Hello! I'm The Vigilante Dillah Tanty and this is my first proper blog post about a thing.
And the thing is:
How do you turn a serial couch potato into a person who exercises every day without fail?
...You do a self imposed, 75 Days of Daily Exercise challenge!
I’ve always been the type of person who would lie very still to retain as much of my energy as possible. I didn’t want to expend unnecessary energy anywhere, anytime, any place. My MO was: Lie down as much as possible. If you can’t lie down, sit down, if you can sit down, lean on something, if you can’t lean on something, well you’re in danger of expending energy and you’re gonna need a lie down once this whole ordeal is over.
But right now at this minute? I’m thinking, man I’ve been sat on my butt for over an hour, I need to get up and move asap. So 'scuse me...
Ok, I’m back.
I’m wary about writing this before I’ve finished the challenge I started for myself: “75 days of Daily Exercise” 60 ish days ago because I have this thing sometimes where when I say something out loud along the lines of: “I do this now” then suddenly I just stop doing it- like announcing it into the ether causes it’s death. It’s happened so many times that I don’t even want to type this… but I am personally always fascinated when I read other people’s journeys of discovery or transformation and I’m always grateful to read about how they got there while they got there. So I’m doing this for you. You’re welcome.
Needless to say I’m not a doctor and what I’m talking about here is just my own experience and what has currently been working (and not working for me) so always get checked out before you start anything new with your body especially if you’re not used to moving much (like me). I’m not an expert in anything ( Dilettante remember!) and I’m only relating what my experience has been. Equally if you are looking for one of those how I lost 1 stone in 1 week (fake) articles then please do not read on, there is nothing here except mostly common sense stuff which we all know. If you are experiencing food addiction or food/ weight related mental illness then please do not torture yourself reading things that may make you feel worse; you need to be kind to yourself. I'm not saying this will trigger anyone but this is a trigger warning because we are talking about food issues, ok?
Ok phew, disclaimers out of the way.
So, how do you get motivated to start exercising when you don’t really want to and how do you stay motivated when it’s really hard/ boring/ lonely/ you still just don’t want to?
How do you stop eating sweets when all you've ever done is eat sweets every week of your life and you've been a grown for quite some time and should probably stop now?
How do you transform your life when the social messaging you've received means you think you have to dislike yourself to want to make atomic change? ...But the disliking yourself paralyses you into inaction yet again? How do you stop repeating this cycle?
These are questions I have wrestled with FOR YEARS and this is the first time I have made any sort of consistent progress, so even if it all goes to shit after I write this I'll share it.
Right now at this moment- at the end of June 2021- I can say honestly that I have not bought or eaten sweets for the last 10 weeks (that's actually not true because I have bought sweets for other people but have just not eaten them myself. Skills) and I have also been exercising, doing a daily workout everyday for the past 10 weeks too- I have had days where I have simply walked the dog but 95% of the time I have done an actual workout ranging from Yoga, Pilates, Barre, Weights and HIIT.
Before I started the challenge I could literally not move for several hours at a time, I exercised infrequently and often didn't leave the house for days on end. In making this challenge for myself, I wanted to make sure I moved every day and got off my arse more but I also wanted to make it so that I just did exercise every day until it was a habit and an integral part of my life rather than trying to avoid it as much as possible. I wanted to post about it on social media for accountability to keep me doing it and I didn't want to look like a knobber who made a bunch of promises and then fell off the face of the earth... so I didn't know, but I hoped the added accountability of posting my daily workouts would keep me on track. And they have been so far.
Why did I want to do this?
For me, I had an event (being a bridesmaid) that was coming up in 9 months and I was thinking of the photo’s- so pure vanity. However, I had had events come up before that didn’t have the same motivating effect. So what was different this time?
