Fitness is an integral part of my life. I really notice the difference to my mental state if I don’t exercise for a whole week so I try and stay on top of it, even if it means just doing my ab blast routine on my bedroom floor when I’m on holiday. I get twitchy and don’t feel myself if I don’t do anything for a prolonged period of time. Every little counts and contributes towards the bigger picture of leading a more active lifestyle.

My new lifestyle has helped tremendously! A lot of my anxiety was driven by bad decision making and bad choices. Being able to irradiate these through adopting healthy behaviours was the first step to becoming happier. A lot of life is down to luck and things that are out of our control, but something we can control is the way we treat our body. I used to disrespect mine – now I don’t. I make sure I’m as active as I can be and also I don’t put lots of nasty stuff into my body. I limit alcohol, stopped smoking, and massively cut down on junk food. I’ve learnt what my body does and doesn’t respond well to and I feed it accordingly! Now and again I will over indulge but probably 1/10 of the amount I used to. I’m not perfect and I never will be but slow and steady wins the race!

Anxiety can take over your life and leave you feeling pretty powerless, it is worse than any other feeling I’ve experienced and when it chooses to spiral out of control it feels worse than the stress factors that have caused it in the first place. My anxiety has probably been heightened because of the fact I’m recognised all the time. Sometimes it’s really refreshing to visit a country and take a break somewhere where I can walk freely in tatty clothes with no makeup on knowing that no one is going to shout across the road or tap me on the shoulder. I’m teaching myself to care less about the judgement of others because I know that this will enable me to be happier day to day moving forward. Growing up and experiencing things for the first time and showing my natural reactions in the public sphere of television can be hard to deal with – no one can ever teach you how to handle that. However, fitness is something that I CAN control.