Tecrin gets fit: one year in

Okay, so it's one year and a bit. Whoops!

One year ago, on the 17th of June 2012, I made a Big Decision. I had made a few before in the previous year: I made the Big Decision to quit my job at the bookshop, I made the Big Decision to start freelancing as a translator, and on the 17th of June 2012, I made another Big Decision. I don't even quite know what brought it on, but what I do know is that on the evening of that day in June, I had had enough of what I was doing with my life and needed a big change that I had complete and utter control over, unlike my work Decisions: I decided to get fit!

Don't mind my grumpface. It was cold!

In 2010, I was probably at the very height of my weight. I don't know how much I weighed at this point, but I remember at one point having the scales tip over 115 kg. They may have even gone up past that! And I looked the part, too. Very unhappy with myself, in June 2011, I signed up at the local gym, got a summer subscription and spent at least two days at the gym each week. That may not sound like a lot, but it was definitely a step up from the zero exercise I was getting at that point. I got a simple workout routine assigned to me by a trainer, and slowly went from pushing myself out the door to actually looking forward to working out. It wasn't often that I felt like that, mind, but it happened from time to time.

Awful picture is awful. Jeesh, Stef, who taught you how to dress, monkeys?!

A year had past, and despite working out at least twice a week and trying my hardest at the gym, I couldn't see a lick of difference. This is me in June 2012, days after I made the Big Decision, at my official starting weight of 112,5 kg. I upped my gym time to 3 times a week, and started to really pay attention to what I was eating. As it turned out (and as I already knew but didn't have the willpower to change) I was eating a bucketload of crap. Unhealthy, fat, sugary muck, mostly. Days could go by without me eating a single piece of fruit or vegetable. I drank almost nothing but sugary drinks, juices, lemonades, sodas. I cut out all these sugary drinks, and switched to water entirely. I changed to eating actual breakfast, instead of eating biscuits and drinking coffee.

After about 2 months in, I could slowly start to see some changes in my face. That felt amazing!

After about a month, I learned enough about healthy food to start eating better properly. I started counting calories on an app on my phone to better keep track of the unhealthy food choices I was making, started incorporating healthy dinners, better lunches than instant soup and crackers or sandwiches layered with cheese and ham, or peanut butter, or Nutella. I learned to not finish off every last bite in the pan, that it was okay to throw away or freeze the food we hadn't eaten during dinner. Tim slowly warmed up to the idea of eating healthier and better, too!

As time ticked on, I became more and more of a gym rat: I spent at least 2 hours, 3 times a week at the gym, I started running (and ended up in physical therapy because I'm a dolt with weird muscles), I started to incorporate more weights into my workouts. At the end of 2012, I was down well over 15 kg! I could go shopping with my mother and actually fit into stuff in the regular section! No more shopping trips that ended in tears and despair! I even fit into jeans from a shop I used to love! The body image issues I talked about in my opening post a year ago still reared their heads every now and then, when I couldn't see any progress or had a shitty day and ate everything in sight. But I was slowly learning to come to terms with it!

It was 2013... And look at that! A shape, that can be described as more than just 'blob'!

In February of 2013, I got my first gym routine that was based heavily on heavy weights. It was amazing! Such an eye opening moment to realise that I loved lifting weights so much! I even started bench presses, that made me feel even more bad-ass. After working up to the weights room though, I wanted more. With help from my trainer at the gym, I weaned off the cardio to a basic warming up and cooling down, and as of May 2013, I got a real, heavy weights routine, with deadlifts, bench presses, barbell squats, kettlebell swings, barbell rows and clean and presses. I think I can safely say that I have become fairly addicted to working out and getting stronger! I recently even joined in a gym-wide timed circuit challenge and wasn't happy with my first time, so I did the circuit a second time and beat my old time by almost a full minute! The rush of personal victories that can only come from your own strength and ability is amazing, and I love it every time I put an extra plate up on the barbell or pick up a bigger dumbell.

