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Everyone has Setbacks! 

We are all human and life is too short not to indulge once in a while! My whole life has been a battle of will power; of knowing when to stop eating, when to get my butt to the gym, when to kick a bad habit or an addiction. To this day I still struggle to keep any semblance of control over my cravings for sugary delights and my need for a duvet fortress on a rainy day. The one thing I tell myself that I always have to remember, is that I am not the only one who struggles every day.

I have a rule nowadays, that I don’t go longer than two days without training. It doesn’t matter what I do for a workout, just as long as I’m moving my body and working up a sweat. This isn’t just for reasons of vanity and wanting to look my best, it’s because it makes me feel so much better once I’ve done it. The endorphins from the exercise flood my body with a joyous sensation of satisfaction and energy. Getting my workout done sets me up for the day and things that seemed bad or depressing the night before no longer feel that way.

In June 2017 I hurt my back, I found out I had a herniating disc in my lower spine, caused by a fall from a horse. Because of this I was finding almost all types of training to be quite painful! As a result of not training often like i was used to, my eating habits started to go south and my mood was less than ideal. The months went by, and November came around and so did mince pies. There seemed to be no filter on how much food I ate as the months accumulated, mince pies and other Christmas-y delights picked a fight with me and won.

By January, I had put on a stone. I went back to my physiotherapist and we worked on some new exercises that would help me slowly get back into training shape. By February I was working out again, albeit at a rather slow and cautious pace. I also cleaned up my diet and cut out sugar for a while. By April I was almost back to my original weight, and I realised something important during this experience. I realised that the way in which I was training before I hurt my back was not sustainable. My back may not have gotten so bad after the riding accident, had I stopped lifting ridiculously heavy weights and doing lots of high impact exercises. Those intense exercises may have gotten me “better” results in the past, but they were not going to be easy to stay consistent with. I wasn’t trying to win a bodybuilding contest, I just wanted to stay fit. So what was I doing training like I intended to do so, when I didn’t need to?

Above: January 2018 vs April 2018.

I now have a much more sustainable approach to training and “go hard or go home” Is no longer my mantra when working out. Now when training I think about how kind I am being to my body and what benefits my body is getting from the exercises I am doing. Most importantly I think about whether I could keep doing this for the rest of my life. If the answer is no, I hate every second of it, then it’s wrong. Since my change in mentality and learning to love my body instead of punish it, I have had very few setbacks. The most important thing I learned from this transformation experience is not to punish myself when those setbacks do happen. Everyone is human, including me, and I love myself for it!