Bend me shape me

SO (drum roll please) I quit smoking over three months ago now.

Surely by now I should be the picture of health? I should be literally glowing with vim and vigour.

According to medical websites by now my circulation should have improved and my lung function has increased by 30 per cent.

The cilia should have re-grown in my lungs, my chance of heart attack has decreased and supposedly my overall energy has increased.

However, I don’t feel any better. I’ve got a taste for chocolate now and seem to be getting wider and wider instead of having the skin of a new born baby and looking like one of those goddesses out of the Timotei advert.

This is not a good state of affairs really.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no danger of going back to the fags, I don’t want to.

That is not going to happen, you can’t get this far and then quit quitting.

So I have decided to view that as a process and therefore ‘stage one’. Now stage two has to include getting stronger, fitter and hopefully a bit thinner.

However this in itself is a bit of a mission. I haven’t actually exercised properly since I was pregnant with my daughter (that’s seven years, that’s shameful).

So I’m going to have to start from scratch. And then you’ve got to figure out when to do it. How can you put some sort of exercise programme into a day which is already jam-packed full of other stuff? Get up earlier is in fact the only answer.

Now that’s going to be a struggle. It’s still dark out there at that time in the morning you know. I am from the Green Goddess and Mad Lizzie generation. In fact if I dig around in the back of the cupboard I could probably unearth a Jane Fonda Betamax video.

I am no good at stepping in time, I get confused when I have to raise my arms at the same time.

I did own a Wii Fit: but I used it only twice in two years, I didn’t like the way the little ‘Me Cartoon’ expanded after it weighed me and was fatter than all the other cartoon people. So you see I don’t have great form.

As much as I look at myself in the mirror and think, you need to sort yourself out, actually taking action and doing the sorting out is proving to be much, much harder than I thought it would be.

So what to do? Is it worth it? Can I be bothered? Do I ever, ever want to get back into those jeans again?

Will Gidg be influenced by what I do or don’t do? The answer to all is, of course, Yes. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

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