I found support in the ranks of the members of Fitocracy when I needed it, it turning rapidly into my favourite online hangout, paired with a great group of ladies in a Ravelry group I'm a member of (Cheerclub! Fistbump!). I also found support in my family members and of course Tim. I even managed to drag my mother to the gym with me and got her to pick up some heavier weights a few times. She loves it!

Approximately 1 year difference! The sign is my trainer's way of being ironic. Burpees. How I hate them. Ugh!

After one year, I think I can say with honesty that I am damned proud of myself for the progress I have made so far. Am I done? Are you kidding? I just got started! I am going to keep working to better myself, learn more about nutrition, healthy living, get stronger, get healthier, and work like a machine to turn myself into the best version of me there can be. I can't wait to see what the next year will bring!

Life, the Universe, and Everything. Or: 20 kg!

It's been a while since I posted anything about my weight loss and my health so I figured hey, what the heck. The most recent pictures I took were on January first, and they're kinda old news already, although I think you wouldn't be able to spot the difference between me there and me now so I'm not taking new ones yet. You see, today I found out that I crossed a new threshold: 20 kg! Holy crap!

I had a bad day the day I put the above image together but there's really no denying that I look a lot better in the new pictures. More in proportion, as a friend put it. Mind you, he was drunk at the time, but still. I'm still a long way off my goal weight too, so I wonder if that would put me in proportion even more. Remind me to get him drunk and ask him when that time comes.

Now, apart from just continuing what I have been doing for the past 8 months, all I have to do is work on my posture... Stop leaning forward, stop overextending my knees, stop pulling up my shoulders (see how lopsided I seem in the picture to the far left? I think I used to think that made me look less fat, or something), learn to relax my posture... It'll take a loooooot of work to fix years and years of standing wrong, but I'm determined now. If anything, it'll help me a lot in my workouts!

Speaking of... I started lifting weights in November, and am currently improving my techniques and posture, adding weights where I can but it's not my main focus and will only happen if I feel I have outgrown the current weight settings, eliminating exercises that are not working for me such as the Smith machine squat or the step-up (I could live with the fact that it made me feel like I was in an Eighties aerobics video, but it was taking its toll on my lower legs!), and above all that I'm working on my stamina by going running! I started another interval training schedule, beginning with intervals of 1 minute at a slow pace (8 km/u) and hopefully leading up to doing a full C25K-program when the weather gets better. Right now, it's going great and I feel like I'm progressing gradually to a point where I can extend my time running again! I'm also tracking my every move (at least the ones I make at the gym) with my heart rate monitor and through Fitocracy, making it very easy to spot if and where I go wrong.

Apart from that really, nothing has changed. Just more of the same. Apparently that works!

I passed the 15 kg mark!

15! 15! 15! 15! Landmark! Woohoo!

For a while, I thought I wouldn't even get passed the 12.5 because I was horribly stuck on a plateau, but look at that! 15! I won't reach my first goal this year any more, though, because that would mean another 17.5 to go in 2 months. But oh well. I'm surprisingly okay with that. Slow and steady wins the race, after all!

Face/Off! Well, not literally, of course.

I posted a picture of myself on my blog the other day and showed it to my mother (I was actually showing her a picture of my luscious balcony garden because I was a proud gardener, and we scrolled past it) and she couldn't get over how much my face had changed already. In her words: I had a puffy face before. It made me feel a bit weird: proud, because hey, she could see change in my face! Hurray! But it also made me feel uncomfortable because really, was my face that bloated and puffy?

So here's a little comparison with the picture I took earlier this week, and a picture I took roughly 2 years ago, from the same angle. Pardon the weird hair in the old picture. I was feeling fluffy, apparently.
I guess... I can see some difference. I mean, my face is less round, I think. And my chin is already less double, if you know what I mean. The biggest difference seems to be found near my glasses, though, they look like they're less close to my face than in the picture on the right. 
But hey, I can indeed see change! Change is good!

