My Personal Journey to Mental, Emotional & Physical Strength

I wasn’t always ‘fit’, ’healthy’, and most importantly ‘happy’. I often wonder if people would have any clue about how I used to live my life. I then think, not a chance they do unless they knew me when I was this unhealthy, unfit & unhappy person. I also often wonder if people who only knew me when I was these things if they would have any clue about who I currently am and who I am working towards becoming. I then think, I don’t want them too.

Lets start from the very beginning, I was a healthy and fit kid. My siblings and I played sport every single year until we graduated high school. Our parents thought this was super important and I am beyond glad that this was part of my life as it gave me so many things. It gave me my love for being active, it gave me an outlet as a teenage girl (if you know, you know), it gave me friends that I still have today, but most importantly it gave me the knowledge of how important an active and healthy lifestyle is. We also ate fairly well when we were kids, we barely got takeout, didn’t eat out much unless it was a special occasion and mainly just ate mums homemade cooking (which is the best by the way). If you’ve had my mums cooking, you know what I’m talking about. I also was never overweight as a kid, so physically I was healthy or appeared to be healthy.

This all only changed when I graduated high school. I stopped playing sport, and started eating the worst foods, drinking the most amount of alcohol every single weekend I could possibly shove down my throat & probably was hanging around a lot of people who also had really bad habits. I would eat 12 pack of donuts in one sitting, huge meals or even two meals at a time, I would drink excessive amounts of alcohol which would then lead me to eat more when I was drunk. I also didn’t have very healthy relationships around this time in my life so I believe that played a massive role in how unhealthy I was becoming. This is when I started to gain weight, lose self confidence & become extremely unhealthy and unhappy in my mind. The first thing you notice when you become unhealthy is your weight, it’s just the way it is and it’s what you can notice the most and what everyone else will inevitably point out to you. But what you don’t realise immediately is the deterioration of your mental health.

The biggest change when you become unhealthy is by far your mental state. I didn’t really think I had any mental health ‘issues’, or that I was struggling mentally when I became over weight. I purely thought all my issues and struggles would disappear when I lost weight. Boy, was I extremely incorrect. I will admit, losing weight and becoming fit definitely helps your self confidence and to a degree the way you look will make you feel good. Exercise and good foods helps your mental state an incredible amount. It will not however, fix or make your demons go away.

I was extremely up and down with my moods. I used to binge eat as a way to deal with my emotions instead of just facing them, feeling them and letting them go. I would hold on to my feelings, become angry, upset & I would eat. Then I would enter the vicious cycle of I feel like this, so I am going to eat like shit and not exercise, and then feel shit about doing that. I was extremely unhappy. In my relationships, my jobs, my body and my mind. I would let people treat me poorly because I treated myself poorly. I was not happy and I couldn’t figure out how to help myself.

My trek to a healthy lifestyle and a healthy mind began in 2017. I’m not talking about my 3 years of on again, off again exercise regime and my eating healthy some weeks and eating like complete shit the next. This won’t work, by the way. Consistency is the only thing that will work. Not just with exercise and healthy food, but with literally everything that will help you to work towards your goal. Be consistent. I am talking about full noise I am helping my fucking self consistency. I pretty much have my brother in law Joe to thank for this, I don't think I would ever have started working out if it wasn’t for him owning a gym and telling me to stop being a shit bag and blaming external factors for my struggles, when I was the one creating them.

I was heavy. I put on a lot of weight, but I don’t really care to share what my heaviest weight, my lightest weight and how much I have lost and gained again with anyone. I think focusing on people’s weight when they have had an amazing lifestyle transformation is unhealthy in itself. That shit doesn’t matter and it doesn’t make you feel good. If you’ve lost weight, EVERYONE will comment and it makes you feel good about yourself. But if you gain weight EVERYONE will comment, but in a much different way. And that’s the shit thing about our society is that is just the truth. Regardless of my weight gain and loss, my mental gain and loss is so much larger and actually worth talking about.

Yes, I can fit size 8-10 clothes again and wear a bikini and feel confident. But I can also stand up for myself, laugh lots, work my way through struggles and handle them as lessons not failures. That’s the real gain here. I used to sit down and let things get to me to the point that I would make shit up that wasn’t even going on and then feel really awful about it. I was angry all the time about shit that didn’t matter. I would get irritated by small things. I would allow people to treat me poorly. I would involve myself in shitty relationships that served me absolutely no good. I would eat a lot of food when I was feeling this way and I would also go out and party all the time, but not really even have that much fun.

My mental health and physical health suffered a lot. But, once you change your mindset and your language towards yourself and other people. EVERYTHING CHANGES. I mean, everything. Although, if something really tragic in my life happens, I am sad. Don’t get me wrong, I will grieve if I need to. But I will also not stay in that state for months and months on end and just get dug into a deep dark hole. I believe you can either let an external factor in your life destroy you and become you, or you can let it help with your growth. I choose to let shit help me with my growth.

I know the things that help me to overcome shit and I make sure I do them if I want to help myself. Notice I said ‘if I want to’. If you don’t want to help yourself, then you won’t. I have weeks like this where I will barely train and eat like shit and not meditate but thats because in that week I did not want to help myself. And that is also ok. It is ok to have weeks where you are quite literally like ‘fuck this’! As long as you are not treating every week like this and then it becomes your life. Allow yourself to have your shitty moments, and then get up and move the fuck on.

I know that if I meditate, eat good foods, exercise, spend time with Josh and have a productive work week then I will be content and happy with the week I have had and I will feel on top of the world. So, I try and do this every single day & week to ensure that I am feeling my best, because if I am feeling my best then I am going to be my best.

I am still learning, don’t get me wrong. I am no expert or perfectionist and I am still at the very beginning of my journey. But, I am so far from where I was and I know that there are only amazing things to come for me and for my mind. I 100% believe that if you change your language towards yourself and towards others that you will be happy and you will tick all your goals.

Instead of getting angry because your partner isn’t doing something (that you probably didn’t even ask them to do anyway), just turn to them and ask them kindly to do something or to help you out if you need help. I assure you 9 times out of 10 they will reply with ‘yes, dear’. And, if they don’t then you’re probably dating an asshole anyway, but that’s a whole different story. Instead of looking at things like ‘Urgh, I have to do this’, change your language to ‘Wow, I get to do this’. the way you look at things and the way you speak to yourself will have the biggest impact on you. This will work for so many different scenarios, but try it and I promise you, you won’t look back.

Just help your fucking self and you will do amazing things.