When I grow up I want to be Lulu

The white fringed trousers

Exercise has always been something other people do. Sporty people, athletic people. People who can hit a ball and always look good in shorts. Not me. I like sitting down or even better, lying down.

I have the usual clichéd memories of exercise. Appalling at PE, picked last for every team, a sports day tragedy. I don’t have a competitive bone in my body so winning things held no appeal. When they did cross country I was one of the stewards telling them which way to go.

When I was 13 my Dad joined the new gym just off the bypass. They had classes and a pool and hairdryers in the changing rooms. A far cry from the local leisure centre with its communal showers and verrucas.

There was a teenage gym session on a Saturday morning and, painfully self conscious but hopeful, I went along. This could be my fresh start. No one knew about my lack of sporting prowess or that I couldn’t touch my toes. I could be a gymnast for all they knew. But there were two slim bronzed girls there who had my number straight away. They would whisper and look me up and down. They might not even have been talking about me but I felt like they were so what’s the difference? Such is the trauma of this memory that I can still remember one of them was called Honey, an intimidatingly cool name even then.

Glastonbury 2015, the best I have ever looked

Primarily though exercise has never held any appeal or joy for me because it’s always been about weight loss. The only reason to work out or move at all was to lose weight. To get thin. Going back and forth on a cross trainer in a grey room watching music videos on repeat was only ever to burn off enough calories to justify a Mars bar at the end of the day. There was no other benefit. I didn’t get the endorphins, I didn’t feel ‘pumped’ and there wasn’t a single moment when I didn’t think about how much longer there was before I could stop. After three weeks, when I inevitably hadn’t dropped a dress size all motivation vanished and I gave up.

Ten years ago I had more time and more money and a personal trainer. She was kind, endlessly positive and most of all, believed in me. I worked out with her on Hampstead Heath at 7:30AM and for the first time in my life became fit. I had workout gear, I sweated. My head went bright red while my neck and body remained white as snow. Jon called it my cherry tomato head. I went to Glastonbury that summer and looked the best I’ve ever looked. But when my trainer moved away and I was back to relying on my own willpower, I never did another burpee again.

Now time has passed, I’ve had three babies and I need to move. I need to do something. I need my cherry tomato head. I do want to lose weight but I also want to feel good. And I don’t want one without the other.

Last weekend Lulu joined Rod Stewart on stage at Glastonbury. She danced on in her fringed white trousers, doing high kicks while she sang Hot Legs. She’s 76. That, I thought, is where to be. She was having fun, enjoying her body and moving.

Where will my body be at 76? Unfit because I didn’t lose weight so stopped moving it? Full prawn from years of hunching and never stretching out? Hobbling about and wheezing on the stairs?!

I couldn't get my leg that high now

Exercise just to lose weight is not only incredibly boring, it’s also short sighted. For the first time I am thinking about exercise as longevity. I am thinking about my old lady body. How I want it to move and walk and bend. I want it to take the stairs and the tube and big roasting trays out of the oven.

So on Monday evening I’m going to a dance cardio class. It has to be a class because I don’t want to think, I just need to be told what to do.

Even now I have those feelings of Honey at the gym, the boys at PE sniggering and I feel silly. If I thought about it enough I wouldn’t go. But I have to because I want to be 76 and at Glastonbury looking the best I ever have.