Category Archives: mental health

Identifying Your Needs

My wife is good at making homemade ice-cream. Too good in fact. Last week, after inviting friends over to our house, she made copious amounts of the stuff. The flavours were chocolate, caramel and pecan, malted chocolate (which tasted like a malteaser that had fallen from heaven.)

But it hadn’t come from heaven. The leftovers from our gathering were in our freezer. A freezer which needed to be defrosted and sold on Facebook marketplace.

Hmm. How do we begin to clear out the freezer without any food waste? Shay to the rescue!

I wasn’t expecting to eat all three flavours which spilled out of the bowl tonight. I first looked in the top cupboard for some salted peanuts, but didn’t have any. I then checked the crisp cupboard, but the multipack choices were not exciting me. That’s the problem when you win a freebie on the Lidl scratch card app. You end up with the beef, roast chicken and prawn cocktail flavours instead of cheese and onion.

It was only when my wife mentioned that the freezer needed clearing out did I remember the ice cream.

After a tough day at work and only getting snippets of information regarding our VISA and business set up in Portugal from my wife’s texts, by the time the evening arrived I was ready to emotionally eat.

I love coming home to my wife and kids, but I can’t pretend that the chaos of our home, with packed boxes piling up and the certain uncertainties that moving house/country brings can be a stressy time in the Durant-Duckworth household. Emotions are running high. I sometimes deal with that with the occasional emotional eat.

I am, of course, following the Never Give Up Personal Training handbook. I have always told my clients to give themselves a break if they make certain food choices during emotional times in their lives. It’s about identifying your needs.

The term ’emotional eating’ is often seen as a bad thing. It’s a weak act. It’s a crux that we need to rid ourselves of. Instead, we should go for a jog or slog it out in the gym. Sod that, tonight I wanted ice cream. Ok, I wanted salted peanuts or cheese and onion crisps but the ice-cream was more than a suitable replacement for giving me a big emotional hug.

We are emotional creatures. And with such complex needs as ours, is it even possible to eat without emotion?!

But the one big, big rule that we must remember is that the slice of cake, the bowl of cheesy pasta or indeed the serving of half of the freezer tasting of malteasers is that you can identify that this is a moment of emotional eating. It is a perfectly acceptable way to ease your emotions as long as you recognise it as your choice.

You have lots of choices when you are faced with an emotional time. For me, I turn to exercise, meditation, talking to others (usually my wife), watching or listening to something funny, watching football, having sex or having a glass of red. But I cannot deny that eating can sometimes trump all of the above. It is an option and sometimes I use it.

And once you can recognise that this is as acceptable as any other coping mechanism then you will begin to improve on your physical and mental wellbeing.

Identifying your needs for every given situation will be different. This is because every situation will pose very different challenges to the next. Just know that you have options. You are in control. You get to choose.

Go to the gym. Have a run. Meditate. By all means do all of those positive things. But never feel guilty about an occasional bowl of ice cream to give you an emotional pick up. And enjoy the whole damn thing!

Runaway Train

Perhaps when we find ourselves at a particularly low ebb in life, we turn to stuff that feeds off of that anxiety. It’s like a form of self harm. Scratching away at the scab that protects the wound.

Severe self harm such as cutting ones self, so it has been said by those who have done it, forms a release as they see a trickle of blood come from a cut.

This release, in more clinical terms, is known as the hormone dopamine. The body’s natural happy drug.

I never self harmed in this way. Instead, I found the gym and, albeit not exactly what we think of when we think of self harm, if you break down the muscle fibres which causes muscle hypertrophy during resistance training then you are ‘harming’ yourself. Certainly, that’s what the body identifies, and therefore triggers the  release of dopamine in the same way as the body of a  self harmed would.

I’ve written before about how the gym saved my life. And it isn’t PT spiel to get people to the gym. It’s just the fact that we need to release these hormones somehow and the gym ticks all of the positive boxes in doing that.

But what about before the gym? Back in the early 90’s there weren’t gyms that catered for 14 year olds in the UK. There seems to be a number of gyms that have certain set hours throughout the week which can be used for under 16’s, such as the gym I train at in Scarborough. But I’m not sure this was the case for me, so I turned to music.

As I mentioned in my first paragraph, we tend to find the stuff that feeds off of our anxieties at particular times in our life. So when I felt low I didn’t turn to the Greatest Hits of Black Lace. I wasn’t doing the agadoo when I felt worthless. Instead, I would listen to grunge and rock music. Bands like Marilyn Manson, Nirvana , Pearl Jam and Jeff Buckley would create more angst and yet in some way soothe me. Perhaps, in music such as this, if you feel that the lyrics speak directly to you, then you can be comforted in that somebody else is feeling your pain. They understand. It’s an arm around the shoulder.

One of my first albums that I bought was the Soul Asylum LP Grave Dancers Union. The lead singer, Dave Pirner, often sang about his depression and it is probably best captured in the track ‘Runaway Train’.

He describes how his own depression felt like a runaway train. That was his metaphor for his anxieties that would spiral out of control.

And this isn’t unusual. One in six UK adults suffer from depression. Females are far more likely to seek help for their mental health than men. A charity organisation that I have had contact with through my work is Andy’s Man Club, which offers advice and meetings in their local areas. I would advise any man who feels that they need help to give them a call.

When I first became a PT I didn’t appreciate how much work goes into mental health rather than physical health. Sure, most people want to lose a few pounds or grow muscle but there is usually an underlying reason for why a gym member has approached me for PT.

By no means are all of my clients depressed! But there is a certain need for us all to be accepted. It is when we realise who we are looking for acceptance from that we can start moving forward. And that person is ourselves. Nobody else.

We drive the runaway train. It can derail sometimes and we can feel out of control. But fundamentally we can get it back on track and put on the brakes. And that’s why people come to me. Because no matter what gym goal they tell me, as long as I deliver in enabling them to accept themselves first and foremost then the rest is easy. A few pounds, no problem! Feeling pumped, easy! Because they start to do it on their terms. They gain control of their mind and their body.

And we can take this same principle outside of the gym with identifying any life goals. The very best Personal Trainers also make excellent life coaches because the needs of an individual inside the gym is simply just a reflection of their greater needs outside of it. It’s all relative to the bigger picture. And then, like a jigsaw, we can piece it all together. It starts making sense. We can take control.

We’ve all got a runaway train, but first you need to understand that you are the driver. Contact me if you need to talk.

shay.pt@hotmail.com