About a year and a half ago, I did a personal fitness profile at Planet Fitness. Little did I expect the results I was going to get. I have been underweight almost my entire life, so to suddenly be classified as obese was a little more than I could take. I knew I had gain some weight, but I still managed to work out twice a week and did a little running here and there, so I thought I was doing ok. Maybe I was a little pudgy, carrying a small spare tire around my waist. But OBESE?

I even got the trainer to measure it twice just to make sure it wasn’t a glitch.

Obese was something you associate with Moses Lim, Elite Girl and Fat Albert, never in a million years would I expect myself to join their ranks. What was frightening was I never would have suspected it if I had never went and did the profile. I have been underweight since young, and over the years I had developed a less than healthy eating habit. I had gotten used to the fact that I could eat whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want and still be content that I would never gain an ounce of weight. But getting older has a way of changing the way your body deals with food. My metabolism just wasn’t what it used to be.

So the next day, I basically threw everything out the window and replanned my fitness program from scratch. Too much lifting and too little cardio probably contributed to the problem. I also decided to cut all sugared drinks out of my diet. So over the course of a few months, I gradually increased the intensity of my workouts and the distance of my runs. Eventually I got around to losing about half a kilo every 2 weeks. From a peak of 75kg, I gradually lost 10kg over the course of a year and eventually stabilised at 65kg.

After reaching 65kg, I tweaked the program a little bit to gain some strength and increased my bodyweight to 68kg- which I feel is the ideal weight for me.

After all the hard work, what I have now is body fat that hovers somewhere between 12-13% and my resting heart rate is about 51 beats a minute. And if you don’t want to spend the money to purchase one of those scales that measures body fat, you can also do it through the use of this online test- which actually gave me a 11.8% body fat, not too far from I got from the Osim bodyscale.

And throughout this entire time I also didn’t follow any special diet. I ate pretty much what I had always eaten (hawker centre food), only in smaller portions and only eat junk food maybe once a week. The only thing I changed was to eat a lot of fruits almost everyday.

Just last week, one of my colleagues got hospitalised because of a health problem. Its a timely reminder why we should never take anything much less our health for granted. A good level pf personal fitness is well within the reach of everyone, what you need is just the will to do it.

p.s. I finally managed to cover the distance of a marathon spread over 3 runs- 43.6km to be exact