Kat & Tshepi

Hi,

Welcome back, hope you had a fantastic week. We had a rollercoaster week, juggling family  and work responsibilities as well as fitness responsibilities such as this project, but normally our weeks are like that. It is tough to grow up and try to be a responsible community member and an adult 🙂 , by the way Kat is 39 and Tshepi is 35, so we are not young pigeons anymore and retirement is far more closer than it used to be, maybe this is the underlying reason we are drawn towards health and fitness, ageing has its wide arms open and ready to embrace us, not really looking forward to that 🙂 .

We began this week by setting up targets for the 6 months’ fitness journey, we set weight, nutrition and training targets. We believe setting these targets will propel us towards our destination and will enable us to track our progress and adjust them as and when necessary. A popular quote by Harvey Mackay says “ If you have no destination, you’ll never get there”, these targets are our mini destinations on our journey towards the final destination. Let us have a look at the targets we set for ourselves.

1. WEIGHT LOSS TARGETS

 We began with taking pictures of the scale readings so we can see where we started.

Kat starting weight is 67.25kg and Tshepi started at 68.90kg, our target is to lose 1 kg each per month for 6 months. We need to get to 61.25kg (Kat) and 62.90kg (Tshepi). To achieve this, we need to lose 0,25kg per week (does not sound too bad hey).

WEIGHT LOSS TARGETS	KAT	TSHEPI
Start weight	67.25kg	68.90kg
Target end weight	61.25kg	62.90kg
Target weight loss per month	1kg	1kg
Target weight loss per week	0.25kg	0.25kg

2. NUTRITION TARGETS

The “80/20 rule in fitness” is a common criterion in the fitness space when you are trying to reach your fitness goals, especially loosing weight. It basically means that 80% of your results will be determined by the food you eat and only 20% will be determined by your training. Whether this is true or not, we like it and agree with it.

Since the beginning of our fitness journey, we have experienced some major progress when we started to pay more attention to and tweaked our nutrition, it is surprising now to think about the food we used to call healthy, we were so off the mark there, so it pays to learn a little bit about nutrition since it plays such a big role on your fitness goals and overall health. As they say, you cannot outrun your fork, so we guess it is better to tame your fork with knowledge so that you don’t have to try and outrun it (and its is a lot of running, whew).

For nutrition targets, we started by determining our calories requirements for our desired weight loss. Calories are the amount of energy you get from food, these energy is what your body use to perform your daily tasks. If you give your body more calories than it requires, YOU GAIN WEIGHT, If you give your body less calories than it requires, YOU LOSE WEIGHT(tadaa :)). If we further simplify this idea, when we have extra energy than we need, our bodies stores the energy as fat, and when we have less energy than we need, our bodies retrieve the energy stored as fat and thus reduces our overall fat.

To determine our calories requirements, we used MyFitnesspal App (a free app that you can use to track your calories), another resource that can be used is the calorie calculator such as this one https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html , there are various calculators available on the internet  for this purpose.

After determining our calories requirements, we set our Macronutrients ratio. Macronutrients are the main components of food that provides us with energy, these are Carbohydrate, Proteins and Fats. We opted for the ratio of 40% Carbohydrates, 30% Proteins and 30% Fats.

To conclude the nutrition targets, we created the menu that we will be using for this journey. On the menu, we aimed for mostly whole foods, which includes various fruits and vegetables for carbohydrates, whole wheat bread (very limited quantity), meat(mostly chicken) and eggs for protein , sources of fat will be coming from various foods such as olive oil, avocados, almonds, meats and eggs.

The foods we will be shying away from are sugar, rice, maize meal, junk food, snacks ( biscuits, chocolate, chips e.t.c), sodas and juices. And finally, alcohol reduction, Tshepi is completely off alcohol, Kat needs to reduce it drastically if he wants to make it to the finish line 🙂 .

3. TRAINING TARGETS

For training, we have set a target of 4 resistance training days, 3 cardio training days and 1 Abs training day….well, that looks like it’s more days than we have in a week. This means we will be training 6 days per week and sometimes twice per day. Here is a breakdown of the days and workout splits.

DAYS OF THE WEEK	MORNING WORKOUT	EVENING WORKOUT
Monday	Upper Body weight training	Cardio training
Tuesday	Lower body weight training	Rest
Wednesday	Rest	Cardio training
Thursday	Upper Body weight training	Rest
Friday	Stomach/Abs training	Cardio training
Saturday	Full body weight training and Cardio	Rest
Sunday	Rest	Rest

On top of the set training targets, we have also set a target of 12000 walking steps daily, these will be tracked via our fitness watches. Walking is the easiest form of exercising, a very good one to start with.

4. SLEEP AND HYDRATION TARGETS

Lastly, we have set targets for sleep and hydration, we aim to drink a minimum of 2 liters of water per day and to sleep minimum of 6 hours per night( a tough one for us).

Whew , now that was a lot of targets. It has been a tough week with lots of day to day stresses and obligations, many emotional dips and fatigue, a few cheat foods and a few missed training days (Okay…4 missed resistance training sessions), but we are hopeful that we will get CONSISTENT and by the grace of God we will make it to the finish line. So until the next blog, stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi