I have a confession to make my lovely readers. I have not been looking after myself. In the past few months, I have been severely lacking at going to the gym and keeping up with my fitness. There’s a lot of reasons that my fitness has taken a hit, partly due to not feeling up to it after work, partly struggling with pain levels and mostly motivation. Yep, motivation, that little bugger.

When the gym was 5 minutes away and I only had a few hours of uni a week, working out was easy. If I felt like going to the gym I could just go, I could make it the first thing I did in the day and if my muscles were aching I could spent the rest of the day in comfortable clothes and blankets with and write from home. I don’t have that luxury anymore. You see I start work at 8am, meaning if I wanted to get an hour in at the gym before work I’d have to get up at 5am. I would not make it through the day if I did that.

There’s a lot of pressure at this time of year to go on a complete fitness hype. To work out all the time and join clubs to slim down, cut back on what we eat. To those of you who are motivated by things like that I salute you, but I’m not one of them. For me my body, my weight and my mood are very personal to me. The thought of being weighed in front of others, or having the pressure of a weigh-in would not do me good, I’m pretty sure it would do the opposite. Likewise, I don’t have bathroom scales in the house, because I know that I can get obsessive.

When it comes to my mental health, food can be a crutch for me. When I’m sad I’ve been known to cheer myself up with food and then be weighed down with guilt. I’ve also been known to get so obsessed with a number on a scale that I don’t want to eat. It can really go either way and I’m not willing to give the dark part of my brain something to feed on. It’s because of this I’ve started taking the measures that I did before, when I was at uni. While it’s not the same (I move around a lot less as I have to drive to work and only have a half hour lunch break) I do want to make a positive impact on my life, because I have been frustrated with myself.

I’m going to the gym with my sister and have cut down on what I eat. I’m so used to snacking because I get bored and not being able to say no to food going spare (today I passed on free Dominoes pizza, it was a proud moment), but I’m not doing it anymore. I have an allotted amount of food to eat. I want to try and stick to this. Of course if I’m going out for the day or evening with friends and want to have something I will, I’m not cutting out the things I enjoy completely.

Really I just want to get back to focusing on my health and feel good about myself, my mind and my body again. No fad diets. No wanting to be a ridiculous size or weight.  Just happy and healthy, that’s all I want to be. Also, next month I’ll be having spinal injections to tackle the pain, meaning that I’ll hopefully be getting around and able to work out a bit more without having to stop for pain!