I know a lot of my posts so far make me sound like a smug, has-got-it-together type who - at the ripe old age of 29 - has managed to iron out every niggling neurosis and for whom life is plain sailing. Well, I may have less to moan about than I did ten years ago, but - surprise, surprise - I'm far from 'sorted'. I have those mornings like today, where I wake up and my brain decides to play a home-movie-style showreel of everyone who's f*cked me over in the past and every instance where I could have stood up for myself but didn't. Culminating in me thinking that I don't actually have any true friends because I don't have anything anybody wants, people are just going to walk all over me for the rest of my life and I'm going to live out my days as a sad, single lonely hermit.
Then I took myself to the gym and went spinning. And felt a million times better. The benefits of fitness on your mental health are seriously underrated. Why the government doesn't put more effort into promoting fitness for better psychological wellbeing in secondary schools (teenagers I think are especially vulnerable to mental health issues and depression) is beyond me. When I was at school, I saw P.E. as a weekly humiliation - completely pointless ('how does shooting a ball into a hoop get me a job?' etc.)
Plus, I wasn't the most sporty of children. I was part of what my teacher called the 'note brigade' - always having an excuse why I had to sit out of dance/swimming/hockey/netball. There was never any emphasis on how great exercise makes you feel, more about making it onto the school netball team and 'having a great body'.
Years later into my early twenties, my friends and I still used to snigger at the keen, sporty girls who went to the gym every night and sports clubs after work - dismissing them as ferociously competitive 'jolly hockey sticks' types. My friends and I used to join gyms together and then sneak off to the pub when 'gym time' came - laughing like a group of naughty school girls bunking off double maths. Later when I moved to North London, I had the same attitude towards the whippet thin 'yoga bunnies' I saw striding down Upper Street, yoga mat in one hand, soya latte in the other.
I came to the conclusion that I was just not a 'gym going' type - and styled myself in the manner of Bridget Jones (complete lack of self-discipline yet loveable for it etc.). Even when I joined my local Fitness First a few years ago, with the intention of doing three 7am spinning classes a week, part of me remained unconvinced that I would stick at it.
Yet in the years that followed, it was my gym-routine that helped keep me sane when I broke up with my ex and lost my grandmother. So yes, this may have turned me into a fitness 'bore' I used to mock in my former days. No, I haven't morphed into Miranda Kerr - but I feel better and yes, a little trimmer than before. I love the appetite you work up in a spinning class, the energised feeling it leaves you with and the ability to de-stress after an hour of yoga. It's not about being thinner than my friends or having a 'holier than thou' attitude. It's about being more bodily aware and focusing on the present, rather than living in your head and being stuck in the past.
Rather than a new year's resolution or a passing phase, the gym has definitely become a big part in my life - I couldn't imagine not going for a few weeks, I would really miss it.
But if the idea of a gym really isn't for you and you'd rather be in the great outdoors, running is a good alternative. I've also discovered Rooftop Yoga classes, led by the lovely Lucy Bannister which take place on top of a car park in Peckham and boasts one of the most beautiful views of the city. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday morning...
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