I knew exactly what to do. I just couldn't make myself walk in.

For about two years I had a gym membership I barely used.

It wasn't that I didn't know what to do in there. That's the part people assume, and it's wrong. I'd trained with a personal trainer for years when I first came to Australia. I knew how to programme a week. I knew what a good squat felt like. I could have written you a session.

I just couldn't make myself walk in and do it.

And when I did go, here's what actually happened: I'd wander from machine to machine, do a set, look at my phone, do another set, look at my phone again, and leave forty minutes later having done almost nothing. Then I'd feel worse than if I hadn't gone.

That's the bit nobody puts in the before-and-after posts.

How I got there

I grew up in Malta playing soccer. Stopped at about fourteen, when I got my first job. Came to Australia at seventeen, joined a gym, found a trainer I liked and stayed with him for a few years.

Then I moved suburbs and the sessions got too hard to keep up. So I trained on my own, and with my husband, and mostly I lifted. That part I loved. I still do.

In 2019 I slipped on a hike and tore my ACL. Keyhole surgery that same year.

That's where the decline started, and I want to be precise about something, because it's the thing I most want other women to hear.

Right before that, I was the leanest I have ever been. 61, 62kg. Genuinely fit. And at the time, I thought I still had weight to lose.

I look back at photos of that woman now and I want to shake her.

I was the fittest I'd ever been and I couldn't see it. I was already at the thing I'm now trying to get back to.

Then it got worse

Then COVID. Locked inside, a bit depressed, some other things going on in our lives at the same time — and I ate about all of it.

The weight went on over years, not months. That's how it usually goes. There's no single moment you can point at and say there, that's where it went wrong. There are just a lot of ordinary weeks stacked on top of each other.

By the time I fell pregnant with my son I was 97kg.

The pregnancy, and the mistake I made

The day I found out I was pregnant, I stopped training completely.

Not cut back. Stopped.

I had it in my head that lifting was dangerous, that most of what I did was off-limits now, that I'd hurt the baby. I didn't ask anyone. I didn't get advice from a single professional. I just quit.

If you asked me why, I still couldn't fully tell you. I was heavy, I didn't want to do anything, and going to the gym felt like a waste of time.

By the end of the pregnancy I was 115kg.

My son was born in October 2023, by emergency caesarean.

Six weeks later I had my gallbladder out. Gallstones that wouldn't pass and weren't going to resolve on their own, so they took the whole thing. Another keyhole surgery.

So: two lots of abdominal surgery inside two months, a newborn, breastfeeding, and 30-odd kg I hadn't been carrying two years earlier.

Everything was harder than it needed to be. Getting up. Carrying him. Healing. All of it.

I'm not going to pretend I know that stopping training caused all of that. I don't. But I do know I made that decision out of fear, on my own, with no information — and I've since learned it wasn't the decision I needed to make.

That's the reason I'm doing any of this.

What actually worked

I went back through group classes. Not one-on-one, not on my own. Classes.

I've thought a lot about why that worked when the gym floor didn't, because it turns out the answer is my whole approach to training now.

It was structured. Forty-five to sixty minutes, already planned. I turned up and followed it. No decisions to make while standing there feeling watched.

It had an end. It started, it finished, I went home. I couldn't drift.

There were other people in the room having a hard time too. Not people with the same story as me — everyone had their own thing going on. That mattered more than I expected. I didn't need to be surrounded by people who looked how I wanted to look. I needed to not be the only one finding it hard.

And if my form was off, someone fixed it. Without a fuss, without making me feel stupid.

And there's a less inspiring reason I chose classes over one-on-one: money. I looked for gyms where the classes were already included in the membership — Crunch, Fitness First and World Gym all are. You pay the membership, you book yourself into whatever class you want, and that's it. Nothing extra, and no personal training fees on top.

I couldn't have afforded a trainer as well, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise. The thing that got me back through the door was the thing I'd already paid for.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Nothing about willpower.

It took three gyms

Something else I'll say, because I've never seen anyone else admit it.

It took me three gyms to find one I was comfortable in. Crunch, then Fitness First, then World Gym, which is where I still train.

Same body, same knowledge, same intentions. The room made the difference.

If you've joined somewhere and quietly hated it and blamed yourself — it might genuinely just be the wrong room.

Where I actually am

I'm about 84kg.

I'm not going to dress that up. I'm not at the end of anything. I'm not posting this from the other side.

But I've put on a decent amount of muscle, and the number I actually care about isn't the scale — it's that I've gone from a size 20 at my heaviest to comfortably a 14 or 16, depending on the brand.

I feel lighter on my feet. I lift heavier than I did a year ago and I write it down so I can prove it to myself. I train around my cycle now, because some weeks my body will take a heavy session and some weeks it flatly won't, and fighting that was pointless.

Am I completely happy with how I look? No. I don't think many of us ever are, and I've stopped treating that as the finish line.

What I'm building

I'm partway through my Certificate III and IV in Fitness — the practical side is nearly done, then the theory.

After that I want to specialise in pre and postnatal training, for reasons that are probably obvious by now.

But this isn't only for pregnant and postpartum women. I don't want to be boxed into that. If you're a woman who wants to get strong, or get back to something you used to have, or just walk into a gym without your stomach turning over — that's who I'm for.

I'm not taking clients yet. I won't until I'm qualified, registered and insured, because doing otherwise would be exactly the kind of shortcut I'd tell you not to take.

What I can do is tell you when I am.

I'm not writing this from the finish line. I'm writing it from the middle, which is where most of us actually are.