My Fitness and Health Journey
Fitness
I’m currently in the middle of a bit of a mid-life renaissance when it comes to fitness. Having spent most of my adult life (and a significant portion of my teenage years) either sedentary or with fleeting dips into something resembling exercise, I had always assumed that it just wasn’t for me.
However, it turns out that isn’t the case. This post is the story of how I got to where I am now, and why it took me so long to do so! I turned 40 at the end of 2024, and yet my fitness journey feels like it has only really just begun.
Starting at…the start
I grew up in a household that wasn’t big on exercise or fitness. The only sports we watched were motorsport (still a passion to this day) and snooker when it was on at the Crucible. Unlike many families growing up in the UK, we didn’t have a football team that we identified with, rarely (if ever) watched the Olympics, never watched the London Marathon or the boat races.
It wasn’t until I went to primary school that I started to discover football. However as I hadn’t grown up supporting a team, I just picked the one who seemed best. I believe the term at the time was “glory supporter” (it was the 1990s and I supported Manchester United so….probably true!).
Around the mid 90s, basketball was growing in popularity in the UK (during Chicago Bulls second 3-peat) and I got heavily into it for a year. I asked my parents for a basketball hoop on the side of the house, and actually got good at 3-point throws (I could have been Steph Curry! Okay maybe not…). However without anyone to talk to about basketball, or people to play it with, the interest withered.
Then, probably the worst thing ever happened for my future fitness. I got a Sega Megadrive. I loved that thing, spent more and more time on it, and saw less need to leave the house. Most of my time with friends was spent playing on Megadrives, swapping games, and playing Sonic 2. This was the beginning of a lifelong love of games, and a love of staying inside and playing them.
Being a teenager
My teenage years followed a similar theme to my younger childhood. Some passing interest in sport and fitness, but nothing I consistently played or got involved in.
My Grandad and Uncle were into Rugby League, and used to take me to matches, specifically those of the Dewsbury Rams. This also meant that when we started to play Rugby (albeit Union rules) at my Secondary School, I immediately signed up for the school team.
However, it turns out knowing what Rugby is doesn’t automatically make you good at it. After about 3 matches, I dropped from the team. I still played Rugby during P.E. lessons, but nothing more.
The rest of my teenage years were spent on my Playstation or PC, playing Final Fantasy 7 far too many times or Quake 3 Arena. I briefly used the school gym towards the end of my secondary school years but still no consistent sport or exercise.
University
I went to university and….did absolutely nothing fitness wise. I managed to get a lot of walking in, due to how far my university halls/shared accommodation were from the university campus, and not driving yet.
Other than the first few months of university though, the walking did keep me from putting on excess weight, despite my best efforts with food!
After university
In the interests of brevity I won’t go through every year individually. Since I graduated from university in 2006, I can summarise fitness and exercise to: -
- 2008-2009 - Infrequently going to the gym
- 2011 - Same as the above
- 2013-2014 - Rock climbing and bouldering
- 2017 - Bought a bicycle, tried to commute to work a few times, felt like I was going to pass out every time I did, stopped soon after
- 2019 - Another period of infrequently going to the gym
Going into the pandemic, I had never established a consistent regime of exercise or fitness. This had the predictable outcome of me putting on weight and feeling unfit.
Before talking about the changes over the last few years, it makes sense to delve into my relationship with food and dieting.
Food, diet and health
My relationship with food has always been a bit problematic. When I was a child and a teenager, I could eat whatever I wanted (or at least that it was it felt like) and not put on any weight. I never binged on food as a kid, but I was never careful either.
Food was always a form of comfort. I love cooking, I love tasting new foods, and at one point I became convinced that I was going to run my own restaurant (Narrator: he never ran a restaurant).
However, portion control has never been something I’ve gotten to grips with.
First struggles with weight
I first started to notice the effects of this love of food when I went to university. When I could cook my own food, I would make too much, too often, and in the space of 6 months I put on around 5-10kg. Walking everywhere helped, but I always carried more weight than I was happy with.
I started to control my eating a little more, and settled into a weight that I didn’t like, but also didn’t hate either.
The same happened when I moved into my own house in 2009. It was really easy to make too much food and eat all of it because…well who else was going to eat it?
Diets
I dieted off and on for years. I would reach a “peak” where the love of food was outweighed by how much I disliked what I saw in the mirror. I would lose some weight, get back to what I’d consider “normal” and then slowly eat myself back to the “peak”.
In 2014, influenced by some work colleagues, I decided to try the Keto diet. Most other diets I’d tried were about eating less of the same foods, or changing small things. They never worked for me because it was easy to eat some leftovers that would have been thrown away.
Because Keto was strict in terms of what food you could eat, it was easier to get into a calorie deficit. No biscuits, no cake, no crisps, no bread, this removed a lot of my food vices.
I went from around a 37" waist to around 32-33", and from wearing XL t-shirts to wearing some medium sized t-shirts. Unfortunately I didn’t own weighing scales at the time. I measured everything by what size clothes I could wear. I wish I had weighed myself, because to this day I have no idea what my lowest weight ever was!
Life happens
Later in the same year, my son was born. My son also believed sleep was optional 😂. Keto was abandoned, just getting through, eating quick and easy food, trying to keep any semblance of a strict diet at this time went out the window.
Over the next few years (that included a LOT of big life events) I went back to my pattern of eating too much again, starting Keto again (as it was the only diet I had gotten results from), and then going back to eating too much, then back to Keto…I think you can see the cycle here.
It is worth mentioning is that Keto is a lot easier to follow when you are only catering to yourself. When you are also cooking for the family, or out with the family and trying to find Keto-friendly food, sticking to Keto feels much harder.