In other news, I can proudly say that I survived a weekend of bad habits and bad food, because I came back from a music festival and had gained less than a kilo. I was expecting a rise, since I completely screwed up my eating habits (try eating regularly and healthy when the temperatures rise above 38 degrees. I don't know about you, but that usually royally screws up my appetite.). I wouldn't eat much at all during the day, and as soon as we could sit down and grab something to drink and eat, I was elbow-deep in the bag of crisps and chugging down cold, sugary fruit drinks, and after the sun went down it felt like I would try to eat the entire day's worth of food in one sitting. I don't think it was actually that bad, but I did fear a big setback in my weight because of it. Fortunately, it wasn't that bad at all,  and I'm already back on the same weight I was last week before we left!

In other, other news: my PT is letting me run again! I already tried it out a few times and since I was getting good results (or rather, not getting crappy results) so he gave me the green light to start working on a running schedule! Right now, it looks as follows:
- warming up, walk for 5 minutes at 5.5km/h
- interval, walk for 40 seconds at 5.5km/h, run for 20 seconds at 8.0km/h, repeat 5 times
- cooling down, walk for 5 minutes at 5.5km/h
I can slowly build up the amount of repeats in the interval section until I'm at 10 repeats and 20 minutes total, and then I can start increasing the length of the interval.
I'm so excited, you guys! Can't wait to get up on the treadmill and run again. I think, but I haven't really kept track of stats, that I'm already improving a bit, but I'm going to keep track of heart rates, speed, distance and calories so I can really see improvement. Exciting stuff!

I've passed the 10kg mark!

YEAH BABY.

10 down, 20 to go for my first goal weight!

The problem of overeating and comfort eating

Anyone who has had trouble with their weight will know exactly what I'm going through right now just from reading the title: Overeating and comfort eating.

Overeating, simply put, is to not stop eating when you know you should. I used to do this a lot. A lot. I would not stop because there was still food on my plate, or because I thought it was a waste to throw food away, or because I was convinced I should, but mostly because I thought I had deserved it (comfort eating). Eating for comfort could be seen as a disorder, and could be fuelled by emotional issues, stress or depression.

Before, I used to overeat because it made me feel better, even though afterwards it would make me feel worse. I know I used to comfort eat a lot when I felt miserable because I thought I deserved a treat to make me feel better. This type of overeating is often caused by emotional discomfort or depression, and in my case (and I think this is the case for a lot of people in this situation), I often got stuck in a loop: I'd feel terrible about  myself, eat for comfort, and then feel bad again because I just stuffed my face. Other moments, and these may even have been worse, I would stop myself from eating something because I knew I should not, succeed in convincing myself, and then reward myself for my great resolve... by eating that same thing I was not going to eat.

But I also used to overeat because I thought it was just part of my routine: I would sit down behind the pc to game (I play World of Warcraft) and I would grab a bag of sweets or crisps because I felt like that was part of it. I would have a bag or bowl nearby and every time there was a quiet moment in-game (during a raid after a wipe, or after a boss kill, or while flying from one spot to the other...), I'd reach for a treat without even noticing, emptying a bag in record-time just because I was on flight points a lot or because we were wiping a lot during progression raids.

This last week I have been stuck in a similar loop again and it is bugging the hell out of me. Even though I know I should not eat that one bad thing, I seem to have lost all self-control and even found myself thinking in old patterns again where I would reward myself with food. I polished off an entire bag of crisps in two evenings. I emptied a bag of almonds in one. I ate sweets for the first time in weeks. Last night after dinner, I went to put my plate in the kitchen and ate leftover pasta sauce straight from the pan. Even though I haven't touched it all week, I know there is a bar of chocolate in the cupboard with my name on it and even though the fact that it's been in there for a week and is still untouched is a good sign, I get distracted and cranky just thinking about it. And I know this may not sound terrible, but it is making me feel awful! These are old habits, bad old habits, and I have been trying so very hard these past five weeks to kick those habits and I thought I was succeeding, but I let my guard down for one week and I end up doing those exact same things all over again.

The lack of restraint has been showing in my weight, but it's not as bad as I originally thought. I have been bouncing like a kangaroo on a skippy ball all week (those with an imagination like mine, enjoy that image in your head), but I am still down 1.3 kilo from last week, currently weighing 104 kg, meaning I'm 8,5 kg down from my starting weight. My weight loss schedule has not been harmed. But I'm doing this to be happy and feel better about myself, so despite the apparent lack of impact on my weight, I'm really not happy with this situation.