I actually started exercising with a personal training gym last September (2020) and one of the things they asked you to do was to write food diaries and this was so hard to do honestly because my day was essentially full of sugar from morning til night and I knew it wasn’t good but I loved sugar. I could easily live without alcohol but at the time, if you’d asked me to live without my precious sugar I would have cried for days. I’m talking about sweets, cakes, chocolate, syrup, pasta, biscuits, rice, bread, all the refined white sugars, all the refined white carbs. I mean I’d probably still cry now because I’m definitely not over it yet but maybe I’d only have the sniffles rather than abject weeping.
I’d been trying to exercise on and off over the years but it was always for a thing like a holiday and I always stopped once I got to the event and that was that. Thank god that's over. Ok, I’ve done the exercising and dieting for the thing- finished now! And I’d go straight back to lying down as much as possible and stuffing in sweets to make up for all that time I’d been deprived of having them.
Even when I exercised with friends, I acted like a petulant child, frowning at them when they weren’t looking thinking ”look at you enjoying this, you make me sick!”, or if it was with a trainer, I harboured very, very ill feelings towards them, much like a teenager, thinking “Why are you doing this to me? You don’t even understand me, I hate you!”. I wish I was joking. I know it's embarrassing! My perception was that it was always something that was being done to me and not something I was choosing to do and therefore I had the permanent sense of wanting to rail against authority, even if the authority was me taking myself to a class. Ridiculous I know.
God I hope there is someone out there who has felt the same and it’s not just me who feels this way about exercise! Pretty much every person I know enjoys exercise to some extent and/or knows it’s good for them. I am the only person I know who has retained this childish attitude towards exercise. The benefits of exercise escaped me, I only saw and felt the immediate effects of energy expenditure (= bad, how will I cope with the rest of the day?) I never experienced any discernible so-called endorphin effects ("But don’t you feel good afterwards though?") No, never. "What about the long term health benefits?" Yes ok I hear you. But it still hurts me now and I can’t see past that.
And there’s the rub.
People who have a problem with overeating and under exercising are doing it because they lack the ability to sustain a long term goal or vision. If you got the bill for the cumulative toll on your health you probably wouldn’t want to be that way but that’s not how ill health through sedentary lifestyles works- you do things because they are a little bit easier and you keep making it even easier on yourself and before you know it you can’t touch your toes or walk up a flight of stairs without needing a lie down and then you can't fit on a plane seat or through a doorway without turning sideways. You eat a few snacks here and there until it becomes normal and you don’t even think twice about eating cake every day. (If you're eating cake whilst reading this, I'm sorry.)
So I guess the mechanism for change is being able to visualise and retain the vision of a medium to long term goal and then having the structure, checks and accountability in place to make sure you reach them. And for that you need a why that works for you. For some people, "because this is good for my health" is enough and for others they might need the motivation of birthday or event and need to just move on to the next thing once the event has passed and that's fine.
One of my trainers remarked that my attitude about training last September is vastly different compared with now. Which I agree with- I've turned a corner with my petulance- I've finally realised it isn't anyone else's responsibility to make me exercise, it's got nothing to do with any one else except myself. If I want to exercise or not exercise that's up to me. If I want to turn up and not put the effort in, the only person who suffers is me. The toll will be on my mental and physical health and if I want to carry that, I can. I just don't want to any more. I can now see the cumulative toll of not moving enough and eating too much, I couldn't see it before because it was too big- there were too many problems to solve.
Here are some of my 75 reasons not to exercise:
Not wanting to move at all most of time
Sugar addiction- the whole day every day- If I exercise I'll have to deal with this as well and I don't want to
Structural problems with my feet, ankles, knees which make moving more difficult
Not being a group person
Not liking exercising in front of people
Not knowing what exercises to do
Watching TV
Not being disciplined
Not being motivated
If I'm exercising to try to change myself then that means I'm a heap of garbage now right? Aghh- How do I like myself and try to change at the same time?
Not being an "active" person
People who think about exercising every day are weird and I want to be able to enjoy my life.
Not being someone who enjoys exercise or even expending energy
Never experiencing endorphins
Can't see the bigger picture
Don't like people telling me what to do. Even me.
