Polly Vernon

WOTCHA muppets; Happy New Year! Welcome to Grazia’s Healthy- ish issue, a publishing event

that has me thinking about health, and specifically: exercise. What it means to be interested in fitness; what it means to be fit. Which, most unexpectedly and following years of not being, I am.

No one is more surprised than me. Here’s what I used to ‘know’ about fitness:

1. It is for obsessive dullard meatheads who aren’t clever enough to know how to stay thin by just not eating much.

2. It is for people too socially inadequate to risk the pub, or coffee house, or, y’know, literary salons, so instead frequent gyms, aka strip-lit, mirror-walled, overpriced temples to narcissism.

3. It is for people who can’t dress, so wear Lycra.

(4. It is for people who are better than me. Stronger, leaner, meaner, quicker. Intimidating people I will never be, so why bother trying, when I can dismiss the whole lark with unfounded prejudice?)

Here’s what I know about fitness now, five years after back problems forced me to give my (now beloved) Pilates a go; two years after Nicola Adams (who I interview on page 32) inspired me to try a boxing class (I’ve been back every Saturday since):

1. Your body wants to move. Desperately. It is built for motion and it craves it. Why would you deny your body its dearest wish?

2. Fitness is not about being good at sport. Fitness is about finding an exercise you enjoy so much, you Just. Keep. Going. Even if you’re rubbish. Even if you fall over and come last and drop the ball and screw up the steps. Because: who cares? No one! That’s who. PE at school gave me the idea you were either good at sport (which I wasn’t), or you were humiliated by it. Fitness now is just turning up. Trying. Pushing a smidge harder than I did last time. Being good at it? Pah! Loving it anyway: that’s the thing!

3. Your muscles learn, remember how to do things, independently of the rest of you. Your brain may be going: ‘I don’t get this, I don’t understand, my limbs don’t go that way, never have, never will, are you mad? Stop! Stop now!’ But your body will go: ‘Chill brain; we’re cool…’ and then, like a miracle: suddenly do exactly what it’s supposed to. Exactly what you swore it could never do, moments earlier.

4. Endorphins are better than cocaine. And cake. And Gucci. And likes.

5. Nothing makes me feel better about my body – more accepting, prouder, more loving, kinder – than when it’s sweaty and knackered and aching and stretched and I’m ripping Lycra off it, heading for the shower.