Week 6 - Day 39

Week 6 - Day 39 = 1.4kg or 4kgs
Total Larapinta sponsorship $35/kg + $40 donation

"I wish I could be addicted to exercise," a work colleage mused to me most ruefully this week. I'd been sharing how bootcamp is postponed until Monday and how surprised I was to be missing it. Could it be true? Am I addicted to exercise?

I certainly don't love Dheeraj's Holy Cow Walk (ringtone) in the early morning dark as it bids me into the unforgiving cold. Samson blinks a few times and puts his furry head back down. Cats are supposed to be nocturnal.

I do like being active as the sun rises. There's something naturally awesome about it that's hard to explain.

I don't love the doof doof beat of dance music or the nexus of primped perfection that is the ladies' bathroom. I do like the structure and support of training where I'm pushed beyond the point where I'd have given up if I was alone.

I'm not sure whether I love the burn of that fiftieth rep or gasping indecent words on the treadmill ... but there's a corner you turn at some point where the body suddenly loves to feel worked. There's a thrill when your changing shape, strength and endurance is real instead of a stretch of the imagination.

There's a long way to go yet before the Xena Project is fully realised but I am starting to believe it IS possible to get addicted to exercise.

The catch is ... you have to do it before you can get addicted to it!

Week 6 - Day 36

Week 6 - Day 36 = 1.2kg or 4kgs
Total Larapinta sponsorship $35/kg + $40 donation

It looks like I'm failing the Larapinta challenge, but I'm not. The scales say 1.4kg but I can say with confidence that it is more like 4kgs. My clothes are fitting better. I no longer have to do a Beyonce body roll to get into my jeans. I feel fitter and better. My body now works for me when I ask it to do things ... well ...unless I ask it to process Hungry Jacks. THAT was a mistake. After eating most excellently for several weeks, I indulged in comfort food early last week. That vile, plastic mound of potent fats and fries was so poisonous that I had to go lie down at 7:30pm and didn't get up till morning.

I'm learning that there are good bumps and bad bumps to have. The bad bumps are the 'I look like a bag of walnuts in this outfit' type. Those are starting to disappear. The good bumps are the quad bumps just above the knees. They're the bumps in my arms when I stretch and they're the bumps that I'm supposed to have two of rather than a whole cascading mountain range when I sit down (ok, so I never got quite that bad but you get the idea).

The Larapinta Challenge ends this Sunday night and I'll send out a final update on Monday morning. It'll be up to you whether you want to trust the scales or your eyes when making your donation to charity. The Xena project, however, continues with at least another month of bootcamp ... after all, I have goals of my own to achieve :-)

Week 5 - Day 29

Week 5 - Day 29 = 1kg
Total Larapinta sponsorship $35/kg + $40 donation

As far as progress goes, I know for sure now that the scales are not a true indicator. This week I am definitely seeing an improvement of around 3-4 kgs (based on previous weight for this appearance). Today was tough, though.

When you lead a sedentary lifestyle, you don't notice the impact of food on your body except in a very general way. Me hungry. Me eat. Me full ... or something like that. I went to four parties last weekend, each one full of rich food and alcohol and yikes, did I feel it during the training session this morning! I felt like I was carrying an extra 20-30 kgs and I very nearly threw up doing crunches on the exercise ball near the end of the workout. I got through it, but barely. The type of fuel in my body made an enormous difference to performance and I seriously had the wrong petrol in my tank.

The instructor has encouraged me to return to natural fuels ... like a kind of caveman diet. I should stick to the things that my body recognises and knows how to process - if it swims, flies or walks and if it grows out of the ground then I can eat it. If it comes in a colourful packet and no longer resembles how it looked when it was alive ... then steer away from it.

I have two weeks left of the Larapinta stretch of the Xena Project (3 August) ... For those two weeks at least my name will be Ugha Ungh ;-)

Week 4 - Day 22

Week 4 - Day 22 = 1kg
Total Larapinta sponsorship $35/kg + $40 donation

I have to say, I fell into frustration and despair this past week. I was baffled by this obstinate lack of progress. My metabolism seems to have gone to sea with the owl and the pussycat in a beautiful pea green boat.

This morning, even though I'm still dismal on the scales, I started to see muscles (in my own little feminine way). So, it's not about making no progress. It's about progressing differently to the usual weightloss programs on the market. Popular diets always feature meal replacements and artificial, metallic tasting foods, deprivation and antisocial eating habits. It gets quick results, but it's not sustainable. It's not a way of life.

