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Fighting to be fit and feeling better..

 Fitness is a concept that can mean something different for everybody, me personally, my fitness is something very important to me, I force myself to get fitter and fitter as often as I can because the fitter I am, the better I feel. Now, I’m not saying become a health nut and only ever drink water and eat salad for every meal. I’m not saying that at all. To be honest, that’s not healthy either. Of course, water and salad are both two very healthy options but too much of it? That isn’t healthy at all. Just like eating pizza for every meal wouldn’t be healthy (but who wouldn’t love to live in a world where you could eat all the pizza in the world and it wouldn’t be considered unhealthy??? Take me there). The key, I believe, is a balanced diet. Now, believe me, I love pizza and full sugar drinks and I mean who doesn’t love a maccies? Or a kfc? Orr a nandos? Orrr a Gourmet Burger Kitchen? The list is endless and the more scrumptious places I seem to name, the hungrier I feel so lets stop the list now. Now, even my diet isn’t exactly… perfectly balanced and I cant deny that but since joining the gym last year and pushing myself a little harder my diet has definitely gone from COMPLETELY unhealthy to way more balanced. It’s the little chances you make like I looove chicken and rice or chicken salad, chicken pasta or when I’m making a curry, all the vegetables, the peppers, the onions and whatever else you decide to put in, its still very, very yummy. Eating more fruit, drinking more water or juice (or if you’re like me, flavoured water because you don’t like normal water because it literally tastes like nothing… it makes me feel like I may as well just be opening my mouth and attempting to drink the air surrounding us), drinking pure orange or apple juice instead of squash (although who doesn’t love summer fruits or blackcurrant squash???), its buying a pizza or burgers or whatever else you might order from a greasy take away and cooking them at home yourself (Obviously I’m not saying this makes those food options healthy, just healthier because they wont be as unhealthy from you, frozen and then cooked yourself than they would be if you ordered them from a greasy take away).

Now, it’s not just changing your diet. Its becoming more physically fit which means adding more exercise into your lifestyle (or, in some cases, adding any sort of exercise into your lifestyle). Now, I’m not saying “right, that’s it, get up, get out and go and join a gym.” Some people cant afford a gym, some people don’t like the idea of being in a gym because of the atmosphere and some people just don’t feel comfortable about the idea of exercising in front of groups of people which of course is understandable. In this day and age, you do not need to join a gym to exercise. Go for little walks, walk to your local shop instead of driving, walk your kids to school, go on little jogs or the easiest and most convenient option – buy a work out DVD and do it at home. That option gives you the possibilities of working out alone, with a partner or even with just a group of your pals a couple of times a week. Another big key thing to getting fit is your mind set. A negative and depreciating mind set will not help you achieve your goals, you need to be positive, motivated, determined. You need to want to reach that goal weather its to tone up, loose weight, get healthier or you just simply enjoy working out and the endorphins it releases, you have to have the determination and the will power to push yourself to reach the goals you would like to see yourself achieve.

For me, working out meant a number of different things. It meant I was being a lot healthier, It meant I was taking my recovery seriously and loosing weight in the right way instead of the unhealthy way(which will all be spoken about in another post). Working out meant chanelling all my anger, my anxiety, my depression into one thing, into one productive thing that was overall making me feel better, it was making me feel like I was well on my way to becoming the best version of myself and most of all, it made me feel good. I had more energy, I felt more free, more upbeat, I felt a lot… happier. And all that negativity I had previously been harbouring and all those nasty thoughts just seemed to… melt away and what I was left with was a more positive, upbeat version of herself who believed she could and so she did. I was seeing MASSIVE differences in myself, I couldn’t believe how much weight I’d lost in such a short time after joining the gym. I was more toned, I was thinner and I both looked and felt healthier. I felt more like a person than I had felt with YEARS and now that I was taking better care of my body, I stared taking better care of my mind and although my mental health is still not in an ideal state its very slowly but surely becoming something A LOT easier to deal with and it’s all thanks to the way my body, diet and lifestyle have all changed. It was difficult at first, hard on my body and there where so many times where I just wanted to give up (half way through spin class, for example) but I knew I just had to keep to on going, I just had to push myself, through the pain to get to the other side, the clearly more uplifting side. Every moment of soreness just shows me that I am pushing myself beyond my limits and I am succeeding.