Having consumed an entire vineyard over the winter months and not exactly ignored the Kettle Crisps, I now feel it’s the right time to start really looking after myself. Various menopause experts also state how this can help, but who wants to be hot and hungry?
Diets – the 5:2 diet isn’t for me, life’s too short to spend 2 days a week staring at Jaffa cakes and watching the hours slowly pass, until you can engage in the natural act of eating… otherwise Dickens would have referenced fasting days in a Christmas Carol and Shakespeare would have had Hamlet, procrastinating other his flax seed.. GI diets (too complicated), Atkins (really?), weight watchers (works for some of my friends, but all I can see is Matt Lucas..), Jane Plan (I’ll send you soup and a bag of lettuce for £50 a month), the list is endless and if it works for some people great. I just cannot diet.
So I am following the ‘get off your arse and move a bit more diet’ (GOYA) – which enables me to eat ‘sensibly’ whilst burning slightly more calories than a mouse on a sun lounger. So how’s it going?…. I desperately tried to talk myself out of going to the gym tonight, hoping the traffic was too bad on the way, that I needed to go food shopping, any excuse that I could think of, didn’t work. The traffic moved quickly and I knew I had an M&S salad waiting for me in the fridge, with a use by date screaming at me (and being from Yorkshire I wasnt going to let that go to waste!). So I found myself at the gym. Now in my 20’s I loved going to the gym and planned my social life around that…. how times (and body shape) have changed…
Pulling on my Nike running tights (high-waisted and very flattering, managing to hold in the stomach, or at least move it upwards), I then discover I haven’t packed my gym bra and vest…. great an actual excuse, not to exercise! However I managed to find a crumpled t-shirt which had been living in my gym bag for months… So as I launch myself onto the treadmill, I realise that I look like a middle-aged bag lady that has emerged from under a hedge. My fellow gym members appear to all be in the 20/30s and Instagram ready… I am more ‘photo booth acceptable’…. 40 minutes later I leave, sweaty, red faced and smug, as I genuinely felt better…. I will never be posing for my latest Insta fix at the gym (my Instagram consists of pictures of the cat and various glasses of Prosecco or Merlot), but I will try to go ‘at least’ twice a week…
I am also trying HIT, this I leave to the confines of my living room. As jumping up and down whilst listening to a squeaky voiced Joe Wicks telling me there’s only ‘another 20 reps’ to go, is not a pleasant experience. I now realise that I am the female version of the tin man, with as much mobility and flexibility. So, touch my toes? only when I sit down to paint my nails. Press ups? even the kneeling variety makes me keel over like a drunk. Star jumps? With scaffolding for a bra, this is still difficult and when did my stomach start to have a life of its own and move separately to the rest of my body? The Plank? Again wearing a loose t-shirt enables you to look down at your stomach for 30 seconds and realise that the Pilsbury Dough Boy could be your twin. Still after 20 minutes my heart rate goes up and the legs are screaming at me to stop, so I am going to continue for as long as it takes for me to get into my Victorian bathing costume in September…..
Not Ready for Cardigans 
Brilliant made be laugh and so true about the bloody gym
LikeLike