Cant stick to goals
Don't like leaving the house much
Needing to sit, to think a lot as part of my job, which is mostly sedentary
Feeling like everyone likes exercise except me
Feeling like exercising is a selfish act
Feeling like even when people don't like exercising they can still do it- but I just don't want to enough
Trying running repeatedly and not being able to which I'm just not cut out for exercise
Exercising takes me away from my family which is bad
Having structural issues which mean even walking is exhausting- how can I do anything more?
I'll have to shower more, what about the planet/ water bills?
Being told lots of conflicting advice- "do this exercise" or "oh no you shouldn't with that postural alignment..."
Thinking exercise is easy for people who do it regularly.
Never being good at sport as a child.
Finding some sports/ disciplines culty and weird. I don't want to become like them. (Ahem, Crossfit)
And not forgetting this gem:
I don't want to get too hot though do I? If I start exercising it might make me just too attractive to other people and that could be a massive problem in my life so it's probably best to avoid that whole possibility. Right?
That's 25 ish but that'll do. I could go on. There are many reasons for me not to exercise. If you've ever struggled with this yourself some of them probably sound familiar.
Now I guess I'll tell you more about how the '75 days of daily exercise' challenge came about and why it's been working for me so far.
So back in Sept 2020 my cousin confirmed she was going to get married in July 2021 so That gave me 9 months or so to get ready. I didn't want another occasion to come by where nothing had changed and I was still stuffing in the sweets and lying down watching Netflix as much as possible. I joined a local personal training gym which caters for women where they do sessions of 4 people at a time but you follow your own programme, there are no classes- everyone follows their own weights/ resistance based training plan. As I mentioned above I joined and I turned up but I wasn't really engaged because it forced me to recognise the extent of my weight / eating/ exercising problems and it was uncomfortable. I turned up and brought my body there but I loathed it and I wasn't onboard. I put the trainers and the whole place into a position of authority and I therefore railed against it. Thinking things like "haha you'll never catch me!" or "you'll have my body but never my heart and mind!" And, let's be clear- it was bullshit. I stopped going in Nov/ Dec because we went into another lockdown and I couldn't cope with the online sessions and I didn't rejoin until April this year. Ok negative, I agree.
But the experience did spark something... so at the end of Dec 2020 I decided I needed to make some very small changes (micro changes!) and see if I could stick to them from January onwards. I needed to do some work on myself so that I could know I'd be able to sustain any changes I was making and just add in things as I was making them a habit and keep making little bits of progress. No one wants to waste money on a gym membership if they aren't going to get the most out of it but this was more about my personal attitude towards motivation to exercise.
So from Jan 2nd I started a daily 10-15 yoga practice from this free very basic app I had had on my phone for years and my goal was just to do it. I mean it features a cartoon person doing a sun salutation, it's not even a real person... but that's what I had so I went with it. I started with a sort of "I reckon I can do anything for 10 minutes" attitude and this really helped me in so many ways over this time period. Now, I don't mind doing an hour workout but back in Jan I could not have coped. So I started small.
Let's be honest, 10 minutes of yoga is not really going to do a great amount for your health in terms of calories burnt or even being long enough to be classed as a workout on it's own. However it did help me stretch/ keep supple first thing in the morning or last thing at night and I got to practice my breathing but the most important part was the mental battle with myself. Are you going to do this like you said you would or are you going to let yourself down about this? I dropped the ball several times but instead of calling myself a useless shit (as per usual) I just said ok, tomorrow then or ok now then- and as well as setting the intention I set an alarm to get up and do it. And more often than not I did it, because it was just 10 minutes, sometimes it was first or last thing at night and sometimes random times but I'd probably do it on average 5/7 days a week.