I remembered that my goal isn't to become some skinny flit of a thing. If it was, I'd do another detox, lose 10kgs, reap in the cash ... and hey, I might become the marshmallow man raging through central New York by October but at least I'd have won the battle (even at the cost of the war.

This isn't the Megan Fox project. It's not the Angelina Jolie project or even the Pussycat Dolls project. Sure these are all fit, good looking women ... but I can't relate to them. This is the Xena project.

The Xena project means winning cushion fights against Alan on DVD nights. It means getting to 40 pushups on my toes. It means never having to wear something different because I don't fit into what I planned (or because I looked like a bag of walnuts in it). It also means eating Sultan's Kitchen with Arif or ordering Haighs when Kerri goes down to Sydney. It's a lifestyle, not a diet.

As I cleaned my room last night, I found a pile of my old Quotes of the Day and sitting on top of the stack was 11 February 2009.

Tomorrow you promise yourself will be different
yet tomorrow is too often a repetition of today.

James T McCay

The problem with tomorrow is that it looks good because it's a different/better you in it, the one that has already made the decisions and done the hard work and is experiencing the reward... but when the series of moments pass in which you would get to that point, it turns out to be just another now. It's still you facing the same problems... Don't be different tomorrow. Be different now and start acting like it.

Week 3 - Day 19

Week 3 - Day 19 = 1.8kg
Total Larapinta sponsorship $35/kg + $40 donation

I've discovered that I really do have superpowers. That is, I can bend the laws of physics that you mere mortals must abide by. According to popular scientific theory, if there is more energy output than input, the body must use its own energy reserves to meet demand (loss of body mass). For some reason, I am the exception to this rule.

On the bright side, this makes me a handy ally when you need to defend your castle or walled village against a siege...

Week 3 - Day 15

Week 3 - Day 15 = 0.8kgs or 2.4kg (?)
Total Larapinta sponsorship $35/kg + $40 donation

Horrified, I stared at the scales this morning. What do you mean 0.8kgs? Less than 24 hours earlier I was grinning at 2.4kg in red digits between my feet. I even convinced myself I could sorta see those 2.4 reflected in the mirror. Yet, no matter how many times I cleared the screen and tried again ... it resolutely showed the same dismal figure.

What fresh torment it is to slave one's guts out only to see a reversal in fortune!!

I told myself 'this time, there will be no gimmicks' ... no starvation tactics or stoic self denial. Those tactics are like the religious war on sin which only serves to reinforce the sinner. I'm done with weightloss wonders in a pill or shake. I'm done searching for that magic ai chihuahua wand. This time it will just be good food and exercise, a reasonable bedtime and everything in moderation.

What else can I do except keep going and hope for a better outcome by next update ...?

Week 2 - Day 12

Week 2 - Day 12 = 2kg
Total Larapinta sponsorship $35/kg + $40 donation

When someone asks 'how are you going?', most people answer 'yeah good', 'alright', 'fine' or other variation. The next socially acceptable answer is 'busy'. When you say you're busy, the other person smiles sympathetically, nods and agrees that they too are busy, aren't we all? Busy is one of those perpetual states of being in our society, like being alright.

During the Xena Project, I've discovered a new perpetual state. Sore. I don't just mean tight calves going up a set of stairs sore, or even hurts to squat down and get back up sore. I mean melodramatically groaning when I get up out of my chair because every muscle in my entire body is rioting all at once.

A relatively new state of being for me is hungry. Naturally, I've been hungry before but this is a whole new category ... it's hunger on another plane of existance. It comes on me like a force to be reckoned with and I've dubbed it 'I could eat my own head' hungry.

The last state of being is tired. I thought with all this training that I'd fall into bed like a rock and stay comatose until the alarm shrieks its bad news the next morning. For some reason, I keep waking up through the night and having to fall back asleep. It's a bit bizarre.

I made a foolhearty deal with someone that I would wear the Xena costume at the end of the project and, true to my word, have now booked in a costume party at the end of August. Of course, I'll pretend like its an embarassing imposition on my modesty and cool ... but we all know that I'm secretly looking forward to it ;-)

Week 2 - Day 8

Week 2 - Day 7 = 1kg
Total Larapinta sponsorship $35/kg

My flatmate and her best friend are teachers and now on school holidays. They went out dancing last night and got home at 4am. Only an hour later, I got up for the first day of BOOTCAMP. Barely awake in the early morning freezing dark, three little soliders started off with a beep test in the downstairs carpark (outside). Two more joined us later in socks and thongs, having somehow forgotten to bring their shoes (??)

