My Journey to Getting Active

Calling it a journey may be a bit of an exaggeration, it wasn’t like I went through many obstacles and came through the other side. My personal journey was more of a change of mental mindset that started out slow and has grown over time until having completely changed my entire outlook of myself as a person. Strangely enough, my process did not start with going to the gym constantly or dieting loads. No, it started with a smoothie. Yes, a smoothie.

I was on Instagram one day and saw that a fellow classmate had began a fruit diet and was posting images of the various concoctions she had made with these different fruits. Now, I had been struggling internally about my appearance and weight for many (and I mean many) years, but whenever my mum or dad tried to talk to me about it I closed them off and blocked the issue out of my mind. I always believed that there was nothing I could do because I wasn’t that sort of person to be able to get fit and healthy like everyone else I had heard of or seen on social media, so I ignored the problem as best as I could. It was only really times when I went shopping and had to try things on that I could no longer hide, the floor length mirrors and bright lights of the changing rooms were merciless.

Don’t ask me why because I truthfully have no idea, but seeing her trying something new and sharing it with the world on social media really made me want to try too. So I started to research healthy smoothies and began to incorporate one a day into my meals. Of course now I realise that it wasn’t enough to really make a difference physically, but mentally it was a life changer. I was finally doing something to change myself. And so, this new change spiralled until one day I decided to do something else I had never dared to do before, I decided to exercise.

Other than PE in high school never had I willingly made the effort to get active and push myself out of my comfort zone. Rounding up my two sisters, I signed us up for a trampoline fitness class close by. The reason I didn’t simply just sign up to a gym is for the simple reason that the gym terrifies me. It’s more the thought of others watching me that makes me feel anxious and my head pound. Everyone says no one will be watching as they are there to focus on themselves and working out, but I have heard one too many stories from my friends telling me the tales of how random guys would come up to them while they were on the treadmill or at the weights corner and try to speak to them or watch while they waited for their turn. No thanks, I’ll pass.

Luckily, the class I signed us up to wasn’t apart of a gym and after a few weeks I realised I had made it into a one day a week thing. The fun of being on a trampoline mixed with new, hard workouts was the perfect welcome to fitness. But the most mind blowing thing about starting these classes was the change I noticed in myself, I was more confident and spoke to my friends more about my struggles and fitness discoveries, I would look forward to putting on my gym clothes and soon I started to look and feel better.

Doing these classes and eating less of the wrong things and more of the right ones, led me to lose 3 stone within one year. I was so happy with myself, not necessarily that I looked smaller than I was but mainly because I put my mind to something and did it myself.

These days I’m still attending the trampoline classes once a week whenever I can and most recently within the past year I have started to run outside with my mum. I use to love running when I was younger so getting back into it was something I looked forward to. Although I still find it really hard, every Saturday me, my mum and her friend go to our local park for a parkrun and I honestly have not felt better about myself after doing that then I have doing anything else.

Gone are the days of lying in until 11am and eating large sharing packets of crisps to myself between meals everyday. I am not the most fittest or healthiest person out there but I have changed the way I was and try hard to do so everyday, that’s what counts to me.

Now, I understand that my story is not a big, newsworthy journey and that there are far more others out there whose journeys are more profound and inspiring. But hopefully what people take from this is that it doesn’t matter what others do, whatever your story is its always worth telling.

So this post is more for me than anything else. But thanks for reading anyway!