Mental Wellbeing & Fitness

By Hope Onderdonck-Young

Picture this. A female student with a keen interest in netball and fitness. Someone who eats well, leads a healthy lifestyle (apart from the occasional wild Wednesday… TP you are missed) and enjoys socialising with others.

Then picture that same person but rather than the healthy lifestyle they lead envisage the unmotivated sedentary lifestyle that was pushed upon them by a global pandemic.

I use the word pushed upon because in all of two days this person went from happy, social and healthy to discouraged, isolated and out-of-shape all because of a disease that was ripping its way through the world.

The person you are picturing is me. It isn’t a hypothetical person, imagined by a writer or a friend of a friend, it is the person behind this keyboard. My name is Hope.

I completely understand that to some of you reading this, it will come across as a bit of a sop story because thousands of people were losing their own lives or those of loved ones to an awful disease and so many people had worse circumstances to live through in the last six months than I did. However, this blog post isn’t a discussion on who had it worse during the pandemic or me completely disregarding what thousands of people went through. Simply, I want to share my raw, unfiltered experience of living through a global pandemic and the dangers of the gym aesthetic or the Instagram body.

Like many, my year at university was cut short. In a matter of hours, I packed up all of my belongings and moved back home; miles away from friends, my boyfriend and the new, exciting life I had created for myself in Exeter. Don’t get me wrong I have a fantastic family and I am lucky enough to live in a beautiful part of the country where outside space is plentiful but for me this just wasn’t enough. Attending fitness and training sessions each week with girls I had grown to love over the past year was something I took for granted; I didn’t realise the impact that losing both a sport and a support system could have until, well, it happened. In lockdown I longed for that 7am alarm to go off on a Monday morning signalling it was time to drag myself up Cardiac Hill for a fitness session, but it never came and as we continue to wait for restrictions to be lifted on sport, it won’t be coming in the near future either.

Anyway, it isn’t all doom and gloom. After some of the restrictions lifted and the whole of Instagram started taking part in those run 5, donate 5, nominate 5 I felt a huge weight lifted, as though the world was starting to get back to normal. However, I was still hugely unmotivated, I could barely make the journey from bed to my desk each morning to revise for exams let alone put on my Gymshark leggings and complete a workout. What I am realising more and more is that what I was going through was okay and still is okay.

Staying fit and healthy is something that shouldn’t feel forced, nor is it something that is reflected solely in your physical health. If your mind and body aren’t at the same place one week and so one requires more love and attention than the other that is fine. Fitness is so much more than strong arms and toned abs. It is feeling as though you have the mental capacity to go about your daily life, the resilience to accept that the world and you are not perfect and also, ensuring your body is able to keep up with the physical demands you ask of it. I have definitely been guilty of judging my body based on unrealistic expectations and standards.

Different people have different fitness goals, and this is something that I cannot reiterate enough. We live in a society where you can be a curvaceous, healthy size 14 or a toned, healthy size 4 and you will still be judged for not taking care of yourself or for not eating the right amount. This is a very dangerous judgement and one that I feel has absolutely no place in a progressive society. We owe it to each other to stop pushing other people’s and our own body ideals on to everyone else and to start focusing on what being fit and healthy looks like for you. Sure, attend the gym three times a week if it makes you happy but do not buy into the gym aesthetic in the hope of achieving eternal happiness through swollen muscles and protein shakes because I highly doubt you will find it. Instead take part in physical activities that you look forward to, eat foods that fill your body with energy and nutrients and if you miss one workout do not think of it as the end of the world.

Sport and exercise are such fantastic tools to help improve mood and wellbeing but only when adopted in a healthy way. Forgetting to fuel the mind is equally if not more damaging than forgetting to fuel the body.