The stupid thing is, I know where it comes from. I start a new job tomorrow. I'm unbelievably nervous. This is a job that I have no actual education or training in, that I only have amateur experience in, that I applied for based on the confidence others have in my ability to do this job. What if I fuck it up? I know that it's not a big deal should it happen, but I don't handle rejections and failure very well... (I am also a very bad loser at games. I once tore a pack of cards in two after losing a game of Mau Mau. This may be related...) Last week, and this week, I started receiving the necessary equipment and logins and passwords needed to do this job (I will be working from home) and there is now a phone staring at me from the corner of my eye, and software popping up and blinking with new messages. I am pretty damned nervous for tomorrow.

 So despite knowing the source of my discomfort and cause of my uncontrollable impulse to eat, I am having some real trouble stopping myself from eating... But I have come up with a new strategy. I am going to try and distract my mind with the Olympic Games and some crochet and see if this brings any good results next week. Hopefully I'll still have that chocolate bar, and a nice, sturdy crochet basket to keep it in!

4 weeks in: my first evaluation

Whew, those weeks have flown by! It's hard to believe that I am already 4 weeks into this whole.. thing.

Thing.

Let's tackle that one first, shall we? I find myself opening up to people about this whole weight loss and health thing I've started more and more, and I like talking about all the stuff I learn (mostly from Pinterest), but the one thing I seem to have problems with, is actually giving the beast a name! What is it I am doing, exactly? Am I on a diet? Because really, it sounds like a bad thing to just call this a diet. Apart from that, calling it a diet also raises expectations and more questions about what kind of diet, whether there's a book they can buy, whether there's a program to follow, or a blog to read or video to watch. But I don't have any examples, since I'm doing this by myself and through my own program, my own recipes, my own 'handbook'. It's making talking about it difficult, because it is apparently hard for people to grasp the concept without resorting to asking me 'why'.

Talking about it like it's a diet also brings out the less than kind comments ("You don't need that! Are you nuts?!") and unwanted advice, and even though most of them are not meant as such, it makes me very insecure. I made this image in the first week, when I felt that the only one fit to reassure me that this was a good decision, was me.

So I'm not liking calling it a diet. It's far more than that, obviously, since I am also working on my health, on getting fit, on building up muscle instead of fat. But to call it a change in lifestyle also doesn't suit me. It sounds fine enough in English (albeit a bit fancy), but it sounds downright pretentious and, quite frankly, ridiculous when I call it that in Dutch. I'm still not certain what to call it. A change of habits, is what comes closest without raising eyebrows and questions. 

Anyway. This... change of habits. Four weeks in and boy am I feeling the changes! No, not really, to be honest. I think the biggest change I am actually 'feeling' is that my body seems to have become far more sensitive to sudden changes in daily diet, because, and I'll spare you the details, there have been some periods of.. less than regular toilet visits. I suspect it has something to do with this being the 'Summer' (I use this term lightly because we have had torrential showers and storms for weeks now) and, as a result, there have been several barbecues after which I felt less than stellar. As in, my stomach felt like it was out to kill me. Am I becoming more sensitive to badly cooked barbecued meat? (I hope not, that would mean I can't ever cook meat for dinner by myself again.)
Whatever it is that causes my stomach to get upset, it has put a few dents in my regular weight loss and it fluctuated heavily through the week, but it always ended up resolving itself after a few days and if I put my loss from week to week together in a graph, it's still a nice, fluent line!

That's right, you are seeing that correctly. That's a loss of 5.5 kg! I'm proud of me. Go, me! Yay! I made comparison pictures and I can see a bit of a difference, but I'm far too insecure still to show those on the blog... Sorry! You'll have to take my word for it.
People are beginning to notice some change in my appearance, friends that I hadn't seen for a long time who noticed immediately, or my brother's girlfriend. Since I don't see any difference, having them tell me they do (unsolicited, I must add) felt pretty good!


