This must be a wind up – Fitness Journey

Every day is a school day in the Source gym, with yet more new exercises to test my balance, co-ordination and strength.

Week four and any sense of complacency that I may have entertained was swiftly crushed under the bar bells in an upper-body session led by coach Scott on Tuesday morning. What’s more – it was a one-to-one session, so there was nowhere to hide.

Despite getting up extra early to get some porridge ahead of the 7am class, my stomach rumbled and thoughts of toast with honey consumed my mind.

Toast with honey barely merits a fantasy for most people, but food and diet has been a big issue for me over the last three months, because – as many people had already known – I am full of hot air.

As previously mentioned (just a few times) in earlier columns, this fitness journey at Source has been helping to rehabilitate a wonky shoulder injured in a fall on the stairs.

For about seven weeks after the fall, I was on a steady diet of painkillers – anti inflammatories, muscle relaxers and opioids… You name it, I popped it. Gradually my appetite began to wane as my stomach pleaded for a detox.

And then came the winds. Gales would be more accurate. Way before the burpees at Source, were the burps, booming belches and other noises. ‘Sorry’ and ‘excuse me’ I was saying aloud to empty rooms. No wonder babies in need of winding, let rip with a good gurn.

Even more worrying was the stabbing pain in my chest which it turned out was also caused by the trapped wind.

Just before Christmas I took an Irritable Bowel (IBS) test to find out if certain foods and drinks were annoying my sorry gut. The test revealed I had become intolerant to gluten, eggs, dairy, chocolate, most types of nuts and worst of all – beer and wine. Basically anything that was nice and enjoyable.

So for the last eight and a half weeks (59 days, six hours and 24 minutes at the time of writing) I have been trying to follow this fun-free diet and it’s been brutal. I was almost reduced to tears in the aisles of supermarkets surveying the huge array of foods I could no longer eat, before continuing my search for the colourless and minimalist ‘free from’ section in the supermarket.

Yes, I have managed to get by, by gorging on green and healthy lunches and dinners, but I still pine for all the normal not-so-healthy foods. However, after many hours searching, I found some sugary gluten free ginger cookies which have become a daily reward, and I fear they are more than helping to counter-balance all this super-healthy super-food malarkey.

These are sad times. This must be a mid-life crisis. Conversations dominated by ailments, making salads interesting, and moaning about GP receptionists, are now my lot.

Anyway, the wind has been settling along with the chest pains and the fear that I was about to simultaneously expire and explode with one final monstrous burp.

What these last three months has given me, is a little more insight and empathy for those whose lives are dominated by diet and food choices.

My eyes have been opened to the colourful temptation of unhealthy foods and the powerful allure of these foods. Even some of the so-called ‘free from’ foods are full of other countless unpronounceable ingredients and they are highly processed.

And there’s the cost involved. It’s hardly a revelation, but healthy foods are a lot more expensive than the junk food. It’s hard to turn away from a large but still manageable chocolate bar priced at a nice round £1, fluttering its eyelids at you from beside the check-out till. Same goes for the crisps and I have discovered a few gluten free options which have been greedily and selfishly devoured.

But when it comes to fuelling the body, you get out what you put in. There’s plenty more cliches where that came from, but they are all mostly true.

At my induction in Source, Niall explained the importance of diet as part of the exercise programme. Crash diets, by their very name, are not the way to go. In fact his advice was very simple, that by increasing the number of good foods in our daily diets, we will have less room for the rubbish.

Like the exercise, Niall, said a healthy diet must become a normal part of our lifestyle, where the habits of eating better is engrained and it becomes automatic.

So as well as balancing weights in unusual positions, I have been forced to think about almost every meal I eat.

Even after eight weeks, eating all this healthy stuff does not quite feel completely normal for me, but at the same time, avoiding the bad stuff seems less of an ordeal.

This IBS diet I am on is meant to last for 12 weeks, and then I am allowed to introduce one of the banned foodstuffs each week, to help identify which one I am still intolerant to. Unfortunately that means there will be no big blow-out at the end. Just a civilised sip or two of beer maybe.

And I suppose, avoiding a big blow-out, is what this has been all about, if you know what I mean…