16.08.2021
Today, I restart my fitness journey after a three week sabbatical.
Working out or being active in any form has been very difficult for me for the longest time. I have been a huge foodie and a lazy bum in terms of physical activity for as long as I can remember. When I was young, I used to find no merit in needlessly tiring oneself out through activities that would cause short term body pain. Just didn't seem worth it 🤷🏾♀️
I have had irregular periods since I first got them. By the time I reached 16, I was told by a gynaecologist to start the meprate tablet to regularise my period but God how I wish I knew its side effects. Meprate is a form of birth control pill with side effects including hormonal imbalance, weight gain and depression/anxiety. I took the pill regularly for almost two years and gained weight rapidly. I was living in a residential school at this point which made it even more difficult to really track what was happening with my body. I didn't realize how much weight I had put on until I got back home but Uni started soon therefore pushing those thoughts to the back of my head again.
But about two months ago, things changed.
In a family of four, I weighed the second highest. I knew I was a little on the obese side which is why I was always scared to stand on the weighing scales until one random Tuesday, I decided to go stand on it and received a rude shock. After doing some quick BMI calculations, I knew it was time to do something because God I wanted to look and feel good. Plus, there was a new boy in the picture 😅🤦🏾♀️
Pretty much on the same day, I saw an Instagram ad for a new workout app, Power which had Bollywood celebrities pre-recording their workouts and making them suitable for both home and gym spaces. Each celebrity's workout has a different ultimate goal and you can choose which one you'd like to follow based on your goals. Of course, I had to choose one with the aim being weight loss but me being me, chose the most intense of them all to follow. Let me remind you, this woman has done no physical activity as such in the last 4/5 years at that point so you can only imagine what happened to her when she got to it.
For the next one and a half week, I was covered in kinesiology tapes and had a hot pack on my thighs 12 hours a day; it was rough. I could almost do no other work because even getting off the sofa was extremely painful.
But slowly, I could feel a change coming into my body, I felt more active and fresh than I ever had in the last three years. I was determined to not stop because not only was I feeling better in terms of activeness, I was also feeling much more sorted out and "cooler" because I had now become a person who works out regularly.
After about four weeks of working out, I got into the weighing scale and like an idiot expected a miracle but of course there was none. There was slight change in my weight sure but I was so badly hoping for a bigger one that I just couldn't appreciate what had already happened.
I slowly started to lose motivation and stopped enjoying my workouts. It became a task I wanted to avoid so bad that I almost faked an injury. My mom was my workout buddy and she'd lost her will too due to some other stressing factors which made me even more reluctant to work out.
Things changed again when I took a mini one week vacation and flew back home yesterday. I had this renewed sense of energy and determination to start working out again and feel better about my body and myself for me, not the boy (things with the boy are so not going well), not the world but ME. I am not going to feel guilty and judge myself harshly for not continuing what I started but treat that as a break I needed to restart my journey with more vigour.
I'm writing this post to note down what are the key things that I as an individual should remember, so here we go-
1. You tend to lose interest by week 3 so have something planned to excite you again
2. New equipment or active wear generally works as a great reward because you feel the need to make the most out of it cos of the amount you spent on it
3. Music may not always be required
4. Working out is honestly more about your mental determination than your physical capacities
5. Do NOT watch other people's fitness vlogs/journeys/transformations because they are not helping you. They only make you compare so STOP. Just keep doing what you're doing.
6. Don't check your weight every two days, can be super demotivational
7. Keep your body active cos metabolism is not just going to increase with one workout
8. Keep a track cos keeping a track is really making you more conscious
