Dawn Tukuniu

Hi, I'm Dawn, married to a wonderful husband and mum to two gorgeous kids, living in the town of Howlong on the Murray River, between Albury and Corowa. I work full time, study part-time, train 6 days a week, and do everything else I can in between especially helping people with their health goals - fitness and nutrition.

My own fitness and nutrition, like most has been a very up and down journey, with large weight fluctuations, yo-yo diets, plenty of fad diets - I'm sure many can relate to this. When my daughter was born in January 2012 I was 98kg and worked hard to get back to pre-pregnancy. On this journey I made a commitment that the 'dieting' days were over, the fluctuating exercise habits were over - I needed to make a life-style change that was going to allow me to be and maintain the weight I wanted to be and to eat and enjoy a nutritious way of life. I needed to do this for myself, my husband, but most of all my kids - being an 'older mum' I need to be around for a long time yet and also need to able to continue to meet their needs and enjoy all the physical things that kids need to do - not watching from the side-lines or the park bench - but being active with them.

I had always been an on and off runner, and began running again around April 2012 which together with 'reasonable' eating saw me drop a few kilo's. In November 2012, I was still running (and improving) and came across an article written by a colleague, Frank Marino who specialises in Exercise and Sports Science at the Uni, which had a dramatic impact on my life ... “My personal journey and experimentation with health and diet"... "Being someone who has dedicated most of his personal and professional life in the pursuit of physical activity and its benefits I was recently overcome with a sense of personal impending doom with respect to my own health status. So, what was I to do? I could either be a passive consumer of the health message out there for all and sundry to hear or I could use my knowledge and resources to try and discover a way forward and in so doing seizing control of my health. My experiment has been simple and straight forward.... for the past 3 months I have removed all carbohydrates from my diet and switched to high protein and fats. The only carbohydrate is that which I obtain from fruit; being a complex carbohydrate not refined. The results have been astonishing ... weight loss has fallen from 93 kg to 85 kg, my cholesterol has plumm