RebelRose

Hi all, thanks for all your encouraging comments. Shortly after I posted this everything went tits up - my elderly scottish grandfather was hospitalised, which necessitated a madcap dash out of Yorkshire at 3 in the morning, and I had to drop everything to handle that as thats the exact kind of thing the other ill family member (parent) has problems dealing with (out of routine, etc). With everything that's happened the past year, I've ended up speaking to the head of my uni department and arranging to retake my final year, so I'm stuck in bureaucratic limbo at the moment, but things are on the up both in getting my family stuff sorted and some care set up for both granddad and parental unit. I've managed to maintain a mostly-paleo diet throughout this, and I am starting to see some changes. I've now got the summer at home to keep tweaking my diet and start re-introducing regular exercise - bodyweight, yoga and some cardio - aiming to have a routine/habit well entrenched by the time I start back at uni in October. Actually looking forward to going back to classes for the first time in a long time, and also to my new living arrangements - I'll be moving into a little attic flat with one other friend who is also a paleo-newb, so we're planning to tag-team each other on diet and exercise. Everything is a long uphill crawl at the moment but I feel like I'm starting to make some progress.

Ey up! Firmly forcing myself to delurk and make some friends, despite my natural inclination to hide in the background on forums. I'm a 5"7 twenty-one year old Scottish/Yorkshire lass (makes for a really odd accent). I was born and raised in a small village in a little corner of Yorkshire that I like to think of as my very own Shire (though I'm a rather tall hobbit). I'm coming up on graduation from my undergrad (hopefully), and am very much going through a quarter life existential crisis. The past six months/year have...not been great. I've been struggling with completing my degree due to stress, compounded by some recently diagnosed ill health in close family member. It's all forced me to take a long hard look at several aspects of my life and ask myself what I really want. For a start, I want to be a hell of a lot stronger - physically and mentally. I'll figure the rest out as we go. I've always been fairly fit and healthy, but I've also always been fairly on the heavy side - part of it is my build, I've got relatively broad shoulders and hips, and am definitely built for curves - but lately it's crept up past what I'm comfortable with. I'm fed up with looking in the mirror or at photographs and being unhappy with my flabby arms and total lack of visible muscle definition, but neither am I naive or desperate enough to start starving myself ala women's magazines - I want to be strong and healthy, not half-starved. So on that basis I'm attempting to switch to a more paleo diet gradually, cutting out junk food, etc, and starting on the beginners bodyweight circuit and interval training. I'm not a stranger to exercise - over the years I've done gymnastics, netball, trampolining, horse-riding, swimming, surfing, judo and quidditch (yep, quidditch!), but I've never managed to make it just another part of my everyday life, rather than an irritating obligation that falls at the wayside later on, or gets way too expensive for a student to maintain. I'm going to be monitoring my progress photographically, one a week, and compile them on a monthly basis to see how it's going - I hate being chained to an incredibly changeable number on a scale. Long term goals? Well for a long time I thought after I graduated I was going to go into scientific, lab-based research, but after spending six months working in labs last year, I'm not so sure. So I'm taking a year out from full-time education to pursue other projects which I'm passionate about, but never had the time for. I want to be fit and have the energy to pursue those projects, and take the chance to get out of my bubble and challenge myself a little. I'm going to compile some kind of a challenge list for the next year, running July-July 2015/2016 (so starting after graduation). Some of those will be small things, others will be a bit more adventurous, and the key one will to be in good shape for training to climb Mt Kilimanjaro with my Dad at some point in the next couple of years. Past 48 hours, I've started trying to shift my diet to more paleo, stopped eating biscuits and the like - made a paleo banana pancake for the first time, which was tastier than I was expecting for what is essentially a sweet banana omelette. Did my first run of beginners bodyweight circuit this morning - ee gawd my pushups are rusty. My judo sensei would be appalled. Made it through two reps of the circuit before my muscles were getting too shaky to do proper form, so I stopped after two with the intention to work up to three-four good circuits as opposed to three mediocre wobbly ones.. Feeling good, though my thighs are definitely bewildered by the sudden torture I'm putting them through.. I'll start the day off tomorrow with interval training - done that before, years ago, so I'm not unfamiliar with it. We'll see how it goes. Probably the hardest thing is going to be forming paleo-based eating habits - living on campus these past three years I've gotten far too used to automatically reaching for the vending machine. Hope to make some friends! And if any of you are ever about this little corner of the 'Shire, give me a shout, I'm happy to tour guide .