T minus 79 days

Weight : 60.5kg
Yesterday's food : You have used 1335 out of your net daily budget of 1500 calories and have 165 calories remaining. 18% of the calories are from fat, 44% from protein, 38% from carbs
Exercise : Upper Body + Spin Class + Elliptical intervals
2 hours 5 min : 877 calories : 171 max hr : 142 av hr

UPDATE: So after today's workout it appears I am not training for a figure competition I'm training for a marathon LOL! And all that after I walked around town all day and then walked all the way home.

Having a day off work today as I am working on the weekend again. A new low weight today but I am only reservedly (is that a word?) excited. I always weigh less mid morning after a sleep in than at 6:00am.

Today I am thinking about how easy it has been to follow this diet and exercise routine. I am not sure if it because I have such a solid tangible high risk goal (exposing myself in a bikini on stage) or because the program is less restrictive than what I have been following previously.

It is probably a combination of the two. Having a non-movable date deadline means every day and every moment counts. I can't skip a workout and make it up on another day because I only have a finite number of days. I can't eat a handful of lollies or go over my calorie limit for the day because I don't have any days to waste. Each day has to be on plan because I only have 79 left to make huge changes to my shape.

My eating plan is amazing. I am enjoying all the healthy veges, fruit and whole grains. I eat a lot of food and I am rarely unsatisfied after a meal. Low fat is not so bad when you can still eat thinly sliced slivers of potato and sweet potato baked to a crisp in the oven to calm the chippy monster. Once you stop eating things with sugar added, you are constantly amazed by the sweetness of berries, bananas and capsicum. And a tablespoon of sweet chilli sauce is only 28 calories and has half the calories of BBQ sauce which now tastes too sweet.

I am relishing every morsel of my 1500 calories because I suspect that there is some calorie and carb reduction somewhere in my future. But until then, I am eating like a queen. I feel slightly saddened that I have lived for months at times on 1,000 calories a day in a constant state of hunger.

I am also so pleased that I don't have to keep questioning if what I am doing is right. In the past, if the scales weren't going down every day, I would eat less calories, or less carbs because I thought I had overestimated what I needed to lose weight. Now I just eat how I'm told and keep going. There are lots of reasons why the scale isn't dropping numbers, not least of which is that my body needs convincing that I am getting all my nutritional needs met so it doesn't have to hold on to the fat because there's a famine coming.

There's also the wild hormonal fluid fluctuations I go through each cycle and the fluid retention from DOMs (which is a daily occurrence at the moment). This is probably very wrong of me, but I am looking forward to getting my body fat percentage so low that my period stops altogether. Before you berate me for such misguided longings, I only want this to happen so I can switch off my ovulation/PMS bloating for the short period of time leading up to the competition. I don't want to stop having a period forever because I am underweight. I would just like a temporary reprieve from the hormone horrors.

In other non competition prep news, I have been asked to present a session at a conference on planning, safety and security at major events. I feel very flattered to be considered an industry leader demonstrating best practice. This could be the start of a new career on the lecture circuit where I am flown all over the world to tell others how to do events. I know ... I'm getting ahead of myself slightly ... but I am predisposed to dreaming big dreams ... I can do anything I set my mind to!