Day 1: June 2024

 

This is not me, clearly. Or me yet 😉 This is where I'd like to get to, doing a sweaty 90 minute strong yoga class, strong and flexible, feeling good and energised afterwards. Pink hair and all!

But that's where I want to get to. This is where I am now:

My name is Karen (yes, I know, the name that launched a thousand memes. I ain't that sort of Karen). 

I'm 54, half-Guyanese-Indian, half Irish, living in the North of Ireland. I've never been much into my fitness, save for a brief, heady period in my 40s where I lost 5 stone, got into running and yoga, and did a few runs and half marathons.

Unfortunately, as a physio told me, "you weren't built for running Karen". I really wasn't. A combo of weak muscles, bad biomechanics, flat feet and (later) joint and back problems that became arthritis meant I kept getting injured. After a series of knee problems, back pain and then two ankle ops, I kind of stopped moving. Piled on the beef again. And here I am now.

I'm not proud of it, but at the same time, you have to start where you are. I'm 5 foot 6, I weigh 18 stone 11. At my heaviest I was 20 stone, I've started losing, a good bit of the journey to go. I'm a size 22-24. I've had arthritis for about 10 years. Moving is sore. Just finished a series of PRP and steroid joint injections, now ready for rehab exercise and getting back, slowly, to exercise, in a sustainable way.

Here's what I want:

1. Lose weight, most important. It'll help everything.
2. Get out of pain. At the very least be in less pain.
3. Build up strength. A baseline where I can get back to fitness safely.

How did I get here? A combo of years of chronic pain, coupled with anxiety, a few tough life events and here we are. But I'm ready now. Ready for some change, and whatever I need to do to get there. I want to be healthy, fit and strong, like Miss Pink Hair in the pic there. I want to feel energetic when I wake up, not knackered like everything hurts.

I've bi-weekly physio built into the next few weeks, and a call set up with a new rehab trainer in Dungannon. We'll see how it goes. 

For now, I'll work on eating better:

• more veg
• whole foods, not crap
• more water
• less carbs, cut out the unhealthy snacks

Let's gooooo 💪