I've never blogged before, although it’s always been something that’s fascinated me, and I have the utmost respect for those who do it and do a good job of it. Probably because I'm not the most articulate person you'll ever meet. I seem to have some kind of mental handicap where I can’t translate my feelings into words and it tends to leave me both frustrated with myself and utterly jealous of those who can. But anyway, in the theme of trying all things new this year here is my attempt! I suppose I’ll start with the why. The reason why I’m blogging is because I am an overweight, nearly 25 year old who has struggled with her weight her entire life and has come to a couple of realisations and observations that I would like to share with those of you who care to read this. Some of them are, I suppose, a bit clichéd. Like any story of weight loss there are similarities between mine and everyone else’s, but at the same time I’m coming at it from the perspective of being a young person facing the pressures of being just that – a young person. I’m also doing this for me, because as I write about myself and my weight loss journey I may just learn more about me in the process – and that can only be a good thing. I should give you a little background on me and where my journey began, because it really started with gaining the weight, not just losing it. It’s fairly typical to be honest, I moved from the North when I was 5 years old and started school in the South where the teachers referred to me as a blow in. I lived in a small town and my class in primary school had 3 girls including myself. The bullying started at about age 7 with one of the girls calling me fat and doing her absolute damndest to make sure my life was a living hell (with help from a few others she succeeded for the next 5 years). The funny thing is, looking back at pictures of myself aged 7 I actually wasn’t fat, I was thin. I was a normal, perfectly healthy, 7 year old girl. But I believed her and the more miserable I became the more I ate. The more I ate the more my parents denied me food and as a result I wanted it more and would often sneak food and hide my eating habits from my parents. The psychology of my behaviour at that age is fairly transparent and the result of it was that by age 12 I was desperately unhappy and very overweight. Secondary school seen a massive improvement in my life, I was no longer bullied but I was still left with the self hatred and eating habits I’d developed in primary school. Before long I was a size 24. I started college at 17, my weight dropped slightly but continued to yoyo as I jumped from not eating anything for days on end to eating unhealthy rubbish to then over eating and making myself sick. I can’t really pinpoint at what stage it all began to turn around for me. I started my job as an event manager in 2010, it was an extremely active position with very long hours and I loved every second of it! It required me to be physically involved at events and the weight started to drop off to some extent but I was still very overweight and very aware of it! The thing is when you’re in you’re early 20’s you’re surrounded by people who just want to have fun – and I wanted to have fun too. But I was constantly held back by my lack of confidence, low self esteem and self hatred. There were so many things I would have loved to have done, places I wanted to go, things I wanted to join in on that I passed up because I was so consumed with my weight and what other people thought of me. Another thing about being a girl in your early 20’s is that every other girl is usually obsessed with their weight too. I can’t tell you how many fad diets I have been exposed to up until this point. At one stage I lived with this girl who spent each week embarking on the next “miracle” diet, often dragging me reluctantly along with her. Some of these diets included the maple syrup diet, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this particular regime it’s where you don’t eat anything but rather you consume litres of this concoction that consists of water, lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. It is revolting. Another diet consisted of eating absolutely no carbs but instead eating about 50 times the recommended daily allowance of fat. Yes, that’s right, fat! Breakfast typically consisted of coffee with cream and bacon with cream cheese and avocado. Lunch and dinner followed in a similar vein of contention. The idea being that the more fat you ate the more fat you burned as you were putting your body into ketosis.. Or something to that effect. Absolute madness! Luckily I was never fully taken in by these fad diets. I’d been brought up to know what was healthy and what wasn’t (although I’d largely ignored it) and although I incorporated elements of these diets into my own in the hope that some drastic change would occur I eventually woke up to the realisation that this would never be the case. It was when I turned 24 that I took the right step to changing my body and also my life. After years of being in denial, after years of abusing my body with extreme dieting, smoking, drinking and god only knows what else I arrived, emotionally exhausted and utterly defeated, at the realisation that I had only one option. And it had been the ONLY option the entire time. I was going to have to start exercising. It was this realisation that brought me to Purefit and since then I’ve never looked back. This blog isn’t going to sugar coat the reality of weight loss. I’ve been training with Purefit for nearly a year now. When I started it was HARD, it still is hard, but I absolutely love it. I’ve found a new social aspect in exercise that I didn’t think would ever be available to me. I, like many others, considered gyms to be sweat dens full of beautiful skinny people who liked to strut around in neon gym gear and look down their noses at mere fatties like me who dared enter their domain. This couldn’t have been farther from the truth. I have met some amazing people and made some great friends, I’ve even managed to strengthen friendships through dragging a few along with me. The point of this blog is to show to you all that I am a normal person. I don’t have the steely will power of some, I don’t have masses of determination, I am not super human, but that is actually a good thing. Because it means that everybody else can do exactly what I did and am still doing – getting up off my ass and getting into the gym to exercise and lose weight the right way. Losing weight isn’t just about how you look it’s also about how you feel inside. And my mood, my self-esteem, my outlook on life has come on vastly since I started exercising. I have a certain confidence that I didn’t have before I began my weight loss, and that almost certainly stems from the pride I feel in myself for coming as far as I have. I feel like I can finally enjoy life. It hasn’t been easy, but then again nothing worth doing ever is. So follow me as I blog away about the trials and tribulations of my diet and exercise program. I hope it will inspire you to follow in my footsteps, ditch the fad diets and face up to the not-so-harsh reality that diet and exercise is the only way forward. And by doing so I hope you have as much fun as I have had so far.