This weekend, I came to a realisation about my struggle with my weight and why it feels as though this whole lifestyle change is coming quite natural to me. It has been one year since I first went to the gym and I remember crying after I made the first appointment with a trainer for a training schedule. My first steps into that gym were tentative and slow, and I felt like it wasn't doing anything for me for the first months at least. But now that I look back on how this year has gone by, I can only say that I think it was all just ramping up to this decision I made a month ago. I think by the time I was ready to make that decision, I had built up quite a bit of mental strength along with the physical muscles. I am now in a position where I feel comfortable enough to ask my trainers for more exercises, exercises that target specific muscle groups or areas, or that help me with specific problems. I am aware of my shortcomings and know that I have miles yet to go, but I am feeling comfortable enough with the process. I think it's a bit of an understatement when I say that this realisation was quite liberating!

All in all, these first four weeks have been very interesting. In the next four weeks, I want to:
- Focus on expanding my healthy dinner options. I am doing excellent in the breakfast and lunch division, but my dinner-options are still quite lacking in variety. It's mostly chicken. And salad. Not that I'd have trouble with only eating chicken and salad, but there's a certain BF that would like some variation in his daily hot meals.
-Keep a better weightlog. I like making notes and the app I use to track my calorie intake does allow for comments, but I want to start keeping it in a notebook. I still have one I have barely used that's a lovely little size and perfect for the job, since that's not the only thing I want to keep track of...
- Start weekly measurements. I took measurements a few weeks ago, but I lost the piece of paper! I want to keep track of both weight and sizes since muscle and fat aren't interchangeable in size, after all. This would be far easier to do in something like a notebook or an excel sheet. But since I like jotting things down in notebooks... I'm going to make a weekly log of weight and measurements.
- Keep visual track of my progress. I have taken a few pictures, but I am so severely self-concious about my physical appearance that I won't post them online. However, I do want to keep taking those pictures so I can keep track of my progress in the easiest way I can: by looking at those pictures. I love the Tumblr Before and After Pictures of Weight Loss because it shows what those people were capable of. It's impressive! Whether they have lost 5 or 50 pounds, or even over 100, I love looking at those pictures and hope to one day have one of those pictures of my own progress.

This list may not contain an awful lot of changes compared to the last four weeks, but for now I simply intend to keep up the good work I have been doing so far.

An intro into Tecrin gets Fit

Welcome to the new section of this blog, Tecrin gets fit! In this section I will document my steps towards truly getting healthy and fit. As with many health- and get-fit-blogs, a little background always helps a lot in understanding why someone starts such a blog so I will explain my situation. 

Go grab a drink, it's going to be a long one.


I have always been overweight. Well, no, let me rephrase that. When I was born, I was two weeks early and tiny. I think I weighed 2.5 kilos! But I quickly made up for that. Eating became a habit in my childhood, and stealing candy from the candy tin in the drawer became second nature whenever I came home from school. I got an allowance, which I usually spent on more candy and sweets. In my last year of primary school my entire class turned on me and bullied me. While mostly, I could pretend to shrug it off as them being assholes, the comments did stick. I started eating my lunches at home after 3 months and would often come home crying and craving something sweet to take my mind off things. I was 10.

Eating turned into a coping mechanism in secondary school, and the struggle with my weight really began. I had stick-thin friends who stuffed their faces with everything sweet and crunchy in sight and never gained an ounce, but that wasn't me. I ate when I was stressed, and I was stressed a lot thanks to, mainly, school theatre group. Final rehearsal week was especially bad, as we'd be stuck in the auditorium for hours a day with often not much to do whenever a scene was being rehearsed. Having a boyfriend with a metabolism rate that's approaching the speed of light also didn't (and still doesn't) help. A rehearsal day often ended with everyone gathered around a table, emptying bags of crisps and candy.

