Well the advert leapt out at me from the local paper. It said "Do you finally need a PLAN to achieve your weight loss goals?" "Then you need this. Body BluePrint. Building Bodies in Balance." And so conveniently located at LifeWorks just a few minutes from the house.
It seemed like fate. My weight, despite the running and calorie controlling, was not budging even the tiniest bit in the downwards direction. This advert was promising to give me a 7 day dietary assessment, a Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) assessment, nutritional plan & consultation, exercise metabolic profile, 6 week exercise plan using heart rate zones, all for the special price of $259.
Reading the advert it seemed as if I couldn't fail to part with the 20lbs of stubborn blubber that I'd been trying to lose for the last 9 years.
I signed up straight away.
So after a few days the person who was going to do my RMR testing rang to arrange a date. 7:00am in the morning seemed a good time to do it, especially as I wasn't to eat for 12 hours beforehand. Water was okay.
I dutifully turned up at the gym and was told to sit quietly and avoid any stressful thoughts while the room and equipment was set up. Then I was weighed, oh hell! and in all my clothes too. That 20lbs was looking a bit light in jeans and fleece, evidently I also needed to keep warm, so no stripping off to lighten the load.
My height, well I'm underheight for my weight, and no amount of standing on tippy toes is going to fix that ratio. But a BMI of just over 25 is what this program is all about. Oh to have a BMI rivalling my other half's, in the teens...grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Then after answering questions like do I smoke? drink alcohol? drink caffeine? etc a neoprene mask was fitted to my face with a tube protruding from it linked to the machine that was going to analyse my breathing and come up with my RMR.
The idea is to zone out, ignore everything around you, relax, breath slowly, don't think about anything at all, sort of turn your brain function into a marshmallow for 15 minutes. Your metabolic rate needs to reduce to a point where it won't get any lower and then it will plateau. You should stay at that plateau for 2-3 minutes.
All was going well until my brain was snapped back into reality by two loud voiced women standing way too close to the closed off area I was in, ignoring the sign to BE QUIET!, chattering away about the most inane subjects. The zone out feeling was gone. At that point the instructor stopped my RMR test because my plateau was now rapidly heading upwards.
