A healthy mind in a healthy body. But which comes first? There’s a chicken and egg question for you. And while I’m at it with the over-used quotes: as Sinatra sang in “Love and Marriage”, I have come to the conclusion that you can’t have one without the other.

There is a long history of narcissistic abuse in my family. Everywhere you look, personality disorders rear their ugly heads. It’s, frankly, depressing. I use the term literally.

For a long time I was fine, mentally. Or so I thought. Physically, too. My weight kept going up but if I could just stop all the eating… Oh, and the drinking. Yeah, the drinking. Well, that ran in the family so what was I supposed to do? My health was fine, my bloods always OK. Bar the slight brush with Rheumatoid Arthritis in my 30s that thankfully subsided for no apparent reason. And the mystery lung condition that isn’t asthma but has still resulted in severe small airways damage. The elevated liver readings – yeah, well, I could stop drinking if I wanted to. But the readings weren’t that bad and I wasn’t drinking that much. The gallstones. The elevated night-time heart rate. The mood swings – yeah, hormones. Obviously. The mood swings that got worse and worse – yeah, peri-menopause. Obviously. HRT would sort that. Only it barely took the edge off.

I kept seeing references to the benefits of weight training for women approaching menopause. One of my grandmothers had terrible osteoporosis and I was keen to avoid as much of that as possible. But – exercise? Me? I was the pudgy, bespectacled, badly co-ordinated kid who was always chosen last for any school team. My parents disapproved of sport and exercise – entertainment for the lower classes or the intellectually-challenged. My shortcomings in that area were not an issue at home. Looking like a sweaty beetroot, as I do when I exert myself, was not an appearance my mother encouraged. I had been raised to succeed in all that I did. That meant dropping anything I was not good at before I made a fool of myself. Or, rather, my parents.

The prospect of having to hire a coach to show me how to safely use heavy lumps of iron did not fill me with enthusiasm. There was an added problem: I was obese. Fitness coaches make you lose weight, don’t they? That was a hard boundary for me. My weight was a viciously sensitive topic. Mother went on about my weight. She had my boarding school play bad cop and put me on a diet, while she played good cop in the holidays and let me eat. She told me I must lose weight to ever catch a husband, but of course obesity ran in our family so I would be fighting a losing battle. And she was right – I had lost that battle, hadn’t I? I couldn’t face doing it all over again with some coach less than half my age. I’d got slim enough to catch the husband back in the day. That would have to do.

I hired the coach and told the boy any discussion of weight and food was off-limits; I knew I had weight to lose but that was not within his remit. He said “fine” but I knew he’d start badgering me eventually. Except I wasn’t going to hire him for long enough. Just a few lessons to get the basics and I’d continue on my own.

To my utter astonishment I fell in love with – no, not the coach. Way too cliché. With weightlifting and martial arts.

I’ve been working with various coaches for seven years. I’ve also been working with a therapist for seven months. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been able to link an aspect of fitness to an aspect of mental health. So, here’s what I have learned:

• Some people can be trusted. That first coach (who I still work with on occasion) never, ever once broke his promise not to discuss my eating habits and weight.

• If you are going to make progress you will have to trust people. With your life, for one thing. If you collapse with a bar weighing more than you do hovering above your back or neck you need to trust your coach to bail you out.

• Trying to do things you’re not immediately good at, instead of just dropping them like your parents and school advised, can be immensely rewarding. Especially when, after months or years, you all of a sudden find you can do them.

• Exercising near your physical limits forces you to listen to your instincts and your body. A good coach will have a fair idea of your capability but you are the one who has to decide if you have it in you to make that final push or if trying might injure you. Dissociation has to stay away.

• There is no shame in failing if you have tried your best. And failing once does not mean you can’t do it and shouldn’t try again. Success is often just around the corner.

• Your performance does not always have to be perfect. In fact, it might rarely be perfect, and that’s OK. It just has to be good enough. And you have to trust your coach, sometimes, to help you judge that. The first time I sent him a video during Covid lockdown, apologising for my poor performance, he told me it was fine and I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. So I re-watched, and he was right. I got a huge high the time I dared send him footage and tell him up front how proud I was of what I had just done. And he agreed! And then there was the time I sent footage expecting praise for what I had just lifted only to be told my form was off and I could have lifted quite a bit more had I been paying attention. That stung. But by then I knew he would not put me down for his own ends. I fought the urge to dispense with his services forthwith and learned a lot from that experience.

• Being kind to yourself takes many forms. Sometimes you have to push yourself and dig deep. Sometimes you have to let yourself rest.

• There is always a choice. You are an adult and you have agency. Just because the coach told you to do something does not mean you can’t question it or ask for adjustments.

• Just being present while doing any form of exercise is a great way to practise mindfulness. And you won’t be able to accuse yourself of doing nothing, as I am prone to do if I try to sit and meditate.

• You can process a lot of emotion at the gym. I have cried many times on a treadmill. I have beaten out my anger on a punch bag. I have felt the fear and done it anyway.

• Being physically strong boosts self-confidence in a way that has astonished me.

And here’s how my physical health has benefited:

• I lost weight, not because I cared what I looked like but because I wanted to be able to do more stuff in the gym.

• I cut down my drinking because exercising with a hangover ain’t much fun. And I don’t miss it. I don’t need it to damp down my emotions – I work them out at the gym. Fight response? Use the punch bag. Flight? Treadmill or bike. Or rowing machine. Freeze? Maybe some yoga poses. Fawn? Say something nice to the gym staff. OK, OK, I’m being jocular now. But you get the picture.

• My lung condition has improved and I have been able to cut my meds by half.

• All my physical metrics have improved.

Some things, like my night-time heart rate and HRV, remained oddly out of kilter given my fitness. Further research led me to conclude this might be due to long-term stress. Maybe even C-PTSD. So I started working with a therapist. My lung capacity has improved further, interestingly, and the other metrics have started to nudge in a better direction.

Mens sana in corpore sano. I’m getting there. I’ve learned to love the healthy body part. The work needed for the healthy mind part is still at the early, tough, grinding stage. The part that sometimes makes me cry and want to give up. But I know for certain I can do it. I’ve proved myself physically, and that in itself takes mental resilience.