My MS Body Mission

It happened- I am technically obese. Now, I don’t feel obese and I don’t think I look obese– I’m still pretty ok with the way I look and I still feel attractive. However, the fact of the matter is that my BMI is currently 30.6 and that has tipped me over from being overweight to obese according to the NHS. This is not the MS body that I want, or have had in the past.

This is something that I don’t want to be and certainly not something I would normally want to share with anyone, BUT there is power in being honest with myself and declaring to the world that enough is enough. Also, I am now on an MS body mission!

Putting on weight has crept up on me since I stopped teaching 3 years ago. During the first year after I stopped teaching I put on 1 stone. This is not surprising given that I went from being on my feet 7 hours a day and running up and down 2 flights of stairs to get to my classroom at least 6 times a day, to sitting on my bum aaaaallll day. Plus, I only have to walk 3 streets away to get to my office. This created the perfect storm of sedentary life and even though my diet didn’t change, my weight shot up.

I have taken action to reverse this continued increase in weight: I’ve done Slimming World (it works if you stick to it!); I started running (I do it for a bit and then have ended up with no energy for months!), but I’ve never been able to find a diet and exercise regime that I could stick to.  Between January and March 2020 I lost a stone and was feeling pretty good. I could fit back into my clothes comfortably and I felt like I was making good headway towards my goal of losing 2 stone in total. And then the Covid pandemic hit.  

At the beginning of the first UK lockdown I found myself actually being far more active than usual. As we were only able to leave the house for exercise, I got into a really good habit of walking 10,000 steps each day and really enjoyed it.  Everything was going really well until May 2020 when I am 95% sure that I had Covid (it was when they were only testing if you went into hospital). I was in bed for about 10 days and it took me 7 weeks to get my energy levels back to normal. During that time I couldn’t exercise and completely gave up on eating well.   Eating and drinking whatever I wanted felt like the only thing that I had control over. This made it very easy to justify eating and drinking EVERYTHING. It also didn’t help that a very lovely lady called Kitty who lives on my street made cakes every other day for the entire street during lockdown– delicious but deadly to a diet! Not only did I put on the stone that I’d lost at the beginning of the year, I also put on another one.  

Now, I’m not sharing this because I think there’s anything ‘wrong’ with being the weight that I am. There’s no judgement about it, the only thing is that it is officially “not healthy. I’ve realised that my problem with losing weight is that I’m actually happy with how I look which has meant that motivating myself to lose weight purely out of vanity hasn’t worked (and nor should it). What I’ve been missing is really getting clear on why I want to lose weight. Through a recent coaching seminar that I’ve taken part in, I’ve created the possibility of being healthy, not skinny. I don’t really care how much I weigh, but I do care about being healthy. The reality is that the amount that I weigh right now is not healthy. I want to be healthy to manage my MS, I want to be healthy to avoid future health problems and I want to be healthy so that my body can nourish a baby in the near future.

So, I declare here and now that I am on a MS body mission: a mission to be healthy and strong. My mission is to weigh 11 stone 2 pounds by the end of 2021. This is the official healthy weight for how tall I am and it is also the weight that I have felt the most comfortable, confident and fit being (I last weighed this in July 2017).  

My challenge in achieving this mission is finding the right diet (I’m currently testing out Veganuary) and also working out an exercise routine that pushes me enough, but also doesn’t floor me. I’m looking for an exercise regime that I can consistently maintain, rather than something that risks putting me in bed for weeks and undoing any gains that have been made. 

I would love to hear how you keep fit and stay healthy with MS.  Any tips and advice is much appreciated! Please get in touch in the comments below.