Kat & Tshepi

Hi there,

Welcome back to Kat & Tshepi blog. We hope your week was satisfying and progressive. On our side, winter is really making its presence to be felt and we are feeling the effects. So it was a cold week, a challenging week for training in the morning. Regardless of the cold, we are happy that we managed to squeeze in four training sessions, we had to miss two training sessions because Kat was not feeling very well, he has not fully recovered from last week. It felt good to be back in training though, we felt more motivated and eager to still pursue our goal.

In this week, we seem to have broken free from our weight loss plateau 🙂 , we made some progress on the weight loss. We have rekindled our relationship with the scale and it is now showing some positive feedback. We may not know exactly what was the cause of our plateau, but we know that our proactive response has enabled us to get over the plateau. Just a recap on some of the actions we took.

• We reflected on the plateau and identified that our eating habits have changed slightly since the beginning of winter. We realized that we may be eating more calories than we are logging.
• We took a two week break from training to give our bodies a rest and to recover from four months of consistent six-days per week pounding.
• In the same two weeks we were not training, we became less restrictive on our diet. We allowed ourselves to eat some of the goodies we normally denied ourselves.
• We reflected and resolved that our bodies might be working on survival mode due to the diet restrictions and the new calorie demands that are introduced by Winter. Our bodies are working to preserve the energy we provide and thereby storing more energy than using it.

Somehow these actions reset our metabolisms and now we are able to see some movement on our weight loss. We are happy that there is progress after weeks of stalling, a painful period we must say 😦 . In this week, we were also consistent with our set diet as well as tracking and logging calories. We also realized how much of our lifestyle has changed since we began our fitness journey about three years back, our life is now revolving around fitness and health and we enjoy that very much. This brings us to this week’s topic “Making it a lifestyle “.

1. Making it a lifestyle

Fitness and healthy lifestyle is an ideal lifestyle for many people, especially for those in a family set up. It is a lifestyle that is admired due to its perceived benefits to the quality of life, but it seems to be a hard lifestyle to attain and even to begin in most cases. As a lifestyle, fitness and health does offer many benefits that contributes to a good quality life. When health is at risk or when one is undergoing any form of sickness that prevents the normal day to day activities from happening, the importance of health resurfaces. It is at this point when the saying “Health is wealth” is making more sense and realistic than it usually is.

Fitness and healthy lifestyle involves making specific decisions about their habits. It involves choosing the type of foods one eats, the activities that one performs daily, and the type of extramural activities that one engages in their spare time. On its basic form, fitness and healthy living requires the elimination or reduction of highly processed foods, sugary drinks and alcohol, as well as switching from a sedentary life to a more active lifestyle. These basic requirements pose more challenges than they appear to be due to their demand of moving away from the norm and comfort zone, it is much easier to stick to the norm and indulge in the comfort zone.

When embarking on a fitness and weight loss journey, living a fitness and healthy lifestyle is not necessarily a requirement. A person can lose weight whilst eating highly processed foods, and a person can improve their fitness level whilst not training but by just improving their activity level. But when a fitness and healthy lifestyle get incorporated to a fitness and weight loss journey, there is an accelerated effect on the journey as well as an increase in the commitment. But the biggest benefits are those gains that are not directly related to the journey such as changes in mindset, changes in perception of life, improved self-confidence, discovery of new hobbies and many more that makes life ooze with untapped potential.

On our journey, we experienced life changing events and efforts through adapting a fitness and healthy lifestyle. When we began our journey, our goal was to improve our health by losing weight and being a bit more active, but before we knew it, our lives were centered around fitness and health and most things in our lives changed. We are very private and introverted people and were really low on self-confidence and self-esteem, but through embarking on a fitness and weight loss journey and adapting a fitness and healthy lifestyle, our self-confidence and self-esteem have improved drastically, and our perception of life has become brighter. Through this lifestyle we were able to start a community fitcamp, we managed to open a Gym, we started hiking every other weekend, we also started this blog 🙂 , started a family subsistence garden project, and now we have developed interests on the sport of Crossfit and we want to give it a shot.  All of these would not have been possible if it was not of attempting to live a fitness and healthy lifestyle. We are humbled by what this lifestyle has availed to us.

That’s it for this week, we understand that a concept of a fitness and healthy lifestyle is subjective to a person’s preference and that it is individualistic. For us, a definition of fitness and healthy lifestyle is the one defined by the choice of eating more whole foods than processed foods, exercising instead of being sedentary, engaging in active ventures on weekends and in spare times, investing time and efforts in pursuits related to fitness and health such as reading, gardening, studying and social media following. Whatever an individual’s definition of fitness and healthy lifestyle is, it has the effects of helping one to achieve their goals as well as realizing other benefits that are implicit in nature but contributes immensely to the quality of life. In the coming week, we will be continuing with our training and nutrition plans, we are hoping that our metabolisms will continue to improve so we get closer and closer to our weight goals. Until next week, stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi