This is a very rocky journey for me; growing up I hated exercise like in the gym and running, I would do sport happily as I have grown up doing ballet and horse riding but the minute you would make me run or anything apart from a sport I just wouldn’t, there was a point in time where I would cry when my dad made me run. Quite a few years later I go to the gym nearly every day doing cardio for half an hour on average; if you told me this a few years ago I would laugh not believing it but now I choose to do it. How did I get here, well acts something I am still not quite sure either but I’ll explain a little bit.

So my dad and brother have always been huge for working out and staying fit so they would always force me to do it as well so I grew up with people who were major supporters of sports and exercise. However, that gene didn’t get activated in me till I went to boarding s school. Like I said I always did sport growing up, and yes ballet is a sport don’t at me, but I never could go to the gym or for a run, basically anything apart from sport. When I went to boarding school it still took a while for it to hit me that I should get into this habit as I was still doing quite a lot of sport but living with about 60 other girls takes a toll on you very quickly. I started to get very body conscious as I saw so many girls with the ‘ideal body’ and girls with such fast metabolisms that it never mattered to them what they can eat and shouldn’t eat, my body isn’t like that. *Before I carry on I will say that society has seriously ruined the whole idea of the ideal body type, everyone thinks the same - skinny waist with a big butt and big boobs and skinny legs. Let me tell you that it is not realistic for everyone to have so please don’t compare yourself with anyone else because your ideal body should be unique to yourself and your body is not like anyone else’s. An ideal body should be the one you feel most comfortable in.* I wish I knew that then, honestly it has been such a long and hard journey trying to become happy and comfortable with my body figure and I still am not there but living with 60 other girls and going to a sporty(ish) all-girls school did not help my 14-year-old self be happy in my body. That’s when I started slowly, and I mean slowly, getting into the habit of working out and trying to tone up my body but it took time, I wasn’t consistent with it at all and I wasn’t doing the right things; looking back now I really realized how much I should have looked into it because I would eat a crap ton of food and work out a very little amount thinking that will make a difference, well it didn’t and honestly I am not surprised because I have not had the best eating habits when I first went into to boarding school. This was the same time when I started to get depression and anxiety which really did not help my working out as they were quite linked to my self-confidence and how well I thought of myself. The more I didn’t like my body the more I would eat which made me gain weight and make me not like my body even more, it was a bad cycle to be in. I was never overweight as such but I just had fat around my stomach and legs and I wasn’t happy with how I looked. I know it is okay with having fat around your body, there is nothing wrong with it but I just wasn’t happy with how I looked. I was very on and off with working out up to and including year 10; I started going for runs but it wasn’t possible to have a constant routine cause of the fact that there was no light when I had the time to run. As I carried on with school a little bit longer and got closer to GCSE year my anxiety got worse and as that got worse I started eating less which meant I would probably go a day with nearly eating anything and not even realizing it because I was just never hungry and it got to the point where my teacher had to talk to me. That’s when I started to work out more again as I started making myself eat more after a period of not eating and it obviously caused my body to gain weight quickly. I would say that year 11 was defiantly the year when I properly started getting into the gym because that’s when I would come home and do it as well and try to keep up with it. But I still wasn't doing it right, I wanted to lose weight but I would eat so much sweet food which was bad for me and I didn’t control myself that much. I would still get my anxiety-filled days where I wouldn't eat at all and still be working out or doing sport a lot, it just wasn’t a balanced and healthy lifestyle at all. But as the year went on I got better and started finding a good balance and I could start seeing a difference, the only problem was I wasn’t consistent because every time I would start to see a difference I would get happy and stop and then have to start again from square one.

