My 30 Kg Weight Loss and Fitness Transformation

Hey, how you going? My name is Lucy and in this video today I'm going to be discussing my fitness and weight loss journey. In total I've lost 30 kilos and I managed to get stronger, healthier and fitter without ever having to leave my home. So if you're looking to lose weight or to get fitter and stronger but you're not really keen on the idea of the gym then hopefully this video will be able to give you some motivation or some ideas on how you can do that. So to give you a little history, when I was in school I dreaded PE lessons. I was so self-conscious I hated being there so I definitely wasn't super sporty or athletic but I was active still and I would take part in different sports and activities but then as I got older and I had to look after myself more I tended to eat more and become less active and I found the weight was starting to creep on and on and then when I hit 18 I decided to move to Australia and I was suddenly living on my own working full-time and I had to start cooking for myself and looking after myself and it was at that point where the weight really started to pile on and I feel looking back now that I was kind of oblivious to how much weight I was putting on and I look back and I see pictures of myself and I was bigger than I remember myself being at the time but that being said I knew I was overweight and I knew I was also unhealthy and I had tried a couple of the fad diets things like shake diets and smoothie diets and with no results over the years but I just really didn't know what else I could do so I gradually continued to gain more and more weight until one day I was watching TV show The Biggest Loser and it was the last episode where all the contestants they come back and they've been gone for three months and they've completely transformed themselves and I looked at them and I thought wow they look amazing and if they can do that then I can do this so it was from that moment onwards that everything changed so nutrition had always been something that was really confusing for me I really didn't know where to start I thought I was eating a relatively healthy diet because I was cooking all my meals at home and when I went to the supermarket for snacks I thought I was buying the healthiest snack options things like muesli bars or orange juices instead of having fizzy drinks and chocolate so I just didn't know what to do but when I really started to look at the science of it it was all coming down to one thing and it's actually very very simple all it is is how many calories you're eating versus how many calories your body is burning so calories in versus calories out and when I calculated it the amount of food that I was eating was far outweighing the amount of calories that my body was burning in a day so all I had to do was flip it and consistently eat less calories in a day than my body was burning but the keyword there is consistency I consistently ate less calories in a day than my body was burning I set myself a target of calories to eat per day that I knew was below how many my body was burning and I stuck to it I found healthier versions of recipes that I already loved I stopped snacking as much and I educated myself on how many calories were in certain foods so I suppose I did calorie count but I only did it for a certain amount of time and I then had the knowledge that I could just do it intuitively and I sort of had a gauge about how many calories were in certain foods and what I could eat and what I couldn't eat the one thing I didn't do is I didn't restrict myself I didn't cut out any particular food groups I didn't stop eating chocolate or drinking coffee the things I really like I just reduced how much I was having and I think that's really important because you kind of go mad if you restrict yourself too much and then came the exercise I was not fit at all I couldn't even run 500 meters I couldn't lift my own body weight so I grabbed some fitness dvds which were a mixture of body weight training with high intensity interval training and Tabata style workouts and I just did those every single day there were about hour-long videos and I just repeated the same ones over and over and over again for the three-month duration and eventually the weight started falling off after about six to seven weeks I started to see bigger and bigger increases in how much weight I was losing until I reached a healthy weight and not only had I lost weight but my fitness had improved as well I remember when I started doing those workouts I couldn't even get halfway through one of them I couldn't do one push-up I was covered in sweat and absolutely exhausted by the end of the warm-up and then after three months I was breezing through them and had to go and find dvds which are harder to keep challenging myself one day I decided to go for a run one something I've never really done before and I went out expecting to be able to run maybe a kilometer and I did an entire lap of the lake that was near my house which was five kilometers it was the furthest I'd ever run in my life so I started to incorporate a little bit more running into my routine I started running three days a week and the rest of the days I was continuing to do my workout dvds at home and I just continued to do that for at least two years I was at a pretty standard fitness level I weigh a healthy weight now and everything was pretty good but it started to become a little bit boring and a little bit routine a couple of things changed in my life I went to study at university as a mature age student and due to the constraints on my work I got a new job which was working at night so I would often be working until four or six in the morning and then going to university in the day so I started to gain a little bit of weight and my fitness levels dropped a little bit my eating got a little bit worse and things just started to go I could see them going a little bit out of control again ultimately after a couple of months I probably gained about seven kilos and although I didn't look too much different I could feel it and I needed to change something to try and get me back into the healthy mindset and the healthy habits that I had before so it just so happened that this period coincided with new years and I decided that this year I was going to make a news