26/05/2025
I'm 44 years old and I've been overweight for most of my life. At my heaviest, I was 19.5 stone and in 2021 I got very ill because of the strain the extra weight was putting on my body. At that stage, I knew I had to do something to change not just my diet, but my entire lifestyle. I am someone who LOVES food! I love making food, shopping for food, trying new places to eat and eating out with friends, so any kind of diet that restricted what I ate, I knew would never work for me.
I started slowly by switching to lower calorie alternatives, so I could still eat cheese on toast, I was just eating low calorie bread instead. I swapped big bars of chocolate at tea break for 99 cal Kit Kats or Skinny bars, bought myself a new pair of trainers and started walking 2 miles a day, then 4 miles a day and then as many miles as I could fit in to my schedule. My work colleagues walked with me at break and lunch time, my Son walked with me in the evenings and my Dad walked with me every Sunday Morning. Very quickly, I started to lose some weight. That old chiché of eat less, move more is true. I lost about 4 stone before I ever even stepped foot in a gym.
I seen Laganview Community Gym advertised on Facebook in January 2023, organised my induction in February and joined straight away. I'd been to gyms periodically throughout my life and always felt so intimidated and clueless, inevitably leaving a few months later. When I joined Laganview, it felt different. It felt more welcoming than any gym I'd been to before, everyone was so incredibly friendly. I was a complete novice, looking up "gym workouts for beginners" on YouTube and just trying my best to figure things out. The only reason I didn't end up hurting myself by doing something stupid was because there was always someone in the gym to spot me or offer advice or help if I asked.
In January 2025, I was happy enough with my weight, which had sort of plateaued out at 14 stone 9lbs for the best part of the previous year. However, I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere with my workouts, was frustrated and going through cycles of building muscle but not feeling great about myself and it got to the point where I wasn't even enjoying being in the gym anymore. This made me really sad because that gym had come to mean a lot to me. When I was having a bad day, or a bad week, I knew that spending an hour in the gym would be a little mental wellbeing break for me, so I kept going even if all I was doing was a hard 45 minutes on the dreaded Elliptical 3 times a week! It felt important to me to just keep showing up.
Eventually, I realised that after 2 years of trying my best, what I really needed was help. I needed someone to hold me accountable for my time in the gym, to educate me and really, to help me fall in love with it again. I wanted to be excited to work out like I was at the beginning. My first session with Laura was at the end of January 2025 and I liked her immediately. Laura is so friendly, so down to earth that I just felt instantly at ease. Laura is big on encouragement so even when I felt like I maybe couldn't do something or was nervous to try something new, Laura's belief in me made me believe in myself.
I want to reiterate that losing more weight wasn't my motivation for going to a Personal Trainer. By this stage I'd lost 5 stone by myself after all. But the workouts I was doing with Laura during our weekly session, as well as the WhatsApp follow-up messages through the week, and just general nutritional advice as we were chatting during our sessions, I've subsequently lost a further 13lbs, since my first PT session. My favourite thing though? Laura makes every single session fun and I come away feeling not only more knowledgeable but also really empowered. When I don't think I have another set in me, hearing Laura shout "Come on, you've got this, you can do it!" makes me want to keep going to prove to myself that she's right and I can do it.
Personal Training is investing in yourself. It's investing in your future. Laura has helped me to see that I'm worth investing in.
