Client Testimonial: Brendan Peacock
Brendan was an active guy who already trained hard. But much to his surprise (and at times denial), he was getting fat! Holiday binges, weekend drinks, the mentality of “eat now and burn it off later” had all caught up. He decided enough was enough, so he got the hard facts by way of a Dexa scan, took some pics and then set about dropping the unwanted fat with PPT.
Read more about his recent transformation & how he flipped his body composition on its head. He breaks it down into different stages that many will be able to relate to.
BREAKING HABITS:
I’m not going to lie, maintaining a consistent healthy diet isn’t easy. No more sneaky afternoon chocolates, I had to cut back on eating out and record everything I ate. The hardest part for me was definitely recording everything. 30 years of unconscious habits are very hard to break. I had a habit that I was not entirely aware of, nibbling while cooking. Whilst it doesn’t sound like much a handful of nuts here and a couple of biscuits there, all of a sudden I need to count them and it’s 200+ calories.
Getting into a good rhythm with cooking meals was critical, and when I knew I was going to eat late, preparation the night before was key. When I started to get bored with the same food, I made time to cook different foods. There is a surprising amount of delicious healthy foods out there if you can take the time to cook and put the effort into it. The worst thing is not preparing, having nothing to eat and rushing dinner, that’s generally when I would resort to easy/unhealthy meals and I made that mistake a couple times while I was finding my feet.
GETTING INTO A GROOVE & PROGRESS:
Now that I had a handle on my eating habits, concentrating on my training routine had become my priority. Finding the balance between strength workouts, cardio/interval workouts, recovery, work commitments and having a personal life was a huge challenge. It sounds like a lot and a bit overwhelming, even writing it down afterwards sounds challenging, but the PPT team was always there to support and offer advice, whether it be to improve diet, change sleeping habits or change the amount and type of training.
At this point I started to see some progress and I wanted to train as hard as I could and lose as much fat as possible. It would get to Thursday morning and I would struggle to motivate myself to get out of bed and get training in before work. At this point, the feedback from the team at PPT was crucial. They’ve heard it and done it all before. It would be easy to stop training on Thursday and Friday to recover, but I needed to push myself outside of my comfort zone to succeed. I needed to remind myself why was there, a few small changes in food and sleep patterns made a massive difference.
THE HOME STRETCH
At this point with about 2 weeks left and I can see the progress. My weight was dropping, my pants were getting loose as my waist line decreased and the photos are looking leaner. Everything was going my way and the last 10 weeks of hard work are making noticeable changes in my appearance. The diet plan becomes easier, the routine of training is easier even though the training itself remains challenging as my weights increase and the running sessions gets longer.
I’m feeling more energetic, even when I have done a hard circuit in the morning, I’m still out running around and playing with my niece and nephew in the afternoon/evening. People were making comments now about how much weight I have lost and how great I am looking. It’s an amazing feeling when you know how hard you have worked towards these results and people are noticing the difference.
The other inspiration was the other clients in the training program. The dedicated Facebook page allowed me to keep in touch with people going through the exact same changes, posts about what they are achieving, the challenges and advice from their own experiences. It feels great to be a part of a small community of people that get what you are going through, the highs and the lows of it all.
RESULTS, CELEBRATING & STAYING ON TRACK
The results came in and I’m stoked with the numbers. I set myself 3 goals, an easy, medium and hard target (chin-ups, total weight loss and body fat %) and I smashed all 3. When I got the final results I had an amazing rush of accomplishment knowing that all the hard work and commitment had paid off. I knew that in the last few weeks I had made some real progress but until the final numbers come through you don’t really know. I’m extremely grateful to the PPT team for pushing me each step along the way whether it be hitting those big lifts, interval training or Facebook reminders when I want to “smash a lasagne and chips”.
That night I celebrated with a couple of beers, cheese and biscuits. That said, I don’t plan on throwing all my hard earned work (and abs) out the window. At the start one of the team made a comment along these lines that makes sense once you go through it all, “Trust in the program, and the results will follow”. At the time I just brushed it off as sales pitch, but now I would offer the same advice to the next person. It is hard but if it was easy everyone would do it.
RESULTS are what we pride ourselves on at PPT. To find out about how we can help you drop unwanted fat like Brendan, get in touch with our team via our contact page here.