About Me - Part 3
This is part 3 of a three part mini series. If you are still reading – more power to you! If you haven’t already, you can read part 1 here and part 2 here.
Getting obsessed with fitness
Post marathon, and by now living just with Autumn in Clapton, I was loving finding new ways of exercising and challenging myself. I did a couple of Tough Mudder races with a group of friends which was so much fun, ran another marathon (not so much fun) and enjoyed going to classes, doing hot yoga, and swimming.
Trouble was, I was getting a bit obsessed.
I was starting to plan my diary around exercise and classes, and turn down social occasions in lieu of making a gym class or going for a run. I think that Autumn and I brought out the worst in each other in that regard, and anything she was doing I wanted to make sure I was at least equaling, if not better. I’m not sure if that was her experience or not, but if I’m totally honest it was certainly mine.
By now I was 29, and though I still enjoyed being in London I was starting to feel very lonely.
When your friends all start settling down
Most of my friends by now were settling down, and I was still very single – going on tinder dates and meeting people but it was never coming to anything.
I can now see that because I was feeling out of control in one part of my life (relationships – i.e. that I didn’t have one and felt lonely) I was massively overcompensating with another.
Two things happened in 2016 which changed my life for the better.
I don’t regret getting into Network Marketing
One – I was introduced to Network Marketing. Though I hated the concept of the business, and ultimately gave it up a couple of months later, I loved the self development work that I was introduced to.
I began reading personal development books, watching TED talks and thinking about possibilities that I’d never thought of before.
Breaking my shoulder was the best thing that could have happened to me
The second was that I got knocked off my bike and I broke my shoulder.
Sounds like an odd thing to claim that it changed my life for the better I know, but it did.
When I was lying in the road, clearly very hurt, my first thought (alright second, after ‘is my face ok’) was ‘I’m not going to be able to go to the gym. I’m going to get fat’.
I knew that that was not OK. As it turned out, I had to have 3 months off the gym – and funnily enough, I didn’t get fat. Not even close. If anything, I lost weight because I lost all my muscle.
It was a powerful reminder to me that I was becoming obsessed with fitness and exercise, and taught me that it’s OK to miss a class occasionally – heck it’s OK to miss months of exercise sometimes, there are more important things.
Moving to Qatar
I had just about recovered from the broken shoulder in early 2017 when I was offered the chance of a lifetime by a former colleague. He had got a job in Qatar, and he asked if I would be interested in coming out to work for him.
I jumped at the chance – I was done with London and had nothing keeping me there, plus the tax free salary was more than I could ever imagine earning! I was in about 5k worth of credit card debt at this time, plus I had my student loans. Not crazy levels, but certainly enough to give me sleepless nights.
Moving out to Qatar would mean I could pay off both, plus I’d always thought I would work abroad again I just didn’t know where. Off I went in March 2017, to a place I’d done so little research on that I honestly thought I would land and there would just be a tent and some camels!
Life in Qatar
Qatar was certainly a culture shock, one I learnt time and time again in my work there. I was still working in contract catering, this time in a hospital setting up the patient dining, staff restaurant and the hospitality services.
It was certainly a challenge, and opened my eyes to many other cultures and the brutality of workplaces in other parts of the world – we are protected so well by HR laws and regulations in the UK and we take them for granted – they just don’t exist elsewhere.
Once again I got lucky and moved in with great housemates who introduced me to their social life and friends. In the expat population, I’ve found everyone to be incredibly welcoming and friendly – after all we are all in the same boat.
The stories you’ve heard about expat life in the Middle East are true – or they were for me at least. I paid off my debt in 6 months and I was living the high life! Brunches! Booze! Sunshine! Parties! It was awesome.
I wasn’t totally happy in my job, I found working 6 days a week and being on call 24/7 a challenge – but I was living a good life.
Meeting my husband
Things started to change in May 2018 when I met my now-husband. By this time I’d been single for the best part of 6 years, and I knew I didn’t want to mess around. We got engaged after 7 months and began to plan our wedding for the following summer.
I had really had enough at my job and it grated on him that I was constantly ‘on’. We agreed that I would leave my job, we’d take the summer off together to get married and go traveling and then come back to Qatar in time for Charlie to resume a teaching post at a new school.
