…the cakes get eaten!
The last thing I want to do is promote any sympathy at all whilst writing this but I think we all relate best to honesty…So I’ll be honest, but if any of you come up to me at bootcamp and give me a sympathetic pat on the arm or a tilted head smile I will be putting my boxing training to use!!
I’ll tell you now in the last 2 weeks every aspect of my life has well and truly taken a nose dive! I won’t bore you with any details but it’s just been one of those times which we all have in life when I felt like I was just drowning in stress and everything seemed like it was getting to much.
Like many of us do in this scenario, I went to Sainsbury’s…into the bakery, bought a 5 pack of cookies and ATE THE LOT!! And the worst part is I felt absolutely no guilt! We are all guilty of falling victim to ‘comfort eating’. I’ve never really understood the reasoning behind this, why does eating something bad for us give us comfort. Why couldn’t it be carrot sticks or fruit that made me feel better… cause that would just be too easy!
Last Thursday however I had a breakthrough. After a particularly rough day I sat and spoke to my boyfriend and cried like a baby down the phone for a good 15 minutes, and by the time I was finished and he’d talked some calm back into me it was 7pm… Half hour before my group session was starting. Now after the day I’d had I had already thought ‘Nope I’m not going anywhere tonight, I’m getting under a blanket on a sofa and I won’t be moving’. Instead my other half suggested that I go, that there was no point sitting feeling sorry for myself all night and that maybe I could work out some of my stresses and annoyances through exercise.
I turned up at the hall (after another little cry in the car on the way over) and thought right let’s see what I can get done now, and if I can’t feel better then lets at least work off 1 of those cookies…
After about 15 minutes of taking part in a delightful exercise called ‘the square of despair’ I found myself laughing with the girls, being silly and trying to make each other laugh to get through the pain of the exercise. Not one part of me was feeling stressed or upset or worrying at all… the only pain I was feeling was the burning sensation which had spread up my entire thigh from the sheer number of lunges! It was the first time that week that I had truly forgotten about some of the s#@! going on and it felt good, it was a relief!
I’m hoping that I can learn from this, and maybe some of you can too. Life will inevitably throw crap at us… we will have bad weeks, hear bad news and sometimes for no reason whatsoever feel rubbish about ourselves. But hopefully I can remember that exercise is a brilliant form of stress relief and that the group I am lucky enough to train with week by week will always cheer me up, even if they don’t know they’re doing it!
I’m not sitting here saying I will never reach for something naughty to comfort myself again, I still think that chocolate can occasionally be used as medicine (Sorry Max). BUT, and this is a big but, I will remind myself that that was not the thing to make me feel better, it didn’t improve my mood or state of mind for any longer than the 10minutes I was eating it. The thing that cheered me up was being a part of a team of people all trying to do the same thing, all having each other’s backs and mainly all having a laugh! Also physically moving and training left my body feeling less tense and like the weight on my shoulders had lightened a bit!
So I suppose this blog is kind of a big thank you to all of you, and of course to Maxine and Sophia, for unknowingly helping me out when I needed it, I hope that at some point I have or can do the same for you!!
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