Our guest health editor Magda Szubanski says small steps make a huge difference in becoming the best you can be.
I am incredibly excited to be editing the health pages of Woman’s Day because it’s an enormous number of readers to, hopefully, positively influence. Really, I am chuffed and honoured.
I strongly believe that if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. The whole thing for me about losing weight is, yes, you can wear fantastic clothes but it really is about health, improving your fitness and your enjoyment of life.
I caught up with a friend I went camping with a couple of Easters ago on the south coast of New South Wales. She reminded me that I used to drive from where my camp was to where hers was, about 200 metres, because I couldn’t walk that far easily. How sad is that?
It’s really hard and demoralising when you get that overweight and that unfit. So my first hope would be to get the message out to people before they get to that point that life can be so much better, richer and rewarding.
My second message, though, is that even if it has got to that point, you can still do something about it. It’s never too late! I think things are made a lot harder these days by the ridiculous pressure to be perfect – that if you can’t look like Kate Moss then there’s no use. Personally, I think the body Nazi in our head is much worse than the one we think is in other people’s minds.