There were a few reasons I chose to enter the BodyBlitz Challenge: the first and most obvious being I needed to lose weight. I have tried this many a time in the past, just like a lot of other people. The difference with doing the challenge was that once I started, I couldn’t stop. I had a time frame — a finishing date. This was my biggest motivator.

I wanted to make big change. It was hard when I first started, as I was making all these hard changes in my diet and it looked like no changes were happening to my body. But after a few weeks I started to see some changes. This urged me to continue and push a little harder. I still made a habit of having a few cheat days along the way. I think cheat days are vital. It gives you something to look forward to.

I always exercised hard, so the only major change I had to implement was diet. This brings me to another reason I wanted to complete the challenge: I am a fitness instructor and have been for 15 years. Yes, you read right. Look at my before photos: would you come to one of my classes? How can I expect someone to come to one of my classes? They would take one look at me and think, ‘How is this going to work for me when you’ve been doing it for so long and you look like that?’ As a Les Mills instructor, we were always told to look after our bodies, as our body was our temple.

One of my biggest hurdles was deciding when to start my challenge. Something was always happening. Going out to dinner this weekend; I will start after that. Family barbeque next week. Card night on Friday. Have to have a beer with my brother on his birthday in a couple of weeks. And so on. I quickly learnt at this rate I would never have an ideal time to start.

Through this, however, I have learnt you can still socialise and do everything you want — you just have to make a few different choices, i.e. when you go out for lunch with your work mates you order a grilled fish and salad, instead of a chicken parma and chips. Or if you do decide to have a few beers one night, or some chocolate, you have to do a little extra in your workout the next day. This is something I’m going to continue with. I had gotten stuck in a trap; I was always on the go and ate a lot of fast food because it was easy and convenient, not realising I was slowly gaining the weight. Not anymore!