Peaks in weight
In 2017, I reached my peak in terms of weight. Again, I hadn’t been measuring my weight in 2017 properly so I can’t put actual numbers on it. All I know is that clothes that used to fit, I would pop buttons on them, break zips and keep needing to buy bigger belts.
In 2021, due to a combination of poor diet, and working from home during the pandemic (with easy access to the fridge) I reached 17st 7lbs (111kg). I’m 6ft 2 inches tall (187-188cm), so this was not a healthy amount of weight to carry. Going by Body Mass Index calculators, this put me at the lower end of obese.
Shifting my mindset
In 2022, I had expressed my unhappiness with my weight, fitness, and just general health. I often had back pain (starting in my early 20s), easily out of breath, and struggled with overeating still.
My wife saw this unhappiness, and talked to a place called the Body Transformation Centre about going on a 6-8 week course to try and help. This is something I would never have done myself (years of social anxiety would put me off even thinking about it), but because she had done this for me, I couldn’t not go.
I went. I did training (cardio, strength, some high impact) a few times a week, and the results were noticeable. I started to lose weight, I started to gain muscle, and I started to feel a little happier in myself.
Even when the course ended, I carried on doing the exercises at home. I got myself some weights, resistance bands, and found enjoyment in the exercise. I also picked the Keto diet back up again, and by the middle of 2023 I had reached 14st 5lbs (91 kg). That’s roughly 20kg down from my peak two years before.
Another big life event happened in 2023. We relocated to a different part of the UK. Fitting in exercise wasn’t easy initially, and weight started to creep back on. I never got back to my peak, but had more weight than I would have liked.
However the difference this time is that I missed the exercise and doing weight training. For the first time in my life, I actually wanted to do exercise, rather than feeling like I needed to.
I tried Keto one last time at the beginning of 2024. This time, it wasn’t working. Life was busy, going to lots of new places meant we rarely found Keto-friendly food, and the weight did not shift as quickly or as easily as my previous attempts. The lowest weight I reached was just under 15st (95kg).
Keto (my safety net of diets) hadn’t achieved what I hoped. I knew that something had to change, I just didn’t know what.
“I will never run, I don’t even like cardio”
Up until this point, I never enjoyed any form of cardio. I liked being on a bicycle, but only light journeys, nothing too long or taxing. I never once enjoyed being on a treadmill. Rowing machines were okay, but nothing I could get excited about.
Before we relocated, my wife tried running. She didn’t take to it, but she told me she was almost certain that I would. I protested, there was no way I could get into it. I liked lifting weights, I liked rock climbing in my late 20s, but not once had I enjoyed any cardio.
During what you might call it a midlife crisis, I had taken a huge interest in shoes and trainers. I always liked getting a nice pair of Converse, but not much beyond that. For whatever reason, I went headlong into the “sneakerheads” rabbit hole, and came out with lots of pairs of shoes.
One thing you start to see more often on Youtube/the internet in general is that if you start show more of an interest in shoes, running websites and YouTube channels start appearing in your feeds.
Seeing running mentioned all the time, along with what my wife had said a year or two before, I decided to give running a go. I got a pair of running shoes, downloaded the Couch to 5k app, and started. This was May 2024. I had expected that by the end of the year I would have given up and tried something else.
However, I didn’t give up. I kept running. It turns out that when an activity includes shoes, technology (watches, fitness tracking, bone conducting headphones), no requirement to be in a certain building/place to start exercising, and numbers I can keep trying to beat (i.e. 5k/10k times), it really appeals to me!
And now I’m getting fit!
Barring some injuries and illnesses that have provided brief interruptions, I have been running 3-4 times a week ever since I started.
By the end of 2025, I will have ran in at least 5 different countries (currently the UK, Fuerteventura and France, adding Netherlands and Sweden by the end of August). I attempted to run round the Le Mans (Circuit De La Sarthe) track earlier this year (didn’t manage it this time, going to try again next year), and I genuinely can’t wait for my runs now.
What’s more, I’ve just started running with other people! I’ve ran with a couple of run clubs, and I’m going to attempt my first Park Run in a couple of weeks. For someone who has struggled with social anxiety for most of my life, it is nice to not only do something good for myself, but to find other people to do it with and forge new friendships, it has been a bit of a revelation for me.
I’m also back to doing strength training, bicycling (and doing much longer distances than I ever could before), and I’m going to be investing in a Zwift setup in the near future.
I won’t be going to back to Keto at any point. I am finally embracing portion control, and just being more careful with what I eat. I finally feel like I can eat without the fear of losing control. Keto worked at times when I needed it to, but it isn’t something I’d recommend to keep doing all the time.
I am currently at my lowest recorded weight ever as an adult (13st 12lb, 88kg), and it is making running far easier! I still have more weight to lose, but it is heading in the right direction. I’m 4lbs away from being classed as “average” (as far as BMI goes anyway).
All change
Something that is worth mentioning is that my life is going through huge changes currently. I am currently going through separation/divorce. Why is this relevant? Because my fitness journey and health are now something that I can rely on.
All previous big life events made me turn to food as comfort. For the first time in my life, despite how huge a change this is, my eating is still under control.
In many ways, running and fitness are now becoming my outlet, my time to process, my time to work through challenging thoughts. It is also helping me expand my social circle and find new friends. It gives me an opportunity to show my children that exercise and fitness is a good thing, something to embrace, and to enjoy.
Whatever the future brings, I am just glad that I found a way to be healthy, to enjoy exercise and to enjoy the outdoors.