About four months ago I was diagnosed with MS. I’m not going to write a big dramatic post about that part, not today anyway, but I’ll be honest about what it did to me in the short term. There was a bit of depression in there, the kind you don’t always admit to at the time, and I dealt with it the way a lot of people do. I ate. Chocolate mostly. Chocolate has always been my vice and for a few weeks it was more or less a food group.
The problem is that I also have type 2 diabetes, so emotionally eating my way through bars of chocolate was about the worst thing I could be doing, MS or no MS. And I knew it. I knew I needed to eat better and move more. Every single day I told myself the same thing: I’ll start tomorrow. Tomorrow is a very comfortable place to keep your good intentions. Nothing ever actually has to happen there.
Then about three weeks ago something just snapped in my head. I can’t point to a single moment or some big realisation. I just woke up done with waiting for tomorrow. I started counting my calories that same day and I joined the gym.
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’ll know I care a lot about privacy, and about choosing what data I hand over to whom. So the obvious tools were out. I wasn’t about to feed every meal into MyFitnessPal or every run into Strava and let them quietly build a picture of my body and my habits. That’s just not for me.
What I could do was self-host. I set up SparkyFitness for logging my food, which does much the same job as MyFitnessPal but on my own server with my own data staying mine. And I built myself a simple training log for the exercise side. I genuinely enjoyed building it, which is half the appeal. Both have public diaries if you fancy following along:
- Food log: https://food.douglasireland.com/public
- Training log: https://fittrack.douglasireland.com/
On the running side I’ve started Couch to 5K again. If you’ve not come across it, it’s a beginners’ running plan (the NHS version is the one most people in the UK use) that eases you from not running at all up to running 5k. Three sessions a week over nine weeks, starting with short bursts of running in between walking and building up from there. I’m on week 3 as of today.
To run the plan I use an app called Just Run, which I found on F-Droid. It fits the same rule as everything else here: no ads, no account, no tracking, just a timer that tells you when to run and when to walk. It’s made by a small developer called Jupli and it’s exactly the sort of quiet, does-one-thing-well app I like to give a shout to, so if you’re starting C25K yourself it’s well worth a look.
Alongside the running I’m keeping my food to around 1800 calories a day.
I won’t pretend three weeks is long enough to call anything a transformation. But I can honestly say I already feel amazing. Better than I have in a long time, and better than I expected to this soon. Ten years ago I could run a 5k in 23 minutes and I was sitting at a 22.4 BMI. That’s the version of me I’m aiming to get back to. Not to prove anything to anyone, just because I felt good back then and I’d like to feel that way again, MS and diabetes and all.
If you want to keep an eye on how it’s going, the diaries above update as I do. No login, no tracking, just the numbers.