It was the best summer of my life. I loved being so free and not tied to anything and we loved spending all that time together. We got married on the hottest day of the year on record in the UK and then took a multi-destination honeymoon across Europe.
Naively, I thought it would be easy to get a job when I came back to Qatar – how wrong I was! We didn’t have to worry about my visa because I was under Charlies sponsorship – but money was getting tight and more importantly I was getting bored – I needed to come get back to work.
I tirelessly sent CV after CV, application after application – and begun to get pretty disheartened. Fortunately, I had an ‘in’ to an airline through a friend who worked in the HR department and she was able to push forward my application for me.
After 3 interviews I was thrilled to be offered a job in the Catering Department at the airline in October. Anyone who has lived here though will tell you – nothing happens fast in the Middle East.
By the time my paperwork was processed and approved I was given a January 2020 start date which actually suited me – it meant that we could fit in a sneaky weekend winter break in Prague before Christmas and then spend Christmas in the UK with my family, something I’d missed out on for the past two years.
Starting a new job… at the start of the Pandemic
I started my new job on the 19th January 2020. Whilst I was so excited to be getting back to work, and have always been fascinated by airports and airplanes, alarm bells started to ring fairly quickly when I realised that the senior manager of the department had an all work-no play type attitude – he thought nothing of expecting staff to be in at 4am, expecting them to replay to emails at midnight and generally being on call the whole time.
Though we were excited about the travel perks that me working for an airline would derive, I started to worry about how I would maintain a work/life balance and be able to maintain a happy relationship with Charlie.
Fortunately, I needn’t have worried – Covid hit, and I was made redundant on the 12th Aril, 10 weeks after I started.
Everything happens for a reason
As I’ve said before, I am a firm believer in everything happens for a reason. I’d always said that I didn’t want Children, and when Charlie and I got married he knew where I stood on the matter.
We’d had the odd conversation about it here and there since we got married, and me losing my job made me thing about it even more. I tentatively put the idea to Charlie – that knowing I wouldn’t be able to get a job anytime soon, maybe the time is right for us to have a family.
We did the maths, worked out that we could live on one salary and decided to go for it – I came off the pill a couple of weeks later and very naively expected that I’d be pregnant the following month.
Of course, that wasn’t the case and I was so shocked to read about the effects of the pill on the body. I’d been on it for about 17 years by this point and had never once questioned what I was putting into my body every day.
All I wanted was to make sure I didn’t get pregnant, and now conversely, I wanted the exact opposite – though it was clear that it wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
Training as a Health Coach
We’d made the decision that I wasn’t going to look for a job, but I couldn’t just sit around all day doing nothing, waiting to get pregnant – I needed something to occupy my time.
I started to look into different health and nutrition courses I could do, something which would look good on my CV in a few years time when I did go back to work.
For a few years I’d been wanting to make the move into health and nutrition, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to do that. In the hospital I’d worked alongside Dietitians and I realised that that wasn’t for me – plus studying to be either a Dietitian or a Nutritionist would take time and money that we just did not have.
I’d considered training as a PT, but I knew PT’s worked crazy hours and often go paid very little – and I’d done more than my fair share of that in my waitressing days!
When I came across the concept of a ‘Heath Coach’ my interest was immediately piqued. I did some research, made some calls, talked it through with Charlie – and decided to invest what remained of my savings into the Health Coach training Program at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
Present Day
That brings us to today. With Health Coaching, straight away, I loved it – I’ve found my calling. I’ve loved learning about different ways of eating and fueling the body, and thinking about health as a 360 degree thing – there is so much more to it than just food and exercise.
Its scary of course, thinking of myself as a business owner – but hundreds of people around the world do exactly this, so why can’t I? I believe I grew into myself in my 30s. I calmed down, settled down, and really began to find a balance.
I exercise now because I enjoy it and it makes me feel good – not as a punishment or to ‘burn off’ something I’ve eaten. I’m constantly educating myself around food, but I don’t obsess over it. I strive to eat well to fuel my body, and I eat intuitively the majority of the time.