop wasting my money and so I signed up for the 12 week challenge held at my gym here:

determined to reignite the stubbornly determined gym attendee (I don’t think I’ll ever be a junkie) of last year when I would go to my workouts just to see what kind of torturous exercises my trainer would challenge me with this week. She’d push me and I would not quit. I would go home and share on facebook and fitocracy exactly what torture I’d achieved that day often with a note of slight disbelief that I actually did it and also PAID to do it. The whole notion fascinated me on some bizarre psychological social experiment level.

So this is what I signed up for:

There’s prizes involved too which I must admit I find motivating. It’s almost like I can treat this like my own little personal version of The Biggest Loser but on a much safer and more realistic scale. That show is like a Kramer off Seinfeld – a hideous beast that you just can’t look away from.

I need to record my workouts and food for the next 12 weeks – go back in for a re-measure of my measurements in Week 6 and Week 12. It’s going to be noticed by people – gym trainer types – if I don’t do this properly and make changes. This kind of accountability is what I need I think. I’m going to put it here too:

START DATE: 10 AUGUST 2013
START WEIGHT: 104KGBODY FAT: 47.7% – this measurement? Not taken by the barbaric calipers anymore – no horrible skin pinching at all. It’s just a handheld machine – with two metal plates (much like the heart rate sensor plates you see on treadmills). Trainer punches in your age, height and weight, you grab hold of it, it passes an electrical charge through you and it can ascertain how much of your mass is bone and how much is muscle and how much is fat. Pretty damn neat. The percentage? Not so neat at all. In fact downright dangerous health wise.

We shall see what it says at 6 weeks. Workout #1 completed today and water intake on target. I’m off to walk the dogs now before I read through the Challenger’s manual more thoroughly. And also figure out if a Bento Box fits my Macros 😉