100 crunches

70 pushups (15 during the test ... but then shuttle runs with pushups in-between counting down from 10, 9, 8, etc)

1:23 minutes doing plank on my toes (after the 100 crunches no less)

2:46 minutes ski sitting (90deg squat against the wall)

Right now, I am a piece of floppy, wet spaghetti leaning kind of side-like in my chair. It's nearly 1pm. The morning has been a blur.

You know what? Bootcamp was fine. Bootcamp was great! The most confronting part of my morning was getting ready for work. Someone said to me recently that all guys check each other out surruptitiously in the bathroom. With women, it's a bit different. I'm a bit naive about the routines most women go through in maintaining their gorgeous selves. Perhaps to my detriment, I've never been bothered with beauty stuff beyond the most simple self-care. As I stood between these two nearly mannequin-like specimens of woman-kind, I was overwhelmed by their array of creams, powders, sponges, brushes and things I don't even know the name of. I felt rather ... inadequate.

Bring on the lunges. I'll deal with the challenge of sponges some other day!!

Maybe.

Week 1 - Day 5

Week 1 - Day 5 = 0.6kgs

Total sponsorship $35/kg

It's a rather inconclusive amount considering the scales can vary up to a kilogram over the course of one day. I'm a bit disheartened and disappointed in this reluctant metabolism of mine.

I've been aware this week, more than usual, of all the weight-related media that's around at the moment. There was the recent study of Australian kids that found they still don't eat their veggies and spend too much time in front of the tv. Fast food companies have signed a pledge that they will advertise responsibly to children. Then of course, there is the ongoing debate over how much funding to give to lapband surgery to fight the obesity-related drain on our health care system. Fat seems to be the ultimate expression of the mythological hydra because it's not the existance of fast food or sweets that's making people fat. It's not a cycle of depression based on skinny models and freudian first pleasures. It's not even really western hedonism or complacency. It's no singular thing. Nearly everything about the way day-to-day society operates encourages poor food consumption and little exercise.

Just about everything (primary foods excluded) you buy from the shops is bad for you in some way. Even products marketed as healthy are misleading. Shops themselves are designed to encourage you to eat badly. The FoodWorks at the Metro, for example, makes you run a junk-food gauntlet before you can get to the checkout. You are literally forced to walk between two metre-long stands of impulse buys just to get your carrots and celery out of the store. They're a business. They care about incrementally adding to their profit margin. They care nothing about incrementally adding to my ar$e.

"The corporations sit there in their... in their corporation buildings, and... and, and see, they're all corporation-y... and they make money..." (Tim Robbins - Team America)

Next week, the Xena Project really kicks off with a vengence. I start bootcamp first thing in the freezing Monday morning dark and will be training 3x a week for the next month. This reluctant body can't fail but respond to THAT!

Stay tuned for groans and whimpers :-)

Week 1 - Day 1

Week 1 - Day 1 = 0kgs

Total sponsorship $35/kg

Firstly, thanks to the people who are sponsor me in the fundraising challenge. BCC is a strong supporter of the organisation's committment to domestic violence awareness raising and community support avenues. Domestic Violence is something that goes on all the time but we rarely hear about it. There's something sacred and secret about family life that makes this topic uncomfortable, but important.

I have to admit, a weightloss challenge is both awkward and opportune. Thankfully, I don't have to stand in my undies in front of a voyeuristic crowd while big red digits above my head betray my secret shame. Phew! On the other hand, this is an excellent source of inspiration to start taking better care of myself.

I've nicknamed my challenge 'The Xena Project' as it's about health and fitness and aiming for my potential, not just settling for an acceptability level that decides between a t-shirt or no t-shirt at the beach ;-) What it's NOT about is starving myself for six weeks only to pack it on twice as heavy come Christmas

I'm also accountable to you guys for the amount per kilo that you've nominated BUT instead of counting down from the the amount of X that shall never be revealed even on pain of death, I will begin at 0 and count up. I'll let you know how I'm going each week so you have an idea how much it will be at the end.

It's all for a good cause.

Two, actually.