Kat & Tshepi

Hi There,

Welcome back to our blog, we hope you had a fantastic week. We had a good week, it was less stressful and less hectic than the previous week. Emotionally we were stronger and better prepared to deal with the challenges and demands of balancing work and family life, as well as focusing on this 6 months’ fitness and weight-loss journey, we thank God for the resilience we were blessed with in the past week.

But no situation is perfect, we managed to continue with being consistent on our cardio training, and for the most part being consistent with our nutrition plan (yeah yeah we cheated a bit 🙂 ) . We missed all our planned resistance training 😦 , and this we can attribute to Kat’s recovery from his bicep injury, as well as Tshepi’s recovery from fatigue. We decided to take it easy this week in the hope of being stronger in the coming weeks. Kat’s bicep injury is recovering well and he should be able to commence resistance training in the coming week, it helped him not to put any strain on the injured arm, and as for the bruised ego, we hope it is recovering well and he will be able to gage his fitness level properly next time 🙂 .

Tshepi is also recovering well from the fatigue she experienced in the past week, the three days she took off work helped her tremendously, she was able to rest, get the house in order and work on her mind-set and strategy on tackling the tasks ahead. And she had some time to prepare some great food for the family, the kids little tummies were in heaven in those days….and the parents too (remember the cheating a bit part 🙂 ).

This brings us to this week’s topic “Food Preparation”. When you are on a weight-loss journey, the worst enemy you have is food, but it also your best ally. You are denying your body certain type of foods and also the quantity it is used to, so your body is responding to this shortage by asking for more, and it asks very loudly when it is in a deficit. Somehow our human nature dictates that when we are denied something, whether good or bad, we eagerly want more of it and now we want it in excess, maybe in anticipation of and preparation for future denial, whew we are complex. Therefore, it is easier to get tempted to eat foods you are denying yourself and to get tempted to eat way more than it is necessary. One way to prevent falling for this temptation is to prepare your meals in advance.

1. FOOD PREPARATION

On our two-year fitness and weight-loss journey, we realized that planning and preparing our meals in advance has enabled us to withstand or reduce the forces of food temptation. This effort has contributed positively to our goals, as well as avoiding the feeling of guilt after eating what we are not supposed to eat, a terrible and discouraging feeling 🙂 . When you have the food prepared in advance and have them with you, you are able to simply reach for the right food when you are hungry or come across some delicious and irresistible food item you did not plan to eat, and most of the tempting foods are high calorie foods with less or no nutritional value which works against your goals, as well as leaving you unsatisfied and wanting some more.

To fight food temptation and failure (and the guilt that goes with it), we prepared our meals for three days in advance. What we do is that we allocate some time on Sundays and Wednesdays to cook meals for the next three days, these are then sealed in containers and then stored in the fridge. When we are home and it is meal time, we simply pull the containers from the fridge, measure on the food scale according to our calorie goals, dish up and reheat…then voila the meal is ready in 5 minutes. This also saves time and laboring on what to eat, as well as avoiding eating more than necessary because if you prepare food whilst too hungry, chances are you will eat too much.

When we head off to work, each one of us carries a bag full of pre-packed nutritious food to cater for our needs during the day.

Preparing food in advance has worked well for us, although we do fail from time to time, the sacrifice of time to prepare the food in advance is worth the effort for our goals, we would have otherwise failed completely and all the time. There is a quote that states “Don’t be scared, be prepared”, this is true with food temptation, instead of being scared of falling into temptation be prepared in advance, arm yourself with the artillery to face temptation squarely in the eyes.   

That’s it for this week. As we are heading towards the end of the first month of our fitness and weight-loss journey, we will be resuming our resistance training programme, and we will be measuring our first month progress . We are hopeful that with all the challenges we faced in this month, we have thrived and have lost the targeted 1kg. Let us see how it unfolds in the next blog, until then, stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi