Working things out
I still assumed that to be fit the aim was to see numbers drop off the scales. That if I exercised like a demon, I’d look as slim as I did when I was heartbroken, but actually feel great too, rather than wanting to crawl into a hole and cry. But lo-and-behold that didn’t happen. No matter how many miles I sweated away on the treadmill or half-hearted dumbbell curls I did, I was still a 5ft 9in woman with muscly legs and broad shoulders. Who’d have thought it, huh? The saddest thing was that I hated my body for it. I was still convinced that to look good, and to look fit, I needed to be smaller – somehow less than I was now. It never occurred to me not to want to get smaller.
Everything changed for me when I started exercising with personal trainer Olly Foster in 2014 at the Ultimate Performance gym in Mayfair when I was working in London. Olly said to me, ‘If you could look like anyone, who would it be?’ and I said right away, ‘Kylie Minogue. She’s tiny and petite. She looks great.’ He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You are NEVER going to look like Kylie Minogue. NEVER. You probably looked like Kylie Minogue when you were 12 years old. Let’s be realistic.’ My jaw dropped. How could he say that?! I was incredibly offended. It was this man’s job to make me look like Kylie Minogue.
But then I looked around that gym – at all the women weight-lifting and loving it – and realised they weren’t using their bodies to look a specific way, they were using them to improve their health, posture, stamina and mental outlook. To improve everything. They were putting looks aside and prioritising how they felt. All different shapes and sizes, all mucking in, grunting and sweating and looking like total badasses! Then it hit me: of course I’m never going to look like Kylie Minogue. It’s ridiculous! And nor should I want to, because I’m simply not built that way.
‘Oh my God…,’ I said, and sat down, kind of stunned, as Olly started working out a programme for me. It’s like someone telling you, ‘The entire way you see yourself is messed up’ and realising they’re right. Olly said, ‘You’ve got really strong legs, maybe we could up the weight and you could use them more’, and again I was speechless. Instead of saying, ‘Let’s try to slim down your thighs’, he wanted me to make them more muscly?! Hell yes he did. He understood that my ‘thunder thighs’ could be a good thing. A great thing even. That my body could work in my favour. That instead of trying to be incredibly thin, having drainpipe legs and a pancake bum, I could have strong legs that would carry me further and faster, below a curvy bum. I realised that before now, I’d not only not been using my body to its best advantage, I’d been actively working against it, punishing it for looking the way it did, trying to bully it into being smaller, weighing less, being less. While all the time, all these women in the gym were doing the total opposite.
Think about that for a moment: think about how much you punish your body – treating it badly, hating on it – for not looking like something or someone else. You will look your absolute best – not my best or Kylie’s best – when you accept what you cannot change and start working with your body, not against it. I learned an incredibly important lesson that day – I shouldn’t want to get fit to look a certain way, but to feel a certain way. Looking good means nothing if you don’t feel good.
Good things come to women who weight(lift)
Repeat after me: ‘weight training will not make me look like a man!’ You won’t become ‘too big’ by lifting weights. Women have nowhere near the amount of testosterone they’d need to ‘bulk up’ to the point that they look masculine. All weight training will do is make you leaner and fitter so you’ll still look and feel like a woman, but a warrior woman who can carry all her own bags, thanks very much.
Here are just a few of the benefits of resistance training for women:
1) It burns more fat. Yes, it’s true that while you’re actually performing the exercise you’re burning fewer calories weight-lifting than you would doing two hours on the cross-trainer (no, thank you). However, you’re actually increasing your metabolic rate, which means you’ll be burning more calories for longer afterwards.
2) You can eat more. Your muscles will get denser and bigger, so you’ll need to eat more to maintain them. Or, looking at it the other way, you can handle a lot more calories. Result.
3) You’ll get stronger bones. The pressure weight training puts on your bones encourages your body to invest in making them stronger and sturdier. This counteracts the natural propensity for women’s bone density to decrease from their 30s onwards.
4) Your immune system will thank you. People who lift tend to have better eating habits and better quality of sleep, lower stress levels and improved circulation, all of which makes you healthier, period.
5) You’ll feel like a combination of Xena, Jet and She-Ra.
Please remember that the photos you see of me working out in the gym are taken when my muscles are swollen with blood to help me lift the weights. That’s why people look pumped during workouts: their muscles are literally ‘pumped up’. Bodybuilders and fitness models go out of their way to look bigger and more defined on shoots or at shows, enhancing their muscles (and even making their veins ‘pop’) through a careful diet, dehydration and fake tan. People can see those images and think, ‘I’ll look like that all the time if I do weights, even just at the shops!’ You absolutely won’t. You’ll just look toned. Lifting weights won’t make you ‘butch’ or ‘manly’; it’ll make you more confident, energetic, stronger, leaner, fitter and happier.
Struggling, sweating and swearing
I started training with Olly properly in 2014 and, because I was now training with direction, the changes I went through – both physical and mental – were pretty much immediate. It’s not just the natural high that comes from exercising, but eating right also has a huge impact on your mood and body and therefore behaviour. Once you start something good, your body craves it and you feel better for having taken action. I had not only found one of the best personal trainers around, but a great boyfriend too! Olly and I were together for around two years and I’m happy to say we’re still mates to this day.
I started posting videos and pictures of my workouts on Instagram and saw how I was able to connect with people in a positive way. Lots of people were into the fact that I was working out to feel good first, and look good second. For that reason I’ve made it my mission to always be open and honest, both about how I feel and how I look.
Then the trolls arrived. The keyboard warriors who spend all day sitting alone in their parents’ basement venting about others because they’ve got nothing else going on. Lads message me and say, ‘You’ve gone too far, you look like a man’ and I’ll reply and say, ‘Well, lift heavier and maybe you will too!’ Yes, that kind of stuff makes me angry, but I’ll take a moment and choose to react differently – I actually try to take those comments as compliments now. I mean, at the end of the day, they’re still looking, aren’t they? If they weren’t interested, jealous or annoyed they wouldn’t be doing it. No one else’s opinion should have the power to make you happy or not. You can’t control other people’s actions, but you can control how you react to them. You can either wallow or brush it off.
My plan from the start has always been to just be me. We all look different, we all have crap days and we all slip up: welcome to the club – there’s seven billion of us in it. I want to show that if I can do this, you can too. Commit to looking after yourself, get to know your own body, take social media with a pinch of salt, be honest about your