December is the time when we start to think about setting our New Year’s Resolutions but perhaps we shouldn’t?  Julie Creffield tells us about her new book New Year, Same You…

I grew up in a family where all the grown up women ever did was talk about what diet they were on and whether they were being good or bad when it came to what they were putting in their mouth. Nobody ever did any exercise. Well not consistently anyway. I was also teased about my weight as a child even though I wasn’t remotely overweight so its hardly any wonder that I too embraced the yoyo dieting mindset in my teens and didn’t really enjoy sport.

And then I discovered running and everything changed.

At a cumbersome size 20 I committed to training for the London Marathon and completely changed my lifestyle. I even set up a blog www.toofattorun.co.uk to encourage other overweight women to give running a go. But after the birth of my daughter in 2013 and having put back on most of the weight I had lost in training, I realised that I was getting obsessive about weight loss and was losing the joy of sport.  I decided to ditch my scales forever and take a new more balanced approach to my all round health.   I didn’t want Rose growing up with the same issues as me.

New Year, Same You is a book about that journey, but also about why New Years Resolutions simply don’t work and how you can improve your wellbeing each and every day without the need for extreme diets or brutal fitness regimes. The book comes from a ‘health at every size perspective’, so this is not about what you can lose in terms of weight but more what you can gain from achieving a sense of balance in your life.

We live in a world where there is enormous pressure for women to be a certain size, yet so many women are too scared to exercise through fear of being ridiculed. Let’s show our daughters, our sister, our aunties and even our mothers that being physically active is not odd or extreme, but a route to health and happiness.

It’s time to embrace the amazing body you already have, and simply go out and start enjoying life NOW!!

New Year, Same You is written by Plus Sized Athlete and Founder of The Fat Girls Guide to Running Julie Creffield and is available to download from Amazon priced £7.99 from Monday 14th December.