Day 5 - Fit and Healthy

Day 5 of rosalilium’s 'blog every day in May' challenge

Fit and Healthy 

 (What do you do to stay fit or be a healthy individual? Share any useful tips and advice. Or tell us about your plans to get healthier.)

 

"Everything in moderation, including moderation"

I am a huge believer in this quote, sometimes called Petronius' Paradox and often attributed to Oscar Wilde.

Having spent most of my teenage years struggling with my weight, at the age of 18 I managed to lose 3 stones to get down to a fairly healthy sized 12-14.

Since then my weight has been up and down slightly (that's what settling down does for you) but I've always tried to adopt a healthy attitude to food, following the basic principle that you can eat anything you want, just not all the time!

 

When it comes to exercise, Andrew seems to be allergic to it claiming that he does enough strenous things at work. To be fair to him, he is fairly fit - but then he has had 20ish years of doing a physical job so perhaps he is right.

My exercise of choice is swimming. I've been a water baby all my life and I'm lucky that my workplace has an 50m olympic sized pool available to use with a staff discount. I try and swim there at least once a week and luckily it fits neatly into my lunch hour.

 

I'm also a huge fan of outdoor swimming as well, although I never have as much time as I'd like to picnic at the lido, share a river with some dragonflies or swim dreamily out to sea.

 

When it's miserable outside, I always turn to these two books about wild swimming with their atmospheric writing and mesmerising pictures.

Wild Swim by Kate Rew (Guardian Books, 2009) and Wild Swimming by Daniel Start (Punk Publishing, 2008)

 

 

 

 

My favourite places to swim outdoors...

1. Greenbank Swimming Pool, Street, Somerset - first opened in 1937 as a gift to the womenfolk of the town by Alice Clark, part of the Clarks Shoes dynasty; it's a lovely place to spend a sunny day with a picnic and friends.

Source: www.greenbankpool.co.uk

 

2. Jubilee Pool, Penzance, Cornwall - a beautiful art deco pool on the Cornish coast, opened in 1935 to celebrate King George V's Silver Jubilee; it's a bracing swim in salty seawater.

Sourcd: www.jubileepool.co.uk

 

3. Weymouth Bay, Dorset - a naturally shallow bay for miles, go there in early evening as the crowds are leaving and you can swim at your own pace with your own thoughts and a view of the Jurassic coastline. When you turn round to look at the beach, you won't realise how far out you've swum!

 

 

Here's hoping we get some decent sunny weather this year!