The Patricia Bech Fitness Diary: Why I started my journey

I have been writing for a good few years now and my main topic of interest is travel. The Patricia Bech Travel Notes is my ‘writing hub’ and this is where I publish a lot of my thoughts, articles and bulletin features relating to various destinations around the world. I also write for quite a few other websites and publications about travel. As you can imagine, it has been pretty challenging to write about my favourite subject during the pandemic!

Patricia Bech Fitness Diary focuses on a journey to better physical and mental health

Therefore I have been wanting to branch out and expand the Patricia Bech Travel Notes for some time, but equally I don’t want to muddle the content on my website. So I have turned to Medium as a place to explore some other themes! This is an experiment if you like and just a way for me to start to develop my writing skills in other areas. It is also a bit of fun of course, which is the main reason I write generally!

This particular article is about fitness, but I also want to explore lots of different topics and hopefully publishing on Medium gives me another channel where I can do this without upsetting my travel readers!

So back to the point of the article, I have started a fitness journey and I want to share my progress as I follow the path to better health. It has been a few weeks since I began a fitness drive and I wanted to share the trigger reasons for doing so and encourage anyone else who is thinking about getting fitter to also start the journey.

Here are the four main reasons driving my new regime.

Lockdown

Sometimes I think that we need a major change to happen in order to encourage us to revaluate our lives. Lockdown has caused this to happen for me. I have kept my computer time a positive experience through lockdown (for example writing my Patricia Bech Travel Notes and other articles) but I also found myself behind a screen too much. I was piling on the pounds and my mental health was struggling. One day, I woke up and decided that I needed to spend lockdown more constructively and I set myself a goal of losing some weight and also getting much more fitter from a cardio perspective.

A new challenge

When I browse social media, I often see pictures of people doing yoga, pilates or home workouts. Although I have been a keen outdoors person in the past, I felt like there is a lot of the fitness world that I have yet to discover. I want to try new ways of working out and see how my body responds. I want to experiment with resistance training, home weights, meditation, yoga and pilates, as well as the usual running and cardio activities. Most of this will be from a beginner perspective and I want to write about it from an accessible angle. It can be scary entering the fitness world, but if I can do it then so can you!

The Patricia Bech Fitness Diary is all about trying new activities like lifting weights and showing that everyone can do it!

Mental health

I have touched on mental health and how lockdown has been very difficult psychologically. When I was looking at how I could help myself get through the days, I figured that introducing more exercise and different types of working out would actually give me some structure. Obviously there are also some great benefits to fitness and it is proven to improve your mind too. A few weeks down the line and I can definitely vouch for this!

Physical health

As you get older — even though I am not that old yet! — I think you start to become more and more aware of your physical health. In lockdown it can be tempting to slip into bad habits by eating and drinking too much alcohol. I didn’t want to let myself go that much or let my body down. I am quite a shy person anyway and even though I only put on a little bit of weight, I didn’t want to start on a downward spiral. Also I want to make sure my body is as healthy as possible so that I can fight things like the coronavirus as best as possible if I am unlucky enough to catch it.

These four reasons are all linked to each other in a way. I don’t think that you need lots of reasons to start on a new fitness journey, but even if just one of these touches you, then maybe now is the time to start.

I don’t want my first article to be too long and so I will stop here. Now that we have covered why I have started my exercise regime, next time, I will write a diary entry about my first steps. If you are reading this and want to make a change to your life, now is the best time. There are so many home workout plans to follow and it is a really positive way to spend your time. More on that in my next diary entry…

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