I also ended up with a rather aggressive form of eczema when I was about 14. It made me insecure, it made me feel bad, it made me miserable, and being miserable made me eat. Thanks to a dermatologist with a tendency to push her patients to trying new things, I ended up doing light therapy, more light therapy, seventeen thousand different types of ointments and creams, even an experimental treatment with medication they normally give to people after a kidney transplantation because at that point, my body had enough of my skin and was trying to push it away. It made me feel bloated, disgusting, and made my skin burn like someone lit a fire underneath. I gained a ton of weight during those days thanks to her 'treatments', even though they never worked, and finally, after almost six years of this, gave up on ever going back there. My skin calmed down considerably quickly after I made that decision. Funny, that.


I don't think I fully realised back then what I was setting myself up for. But I noticed that my weight was always creeping up, and it made me miserable. Being the dramatic teenager that I was (let's face it, we're all drama queens during those years), I considered starting throwing up after meals to do 'damage control', but I never went through with it. The idea itself was too revolting, I guess. Thanks to one of the most wonderful classes in secondary school history, where bullying was not tolerated by the students and teasing never went beyond remarks about one's hair or clothing and mostly stayed within the bounds of grades or strange personal belongings, I was never bullied or teased about my weight again.

I managed to stay relatively in shape during those days because school was a 20-minute bicycle ride away and I played badminton twice a week. Thanks to a horrible coach and a lack of interest in the sport thanks to him, I stopped playing badminton when I was 18. By then, I was in university, and walked a lot. My college is situated in the heart of Utrecht and it was at most a 15-minute walk from the station, so why bother taking the bus? I still lived 30 minutes from the train station, so I usually took the push-bike there and back home.

I think my current weight-issues began when I moved in with the BF. Suddenly, I lived only a 10-minute walk from the station, and I lived together with someone whose idea of a healthy meal was thoroughly muddled thanks to never really having cooked a meal in his life. I gained 10 kilos in the first 6 months. University was also stressing me out. My first year, I chose a program that did not really fit me, and I wasted a year trying to struggle my way through it before deciding to switch to a program that did suit me.

My parents, supportive as they were of my every choice in life, seemed unable to deal well with a daughter that was clearly unhappy with her own body and thought peptalks that only focused on my body and weight would 'help', or that cracking jokes about it, calling me Miss Piggy or poking me in the gut whenever I was eating, would help. I've never told them, but the tons of conversations we had that started with my mother tut-tutting about my weight really broke me at times and I shed many a tear about them because all I could focus on was that I was fat fatty fat fat fat. 

I suppose at this point one could say that I was nursing a slight eating disorder. I would try to 'eat healthy' by not eating at all, only to fall asleep during class or on the train due to lack of nutrition. I would then come home and binge on anything I could get my hands on. Whenever I tried to actually eat healthy, I'd try to live on fruit and nothing else for days. I don't think I need to tell you that this didn't work and eventually, I'd fall back into old habits and eat a whole bag of crisps by myself. I wasn't exercising at all in those days. I would try to talk myself out of eating something, but when I succeeded in convincing myself I wouldn't need that cookie, or that bag of sweets, I'd reward myself... by eating that cookie or diving into that bag of sweets.

Last year I decided that enough was enough. I joined a gym and started working out twice a week. At the beginning of this year, however, I decided that I was going to start my own business as a translator and quit my (somewhat active) job at the local bookshop. I couldn't muster up the time to go to the gym twice a week and it dwindled to once a week, sometimes not even that. I decided to take up running this year, only to have my plans thwarted by short muscle structure in my calf muscles which gave me horrible pains in my lower leg while running that I'm hoping physical therapy will help with.

But despite my efforts, I didn't lose a single pound. Oh, sometimes I did, but they'd always come flying back as soon as I let up the effort. I didn't start a diet, because I only live with my boyfriend and I can't afford to cook two meals every evening, nor did I want to force him to join my diet.

But it really is time for some drastic changes in my life. Enough is enough.

Right now, at the start of this blog, I am a short, fat girl that weighs 112.5 kilos, and it is my goal to lose at least 30 of those before the end of the year.

There, I said it, it's out in the open! No turning back now.

In the coming days, I will document my steps toward a healthy eating plan and will try to lay out an exercise schedule that I can commit to every day. I hope you will enjoy reading along with my journey towards a better, fitter, healthier, happier me.