resolution and that was to be able to do one chin-up by the end of the year at the time I couldn't even hold my body weight on a bar so I felt like being able to do just one chin-up by the end of the year was a pretty achievable target I had already seen the benefits of body weight training in regards to weight loss but I hadn't really had much experience with body weight training for strength gain and as I started to research more into it about how I could progress to do a chin-up I started to get hooked on calisthenics and all the benefits that come along with it so I started following some people online who teach calisthenics and who also do it as a hobby and they were doing some amazing things with their bodies I would love to be able to be at that level one day but at the time I was definitely not strong enough so I started working on the fundamentals of calisthenics alongside my chin-up training I was training my push-ups my dips my core work as well and trying to really gain that base strength that you need to be able to progress further in calisthenics I noticed that my strength started to grow and every week I could do a little bit more in the exercises whether it was my push-ups were just a little bit better whether I was closer to being able to do a chin-up whether I could just handstand a little bit longer I was starting to see differences and not only did I see differences in my strength and not only did I see differences in my body but I also saw differences in my mindset I was no longer training for aesthetics I was no longer training for weight loss I was no longer thinking about what I was eating all the time I was training because I loved it because I was seeing so many benefits from my training my passion was just growing and growing and quite frankly I was driving my friends and family nuts with how much I was ranting and raving about calisthenics so I created my Instagram account and connected with a few people who were doing the same thing as me in my local area we started hanging out and I started working on new skills and from there my strengths and passion grew even further eventually after about five months I was able to do one full chin-up and I can't tell you the feeling was amazing something I'd worked so hard for for five months finally paid off and I was able to pull my body weight above the bar I saw improvements in my handstands my push-ups were better I could do body weight dips and pistol squats which I could never do before but the biggest change I saw was in my happiness I was so happy when I was doing these exercises and I was training because I loved it not because I had to or for the way it made my body look but the added bonus was I was losing weight my body was replacing any fat that it had left with muscle and I was starting to look leaner and stronger and that's when all the pieces of the jigsaw just started to click together I now understood that the nutrition and exercise were working together perfectly to give my body exactly what I needed and the best thing about it was I was loving it I have experienced the benefits of body weight training in all regards and I truly believe that it is one of the best exercises for weight loss and general fitness and to grow strong as well and it's not just for men it women can do it too people who are overweight can do it people who have never been able to do a push-up or a dip or a chin-up in their lives can do it and I feel like I am testament to that because I've been through all those experiences and I've come out with the best hobby and the best passion and the ability to hopefully help others achieve the same things looking back over the last several years in the journey that I've been on I really think that body weight training and calisthenics has been the one thing that's kept me moving forward I've always had something to work towards and strive for and I believe that had that not been there I may have become quite complacent in where I was and potentially put the weight back on again the great thing about calisthenics and body weight training is you're always seeing improvements and you're getting stronger and fitter all the time so when you're going through a weight loss transformation or you're trying to get stronger or get fitter it's a really great motivator to see those little changes in your body and your abilities so another great benefit of body weight training is that you can do it anywhere you want you can do it in the comfort of your own home so if going to the idea of going to the gym scares you or intimidates you like it does me a lot of the time it's a perfect form of training you can consistently train with very little time and very little space and still achieve amazing results if not better results than you could in the gym when I initially lost the weight I was still quite restricted with my diet and I was constantly assessing whether I'd done enough exercise to allow me to eat that day it's not a very healthy mindset that I had whereas now I have a much better outlook I train because I love it and I eat because it provides the fuel that my body needs to be able to exercise and I think that's the shift that I really want to be able to help other people with I would love to be able to motivate people now to lose weight and to find what they love to do I'm going to start using YouTube a lot more and providing content on how to lose weight the nutrition side of things and different workouts and more information on calisthenics as well but if you have any other ideas or suggestions that you'd like me to focus on then either leave a comment down below or head over to my Instagram account and send me a message I would love to get you to know you guys and to know what your stories are and what your goals are for 2019 and onwards as well and create like a little community here so we can all work together to achieve some amazing things I think it's definitely possible and I hope that I'm testament to the fact that you can lose weight and get fitter and stronger and that you can do it all from the comfort of your own home whether you have money have experience have knowledge I had none of those things and I managed to do it and I believe everyone else can do it too so thank you so much for watching and I hope you found it useful in some way and I'll see you in the next video