Losing weight rocks! Over to Claire, one of our lovely Members at Narre Warren, to tell you her sto

I wanted to take part in the six week weight loss challenge mainly to get myself back to a healthy BMI and I also wanted to be a healthy role model for my kids. I had tried quite a few times to lose weight on my own, and I usually would do really well for a few weeks. But then I would lose motivation, have a really bad week and put the weight back on that I had already successfully lost in the first two weeks! I find it easy to lie to myself so I felt that I needed to be accountable to someone other than myself. I find that being accountable to someone else really works for me, as I always like to be the 'good student' in anything that I do (must be from years of education and study!).

At the start of the challenge Andrew introduced me to myfitnesspal.com to help me track what I was eating and this was a real eye opener as I think I was eating possibly three to four times the amount that I should have been. He also taught me the best ways to exercise with the goal of weight loss in mind. In the past I had come into the gym and used cardio equipment for long stints which assisted with endurance but not weight loss and aside from that, hours of cardio are boring. I am actually really enjoying the circuit style of training with shorter timeframes for each exercise, I find that I can keep the intensity up and my mind doesn't wander.

In the first week I found that I was often hungry as I was not only eating differently but my portions were also smaller but now in week three, these changes feel quite normal. I also began to see the numbers on the scale coming down, so this gave me the motivation to push on with it. In the long term I would like to lose around 10kg and at week three I have lost 3.5kg so I feel like I'm making progress. I'm really to looking forward to fitting into some of my old skinnier clothes and having people that I have only met over the past few years get to see what I used to look like before my three kids were born.

- Claire Murray.