Alice's Inspiring Story

"My name's Alice. I'm 29, living in Wiltshire. I moved over here from Bath about a year ago following my dad's cancer prognosis. I'd just had my son and two weeks after he was born, my dad's cancer spread to his brain unexpectedly. I got a phone call from my brother to say that him and my mum had been involved in a car accident. He'd had a bleed on the brain and he was given a prognosis of 12 months to live. He ended up hospitalised, couldn't speak, couldn't walk, and required full-time care. I was commuting over a lot and ended up moving in with them to sort of care for my dad in his final 12 months.

All of a sudden, everything changed in the blink of an eye and what we kind of pictured the future to be like, was instantly just taken away from us, really. I suppose I was quite numb to everything going on around me. I didn't really realise the impact that that was having on my mental health, but also on my physical health. I was on a high dose of medication and stress eating.

I was quite oblivious to my own self-care at the time because my bigger focus was on everyone else around me. I remember just thinking, I need to do something for myself as well. My meds would work for a certain amount of time, then the panic attacks would come back and eventually I got to a point where they were like, 'you're on the highest dose we can give you, there is nothing more that we can offer you'. So I knew at that point that I had to do something to make those changes, and I wasn't really sure what that was at the time.

I knew about The Body Coach because my friend had done the 90 Day Plan. Going to the gym would never have been a possibility, knowing that there was an option to kind of be able to work out from home. I woke up one day and just something had changed my mindset and I was like, today's the day, I'm going to do something to change things for myself and it was, and I haven't looked back since. This huge boost of natural serotonin that I didn't even know existed was amazing and I just fell in love with exercise. Something that I never, ever, in a million years thought would happen.

This was the first time ever that I'd found something that wasn't medication, wasn't comfort eating. Yeah, I just couldn't believe it. I was about 12 stone when I started, lost about 4 stone, and it just feels nice to be able to, now my little one's almost to two, to be able to run around with them and do all the stuff that I wanted to be able to do but me a year ago wouldn't, it wasn't a possibility.

Before he died, I told him that I was going to go and do something for charity, some big thing. I signed up for a five day trek through Vietnam. This has all given me the confidence and the fitness level to be able to really push myself to to do something like that and I think it's a really nice fitting tribute to my dad. But also a really good challenge for me, too.

He saw me go from being in a very unfit state to me doing workouts in front of his hospital bed. And his important thing was that we were all going to be okay and I'd be able to still be there for my mum and all that sort of stuff. And so he definitely saw me and in the best place I could have been in at the time.

Everything that I've learnt from what's happened with my dad, and with my mum as well, is health is so precious and it's a real privilege to be able to get yourself fit and healthy and I think we take that for granted way too much, and I definitely did before. Whereas now I'm able to wake up every day, do a workout, eat good food and embrace all of that."

Watch Alice's Inspiring Story here.