How I move Lydia Dinga
Youtuber explains the difficult battle to ‘love her body’ and says diet has been key to transforming her fitness regime
I was born in Kenya and remained there until I was about seven or eight years old. Then I went to the UK to live and moved to a town that wasn’t ethnically diverse, where my family was part of a small handful of black families in the whole place. It meant that I grew up knowing that I was just very different. Like everything about me. From my hair, skin and body, I was constantly told that it was very weird looking. But since people started to reduce women’s body types to trends, the perception of what’s nice and aesthetically pleasing has suddenly changed. It’s why I still have a complex relationship with my body, and have fought to love it.
I really do think I deal with a degree of body dysmorphia.
It became more apparent whilst filming my eight-part wedding series for my Youtube channel – which has accumulated 227,000 subscribers since 2009 – to document my journey to marrying my now husband, Damini. In episode four, during my second dress fitting, I was so nervous because my weight fluctuates a lot.
And the way I see my body versus the way my actual body looks are two very different things for me. I was afraid to open my eyes and look in the mirror. There was so much going on at the time, and I was stress eating – though the food was going nowhere. I’ve experienced that before, when I was buying my first home in 2019, which I also documented. I lost so much weight for the same reasons, and even hit my goal weight. But I wasn’t happy. I had some friends pull me aside to ask if I was OK. It’s why I’ve stopped being in pursuit of a dream body, it just keeps us in this vicious cycle. Brides put so much pressure on themselves to look their best on their big day, but I still wanted to look like myself outside of societal pressures. It’s just one day.
When I used to go to the gym regularly it was purely for vanity. It had nothing to do with my health.
I don’t know if that’s good to admit or not, but that’s the truth. But when I experienced the “second puberty” – a term that describes the changes our bodies go through in our late twenties – and turned 30, even the thought of cake added calories. So you can imagine how bad things got when we went into lockdown. There was no freedom of movement and my day revolved around recreating my favourite recipes. I could see where things were headed, and decided to walk 10,000 steps a day.
When I lost 13lbs, my husband and I came up with the 30-day #Dingastepchallenge, which launched on Instagram in May 2020.
At the time, we were all longing for friendship, conversation and even love, because we were stuck inside. It has since gone viral and grown to encourage hundreds and thousands of people from all over the world to walk either 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000 steps a day, with the aim to advance by two levels by the end of the challenge. The community uses the hashtag to share experiences and the pacer app to ask questions for accountability.
It’s been very important for me to share the realities of walking as a form of exercise.
It’s not easy. It’s really hard, boring and long. It takes roughly 3½ hours to walk 20,000 steps. You need a podcast or maybe a friend to walk with, and sometimes it may rain, but it works. That’s a guarantee. Though it’s not something you can just do casually. You have to be intentional about it and make time in the morning, lunchtime and evenings.
This was the beauty of lockdown – we had more time. For example, if I’ve got a nail appointment that’s an hour away, instead of driving I would walk. I don’t do 10,000 steps every day, sometimes I walk 8,000 or 6,000, depending on what I’m doing that day. But you have to plan ahead and incorporate it into your day. Walking is also cost-effective – it’s free. Why wouldn’t you do it?
People forget that our diet is also a major part of exercise. It’s 70 per cent food and 30 per cent exercise, but no one wants to hear it.
People want it to be the other way around. You can’t out-exercise a bad diet. There are not enough hours in the day for you to be in the gym. That’s why it has to become a lifestyle. The things I choose to eat are what has primarily transformed my fitness regime and helped me maintain my weight, apart from my biggest problem: my sweet tooth. I love processed and refined sugar. I love Haribos so much. But it’s about moderation and balance, right? That’s the only way we can be consistent and ensure we don’t lose ourselves in the process.
Watch ‘The Wedding Series’ documentary on Lydia Dinga’s Youtube channel now.