Diet and fitness

Diet and Fitness

Diet and fitness

I briefly touched on diet and fitness in my last post. in this post, I wanted to elaborate on it some more. As I know from personal experience, it’s not only vital for physical health but critical for your mental health also.

The only problem we have with any kind of change, is that you need consistency and perseverance to make it become a permanent fixture of your life.

Setting goals

The goal has to be manageable and sustainable, for example, if we told ourselves that we was going to run a marathon every week forever, then this would be seen as unrealistic. I mean it’s not impossible but unrealistic, in terms of if we don’t do a marathon one week, we become disheartened and we are likely to give in.

We need to set clear and maneagable goals and expectations and once we start to complete these goals we are more likely to continue and achieve them. By our goals being met we become more confident and are more likely to carry on with any change we have made.

Thus enhancing our physical and mental health in the process. So this leads me on to the subject I want to talk about in this post, diet and fitness.

Diet

One thing I can recall from the years, I now know as suffering with a mental health illness, was my over indulging in sugary foods. Whether I was going to these foods for comfort or maybe of the lift they would give me (short term), or maybe a combination of them both. One thing for sure, they was doing me no favours at all, physically or mentally.

The more I ate of these foods which included, cookies(big 5 packs), chocolate share bars, lucozade and basically anything sweet. I was eating it by the bucket load. Before long my body was suffering, which in turn definitely affected my mental health. I’d put so much weight on and was so unhealthy, this played a massive part in my mental health problems.

Change

It got to the point were something had to change. I was always an active youngster, and for me being unhealthy and overweight is a big thing. I decided to overhaul my whole eating and drinking routine. For the first week I only drank water, lots of it, and ate a carb free mixture of foods.

I personally found the Joe wicks meal plans perfect. I understand everyone is different and I would look into what works best for you before you undertake any major change in your life.

After just one week I felt amazing, literally amazing. So much energy and a whole new outlook on everything. The more I adapted to this lifestyle change, the easier it became and the better I felt. On a personal note, I think we can reverse so many physical ailments if we changed our eating habits.

So with this new found energy and confidence, I decided to channel it into other things. Which leads me on to the Fitness aspect of my post.

Fitness

After 3 weeks of eating and drinking differently I decided that i needed to add fitness activities to my life, to get the maximum benefit of what I was changing. I signed up to do a sponsored run for Children in Need, if i signed up to something like this I would be more than likely to carry on.

Like I mentioned previously, we are more likely to achieve what we set if we have goals. I trained so hard for this event. The workouts I was doing was a mix of HIIT sessions and jogging. The HIIT sessions were brilliant and because they are a quick workout but with so many benefits, it is a maneagable way of fitting it in to your day.

When the sponsored run came around I felt fantastic, so much energy and was in the best shape of my life. Once I completed it, the euphoria I felt was amazing and made me even more determined to carry on.

Five stone lost

I signed up to do some more events and was able to fit in clothes I never thought i would. All these things had a massive positive impact on my life, I had lost around five stones in just under six months and had so much energy and optimism.

In all this time when I look back now, I can’t remember a single time that it crossed my mind on the physical illness (COPD) I had convinced myself I had.

For some reason I stopped doing it all and resorted back to old habits, I’m not to sure why as I was feeling the best I had ever felt. I can recall now that the breathing diffuculties resurfaced and my mental health deteriorated again.

It was two years later it all came to a head and when I realised I was suffering from a mental health illness. At the time it didn’t cross my mind that my problems seemed to vanish after changing my diet and increasing my fitness levels, but that is the problem with mental health. We are blind to the fact of logic and we irrationalise our thoughts, making us believe something else.

Diet and Fitness

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