This is the one part of my website where I actually talk about me! This site isn’t really about me, so that’s why I am keeping it to just this one page. And this is the story of why I became interested in health and fitness, and how I came to my current beliefs, so it somewhat informs on the rest of what I post.
So it started back when I was a kid in England, I started getting a lot of pain in my belly when I was 6, which became permanent with added toilet troubles when I was 9. This started a decade long odyssey of hospital visits and stays. I often was going in multiple times a week. Nothing the doctors suggested ever really helped. Whether it was medications, incredibly restricted diets, psychological counseling, probiotics, some alternative medicines, and even a strict formula only diet; nothing really worked for long. I was never left any better, often worse off due to side effects. Eventually my troubles became so bad that I was missing months of school at a time, I could barely go anywhere as my pain was too great or I could not be too far from a washroom. So how did I turn it all around?
Well you might think I had grown out of it, like the doctors were always promising but you would sadly be mistaken. I still have my problems but one thing I did on my own has meant that it is not as bad as it once was and is a lot more manageable. When I was 16 I started going to the gym to solve some of my other health problems related to muscle weaknesses: knee pain, and back pain. Well the harder I worked out the better my guts became. Who knew that working out could all but cure my toilet troubles? Sadly not my doctors or I might have been better a lot sooner. Unfortunately other things would still throw me off, and I was unable to get to the gym when I needed it the most. When I saw the TRX on TV I jumped at it, a tool that wasn’t gimmicky but would allow me to get a great workout in at home. After I got it set up I started right away, and I had the best summer. At this point I had graduated to an adult gastroenterology team, who wanted me to be in charge, and so were very supportive of any idea I had. With their help I was weaned off all my medications, and taken off my restricted diet. You have no idea what a joy it can be to drink milk until you haven’t been allowed to have any for 10 years!
Eventually I got discharged from medical care, not because I was cured but because my doctor said I could do a better job treating myself than he could. So with that I decided to study exercise science in order that I could help other people avoid what I had been through. After graduation I moved to Canada to be with my wife and to have our first child. Physical activity kept me in shape until I had appendicitis, and had to have emergency surgery. Since they had to make incisions in my abdominals I was barely able to move for a week and was instructed to not do anything hard for my core for a year. Well it lasted a little more than a year, I was out of the habit, and my diet and sleep patterns were not the greatest at this time; so I gained a bit of weight. Eventually I got up to 230lbs; borderline obese.
How could I, an aspiring personal trainer, be obese? I definitely had the knowledge of how to get fit and lose weight, so why wasn’t I? I realised that it was my approach that was failing. I wanted to be doing the best possible workout or diet, or what’s the point; which is a trap many people fall into. So I started to study habit based approaches to fitness and diet. Instead of going all out I focus on doing something small until it becomes ingrained as a habit (hence my URL), and then I add on a new one until it becomes and habit and so on. With this approach I have managed to lose 40lbs with no struggle or burn out. I’m not going to say it’s easy, but it’s not that hard either. The hardest part is really working out what step to take next. And this is what I want to help you with!
