Losing fast

The weight is falling off a bit faster than expected, possibly due to the amount of exercise I did this week. I spent my Australia Day weekend in the Snowy Mountains on a hut maintenance trip with SPAN, my outdoors club. We did about eight hours of mountain biking over the four days, over fairly rough fire trails that had lots of ups and downs. On top of that we spent a day and a half scrubbing and painting the interior walls of the hut. More about this later in the week...

I stuck to my meal plan for the first three days of the week, and then had to improvise a little when it came to camping. An advantage of going on a hut maintenance trip is that National Parks let you take in one vehicle to carry tools and supplies. This meant we were able to carry in real food, and we even had a little fridge!

I ate healthy meals of home-made muesli for breakfast with nuts and dried fruit in it, crackers or wraps with tuna and salad for lunch, and we had two nights of noodles with veges and Lup Cheong sausage (fatty sweet pork), and one night of couscous with chickpeas cooked in a tomato and zucchini sauce. Because of the level of activity, healthy meals were not enough, so I also had fruit, almonds and muesli bars as snacks.

My indulgence for the weekend was a bit of chocolate, and because it was a social weekend, there may have been a few drinks, chips, cheese and bikkies involved as well. I'm not sure if the treats are going to show up in my weight next week, or if they disappeared with the exercise - I'll have to wait and see. As long as I don't go overboard this week, I should be fine. I'm way ahead of my target weight so far, so I'm not going to panic just yet!



Weekly change in measurements

I think I need to explain two points here to explain my losses, especially around my waist. I may be dehydrated after the hot weekend, causing an artificial weight loss that will be reversed as soon as I rehydrate. For the women out there, (don't read this if you get squeamish), my waist measurement is significantly reduced this week because last week I may have been bloated due to my time of the month. It has to be said - it does affect your measurements. So some of the loss there may have happened in the first week, but didn't show up until this week.

Don't forget to recognise activities like cleaning and other jobs as exercise. It may not be vigorous, heart pumping work, but it still counts because you're moving. Come back later in the week to see some photos of mountain biking around Mt Jagungal in the Australian Snowy Mountains!