So that brings me to this year. When I moved schools the campus was bigger which kind off keeps a general fitness up cause I have to run from one end of campus to the other for lessons but we also didn’t have P.E. lessons anymore which was very strange since I have had P.E. lessons for my whole school life till now. So all I was reliant on was my riding which also had reduced and I had stopped ballet this year as well, not very good. I started the school year again being quite on and off with the gym just since I was still getting into the routine of sixth form and the first term is honestly always the hardest but I had made friends that I would go to the gym with and we had our fixed days which seriously helped me stay motivated and I started to really get consistent with it. I also really started getting a better eating habit as I would have more school food and a lot less junk food. This made me feel good because I was finally getting regular with everything and I was starting to feel a bit more confident.

This brings me to the lockdown. So I started off the lockdown doing a good routine and I started to feel very demotivated so I started to do the Chloe Ting workouts again, I started with her workouts in year 10 and its a good way to gain motivation to get it done as she does plans. But with all of this I wasn’t seeing much difference with my body, I was still gaining a lot of weight and just generally not very happy with how I looked. I am home right now during all this so I was starting to eat more and not have as much control over what I was eating, I was also having dessert after every meal pretty much which cause me to gain like crazy(ish) and I am semi lactose-intolerant which I control in school but not at home so I was bloated a lot as well; all this together just made me feel uncomfortable in my body. So eventually I got my brother to become my personal trainer and it has been two weeks exactly since I have started training with him and he has been able to guide me on what to do in terms of in the gym and out of the gym to keep a well-balanced lifestyle that will help me work toward my goal. I don’t like saying diet because the word 'diet' suggests it is temporary with means so are the results and as soon as you stop the diet the results will also go into reverse so whatever ‘diet’ you start should be one that you can make into your lifestyle and not have to stop but maybe just tweak it as your body changes. Since I have been working out with my brother I have seen some really good results on my body and can physically see that I have lost inches as well as started to become more toned which was my goal. Since it had been two weeks I thought I would do a mid-month weigh and check more progress through my weight and I saw that I had only actually lost 300 grams. In two weeks of intense workout, I had lost 300g. That demotivated me throughout today's gym session because in my mind it felt that all of this effort has gone to waste and it didn’t feel good. But then I also know it depends on the time of the month you weigh yourself as a woman. I'm sorry if this is going to become TMI but its something that every person should be aware of, especially girls. Leading up to your period you tend to gain 3 to 5 pounds which is about 1.3 to 2.3 kg which gets lost a few days into the start of the bleeding, the amount you gain all depends on your flow. I am currently in the gaining period which also adds to my bloating feeling so I might have lost a lot more but because my body is also gaining it is almost counteracting what I lost; even though I know that sometimes seeing it on the scale that you lost so little after this much work does suck. My biggest advice when you are trying to lose weight to measure your inches and not weight, or check your body fat percentage, because those will tell you more accurate too how much fat as such you actually have on your body. Your weight on a weighing scale includes your muscle and muscle weighs more than fat so you might weigh more then you wish but your body fat percentage could actually be at a good level.

This is hard, having the motivation and will power to go to the gym is hard but one thing I found it that you have to push through it all because the feeling after you start seeing that positive change in your body is amazing, honestly. I find the days where I feel less motivated to do something are the days where I force myself into the gym quicker because for me once I give into the temptation of not going into the gym for one day that isn’t my rest day then it is hard for me to get back into the habit. It is also insanely important to give yourself a rest day and let your body recover, otherwise, you will overwork yourself and just not do as well in the gym. Working out is something unique to everyone cause as I said earlier everyone's body is like their own fingerprint, unique to them, so that means so should your workouts be. You can't generalize this but this was just a brief (kind of) explanation of my fitness journey and my ups and downs with fitness/ my body. If a person who used to cry at the thought of going for a run can turn herself around and go to the gym every day, then so can you guys. One last thing I will say is that make sure you are doing it for yourself and not someone else because when you do it for yourself is when you will truly start to see a difference in your body as well as your confidence about your body, thoughts do actually impact weight loss so when doing your working out, do it with a smile and do it for you.

Till my next post my lovelies x