This morning I was looking at the outside of the fridge and thinking how untidy it was.

As I scanned pieces of paper clamped in place by an assortment of magnets, collected from all over the world, I came across the one I’ve attached above. It’s Day 1 of my Couch to 5k run.

I couldn’t resist doing a comparison and you can see the difference.

I’ve never been fat and I’ve never been overweight so it has been a great surprise to everyone – myself included – that I have shifted so much weight.

Let’s go back to the beginning, though.

In 2017/18, I started practising handstands and I was horrified at what I saw when I looked at the video I’d taken: someone had replaced my body with that of a larger woman.

I went to get ready for an interview and found that my skirt wouldn’t budge over my knees, nor my trousers, nor the next item, nor the next item.

I thought my clothes had shrunk in the washing machine. Seriously!

It took a whole wardrobe of shrunken clothes and an unprompted ‘yes you do look fat in that’ comment for me to wake up.

“You know what you need to do to shift that, don’t you, Lynda?”

As someone who was exercising daily and sometimes multiple times a day, I was mortified.

But for those two years I couldn’t commit to anything dietary-wise because at the end of the day, I believe I have a very healthy lifestyle and diet.

So what happened?

Well, I was searching online for something – to this day, I have no idea what – but what I did find was NHS Choices and Couch to 5k.

I can honestly say I never looked back.

I ran every other day for 5 months – I ran on holiday in Bulgaria, I ran in Amsterdam…

 

And, I planned to run in Italy – but that’s another story called Covid19-Lockdown-Pandemic-gate.

I ran up to 10k and I got my 5k and 10k badges on the Health Unlocked website. I walked as often as I could clocking 15,000 steps a day –  and often more but never less than 10,000.

I took my measurements every few weeks but I couldn’t see a difference – by December 2019, my yoga gear was still too tight – in fact I had given away lots of unworn top-label items.

No matter, I was more than annoyed when, after my annual blood test, the doctor all but accused me of being a fat, overweight alcoholic and referred me to a diabetes prevention group!

High glucose levels can be associated with carbs and not simply alcohol intake and, nowadays, it seems that you can have too much good cholesterol. You really can’t win.

So how did I go from those two measurements? What made the difference?

To be continued…