A couple of months before the wedding my writing took a bit of a dive, I can’t really call it writers block as I’ve only been writing for a few months, I just fell out of the habit. There’s a discipline that you need and pre wedding I lost it. I’m now trying to write everyday, after the gym and the dog walk and all the house stuff. A life coach told me that I should be getting up at 5.30am to get everything ready to start work by 9am. Yesterday I was up at 7am and started at 1pm. I need to find my notes; I don’t think we talked about the optimum time to do the laundry.
Aside from the lack of writing, I did keep up with my pre wedding fitness and health plan. So much so, when asked how the wedding preparations were going I’d say “Fab thanks, I’m doing proper push ups and I’m starting to lift some quite heavy weights now, I feel great.” I’d then probably bang on about the mental benefits, how it was helping me stay positive, deal with stress blah blah blah, like a born again person in lycra. (I’m not using the expression middle aged, as, by the time I’m ninety I’m aiming to have an entirely reconstructed titanium body and be flying around with a jet pack, so this is nowhere near the middle) but then I realised after a while that they meant the actual wedding, the ceremony, the party, the food, not just how my abs were coming along. So around three months before our wedding day, I started with the final wedding planning. I loved it all, organising a party and a love ceremony, how could you not? Maybe this could be my excuse as to why my writing dropped off, I was too busy getting excited, totally understandable. Maybe I should be a life coach; my speciality could be stopping anyone feeling guilty for being useless. “Think you should be achieving more? Come and see me and I’ll find a million excuses as to why you haven’t been able to and you’ll leave feeling totally guilt free and fabulous”
Weddings or higher number birthdays do give you to chance to indulge yourself a bit. My advice? And this is free, as at the moment as I haven’t officially started my life-coaching career, give yourself time to achieve your goals. In my twenties I didn’t even consider fitness as part of wedding planning but in my forties I needed all nine months. The fat takes a while to burn off, the muscles take time to build and they need time to rest. I couldn’t have dropped everything for a three months detox or to do an intense training course, it had to fit into my schedule. Too busy with all my writing you see.
I worked pretty hard at it and I am quite proud of myself, sweating away in cardio workouts, months of increasing weights to do heavier deadlifts, planks, pull-ups and squats. A huge thank you has to goes to Olivia Fraser who got me going and then kept me steadily improving with her boot camps and pts. Good company and laughter makes exercise so much easier. Towards the end I found my local F45 club, which is a total savour. Only ten minutes from my house, their fun and quite intense classes alternate daily between cardio and strength. With start times as early as 5.30am there’s no excuse not to fit it in, (the inner life coach in me is delighted)
It wasn’t just about the training; I figured out how to eat quite optimally, which in the last couple of months was timely. The trick? I cut crisps out as a food group (which includes potato’s not the sweet ones obvs) I stopped eating magnum ice creams, sweets and general snacks in the evenings, switched pasta for spiralised courgette, got totally hooked on coffee and did the odd session of intermittent fasting (you know that one, skipping dinner or not eating until later in the morning) I have to say that I found this technique particularly easy as it doesn’t involve any cooking. These adjustments came from a couple of consultations that came with a great DNA fit package that I tried. In the last month I was even sharing my pre work out bananas with my gym buddy Kate to cut down on the sugars. I ate a lot of deliciously activated nuts and seeds from Eat Boundless as pre or post work out snacks and I then in the last couple of months upped my training to four to five times a week. With these extra workouts and the small changes in my diet, things really did start to shift. I did love my “cheat weekends” starting on Friday going straight through Monday, until I realised that maybe four days on three days off wasn’t going to do it.
One more thing I wanted to share is that I never want to train and I don’t think many people do, its hard, it can be boring and its exhausting, its exercise, its not really fun, its sweaty and you have to push yourself again and again. So if you don’t feel like going to go to a class or the gym don’t listen to that, just go anyway and look forward to the high you’ll get from escaping when its over, combined with all the endorphins. After just forty minutes I reckon you feel pretty good all day, so that’s a major return. Here I am again, the born again/life coach bursting out, I can’t help myself. Exercise has become an integral to my life now; I miss it if I stop. I miss the energy it gives me and I love being fit and toned, I can run up the stairs and wear my denim hot pants. Of course there are a few wedding photos that won’t be making it to instagram or to the framers, the Rick Owens dress that I chose to wear wasn’t taking any prisoners but over all I was very happy with the outcome, I reckon I pretty much rocked it. Now to setting my alarm for tomorrow, 5.30am really?