3 minute read
What I Mean When I Talk About Health
Health is a concept I see and then promptly hide from. I’m not ridiculously unhealthy, I tend to do more steps than I don’t, I dutifully have put my coat and hat on for what feels like three winters length and trudged around the nearest dyke with the dog, and I am up early each day poo picking my pony’s paddock, carting her water in clear plastic drums and lifting hay nets. I wouldn’t that’s probably at best a blanket of self-delusion and at worst a tad vain. I get tired if walking longer than an hour and my one thought when doing gardening or manual tasks is when is the earliest time I can put down the tools and pop inside for a cuppa. I am someone that pretends to be healthy, helped by my slight, but ‘gettingless-slight’ frame, but the nagging discontented voice inside me tells me otherwise.
My diet is okay(ish). framed disaster by breakfast (cereal) and tea (something typically British involving gravy and two types of vegetables) and that’s not to mention the snacks – hello, lockdown biscuit binge – which there is seemingly no time limit for (after tea, watching yet another true crime myself to a ‘Golden Oatie’ or two, an after the way out of the door to do the horse. Why, hello, bourbon biscuit. Snacking has become life.
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I look healthy from a distance, average BMI, no obvious impediments or stiffness in moving but get closer than the mandatory 2m and the worried line above my right eye becomes apparent, the permanent grey bags underneath my eyes from regularly waking up at 4am and the stiffness in my neck from long-term working at home. Seeing the daffodils burst into life, bringing with it slightly sunnier weather, has made me want to look outwards and enter the renewal of a health focused spring. For me this means committing to doing the full 30-day yoga programme, and not being stuck on day 14 like I have for the past two weeks, embracing lunchtime walks with zest and gusto and meal planning so that I reach for an orange or an apple rather than a custard cream.
It is not just the changing of the seasons that has made my focus on wellbeing so urgent, I am thirteen weeks pregnant and seeing the little life inside me at the 12-week scan, with one hand on their head and the other sucking their thumb was nothing short of incredible. I had seen pictures of friends baby scans which looked like a nondistinct blob, so I went with the expectation of there, being relieved ‘something’ at least was there and my morning sickness and growing overtaken by the utter humanness of the little baby I had been carrying with me everywhere I went. I took the scan picture home, kept it in my ‘important memory’ area in a drawer underneath my bed and kept sneaking a look during breaks in 9-5 home working, staring at the baby’s little nose and ears in wonder. It is this change that is making me look closer at the word ‘health’ and ask myself truly, am I really healthy or am I just doing the bare minimum? Emotionally, I am well known for having high highs and low lows. I have always been a ‘prickly’ exists on continuum of feeling mildly good to absolutely awful, one day to the next, with the lows lasting a month or more. I have been lost in the black fog before and my body tenses against the thought of going back there again. Yet it is not as easy as just not wanting something. During pregnancy, a time where blogs would have you believe it’s joyous and exciting (yes and yes, in parts), I have had days of jealousy, rage and lethargy with the pièce de résistance being a day of continuous crying, foetal position running through ‘what if’ scenarios in my head, which nothing but sleep could bring me back from. The vivid nature of pregnancy dreams