I didn't know it but I was laying the groundwork for completing "75 days of daily exercise". I realise now I was building mental resilience, and flexing my willpower muscle regularly. I was showing myself I could be the kind of person who said they would do something every day for themselves and showed up every day to do it. And that was powerful. So powerful in fact that by March I found myself waking up earlier and earlier to get my 10 minutes of yoga done and do some music work. I eventually created a habit of getting up at 4.55am but I'll do a post about this another time because it's a whole thing.
So I was getting up early, getting some work and my 10 minutes of yoga done when I realised the wedding would be coming up in 12 weeks and if I wanted to look as good as possible in my dress I needed to step it up a bit. Because I'd laid the foundations and the habit of exercising every day I knew I'd be able to stick to it this time and I actually was looking forward to having the expertise and focused environment the gym and trainers would provide. The gym had sessions at 6.30am and I'd never been to them because I was always asleep (natch) but because I had been getting up early, I realised- I could actually do these workouts and be back before anyone was even up in my house (wtf!) and so I signed up again in April, started the 75 Day Daily Exercise Challenge on the 23rd and haven't looked back since. And just so you know the 75 days was totally abitrary- it would have been 90 days but I wasn't quite ready at that point in mid April. 75 days was just a nice round number based on the time I had left before the wedding. Some people have asked me if I've been doing the "75 days hard challenge" and I'm not- but that (much more extreme) challenge definitely has some interesting aspects to it...My version was maybe the 75 days soft challenge...?!
So this is all pretty rambly and anecdotal and I'll try to post what exactly is it that I do/ have been doing blog post soon once the challenge is complete but hopefully it gives some insight into what it's like for someone who has always struggled to eat well and exercise to get to the point where they are exercising everyday and eating more healthily as a habit. As I say my instinct is to not talk about this because of the "saying it out loud/disappearing" effect but I know there is a lot to be gained from the insight someone can give while they are "in it" rather than just reflecting back on an experience. I wanted to do a diary blog post a week about how it was going but I doubted my ability to sustain it and I felt like I had enough accountability in posting every day for 75 days on Instagram.
I've had some incredible support all the way along from people I know and people I don't... which has been really encouraging... but people have got their own lives and aren't as invested as you are in a personal challenge so I decided very early on I wasn't doing it for anyone except myself for accountability and if people responded that was great and if they didn't it didn't matter because it wasn't for them as such. However, I do know that seeing my posts has been motivating for some people and I'm super chuffed about that. Many people have been sending me variations of "You're doing so well" or "I watch your stories before going to do my workout" or "You're inspiring me, thank you" and that's all so great to hear but I did this for me, to see if I could because I was sick of being someone who primarily sat on their arse, who's health was suffering and didn't know if they had what it took to make a significant change in their life. I'm happy to have proved something to myself.
There has never been a time in my life where I have not eaten sweets for this amount of time. I'm an addict so I think about sweets and sugar every day- and I'll do a separate blog post about this because it is massive but I'm talking about this little bit of progress because sweets (like haribo for example) are my ultimate trigger "food" and it was important to me try to reduce the hold they had over me. I'll talk about how I've been doing that another time.
So I'll post again at the end of the 75 days when I will have completed this challenge but of course this is just the beginning and for me it's been "Phase 2".
Pre-Phase 1 was Sept- Dec slowly realising what it will take but not being ready;
Phase 1 was January- March building up my mental and physical resilience and practicing being more active and exercising every day;
Phase 2 was April- July adding in extra accountability and stepping up the exercise to more targeted intense and effective workouts and working on reducing my sweet fixation.
Phase 3 will start in July after the wedding and will involve doing more specific physical rehab looking at my feet, ankles, knees and hips alignment, with an anatomy in motion practitioner and a functional patterns practitioner as well as keeping my already established workouts going; one of my other aims is to reduce my sugar intake to minimal levels but I'm quite far off that at the moment!
So here's to couch potatoes everywhere:
Find Your Why (and make it a good one), because without it you're never going to get off that sofa, then...
Find your how
and then
Just do it.
I've been doing it and I can confirm I'm still alive!
Dillah
xxx