I Move for Me: Ush Lad
Written by Ush Lad
Ush is a personal trainer for women who don’t like your typical hard bodied personal trainers. Her way of thinking, her ideas around food and her understanding of how women can be affected by media and slimming groups means that people relate to her and enjoy working with her and trust her to help them hit their personal fitness goals. You can find more info about her here
Let’s start with the fact that I was a big girl at Uni, a size 24, a lot of things led to that weight gain, one of the biggest things was emotional eating.
Yes, I was an emotional eater, I used to binge on pizza, pasta, alcohol and chocolate to hide how I was feeling… To the rest of the world I was a happy girl, with great friends who just loved her food… But inside I was in pain.
After uni I joined a well known slimming club. For those with little or no experience of how they work, they are designed to make you obsessed with one thing and one thing only: seeing the number on the scales come down week on week. But for me, this wasn’t enough. I started to need to see this day on day. Somewhere along the way I turned to more and more extreme and unhealthy ways to ensure my weight continued to drop.I would binge on what the same slimming club would consider to be ‘dirty food’ and proceed to throw it up.
To others I was a miracle, able to eat McDonalds, KFC, Pizza and still lose tremendous amounts of weight (5 stone in 10 months to be exact) but again, inside I was in pain. By now my hair was falling out, I lost my period, I was constantly cold, I had the worst cramps, my skin was dry and I got ill all the time…But hey I was a size 10!
Then I got seriously ill, I contracted gastroenteritis and my stomach was in bits, there was no food in me, I was weak and eventually was put on a drip in hospital. You’d think that was the moment a shift would occur right…but I still couldn’t see how badly I was damaging my body. Tt was actually in a hotel room in NYC a few weeks later when I was so dehydrated that my lower left leg completely cramped up and I could not move that something shifted. I screamed an entire hotel room down at 4am!
That’s when it hit me that I’ve never been kind to myself. Years of body shaming myself hit me like a tonne of bricks. That was the moment my perspective changed and I decided I would no longer be a victim to the scales and instead I would take control and focus on my health.
It wasn’t easy though to establish what this meant for me. I tried every diet under the sun (keto, SW, Atkins, South Beach, Clean and Lean) and I yo-yo’d for the next 5 years trying to find out what healthy really meant when faced with so many emphasis on body weight above all else.
After a great deal of time I feel I have found some kind of balance in this crazy world of health and fitness, I found weight training, I found boxing, I love dancing, I fell in love with movement and the rush of feeling healthy - so much so that I qualified to become a Personal Trainer and Online Fitness Coach to help other women.
So why do I move now?
Now I move to feel my best, to feel not just healthy and fit but to feel mentally awakened and aware of myself.
But the biggest reason I move is because I’ve seen generations of Asian ladies above me get old before their time. I’ve seen them struggle to get off the sofa and climb stairs at the age of 55, I’ve seen a whole load of diabetes, cardiac disease and death because of lack of movement and being overweight… And to be honest that scares me and inspires me to move. So now I move because I want to be stronger into my later years, I want to enjoy my life, to enjoy being healthy and to keep active for my future family. Also I want to be able to run around after my own grandkids one day… Why wouldn’t I!?
It’s no longer about the scales or dress size, it’s about living my best life!
