So
how is your New Year’s resolution going? Apparently about now is the trickiest
time when all good intentions can disappear. According to the Australian Bureau
of Statistics 2013 Health Survey, 50 per cent of Australians make a resolution
at the beginning of each year but the failure rate is a very high 92 per cent,
meaning only 8 per cent of us succeed.
Usually
I don’t buy into resolutions at all, although on several occasions, I have used
the opportunity to make some of those big difficult changes. On 1 January 1992
I threw my last packet of cigarettes into the trash and never regretted that
choice, although it sure was a painful process for a few months. If this is you
right now, please hang on. Yes, it’s as hard as hell but trust me, it will
become a watershed life moment.
January
1985 was my other big one. A few years earlier I had retired from my fulltime
showgirl career as a Les Girl, made some major life changes and for one reason
or another stacked the weight on – I think I tipped the scales at 120kgs. So I
committed to the number one resolution: to lose weight and get fit. Little did
I realise then I was changing my life forever.
I
joined a gym in Clovelly and was extremely lucky to find a brilliant woman who
was to encourage and educate me on my fitness path. As it happened, about 12
months into the process, that gym closed and Charne and her team joined the
line-up at the newly opened Fitness Network on Oxford Street.
By
the late 80s, all the ghetto gyms were packed and much of Gay Sydney was
aerobics-mad. So much so that in 1989 the 4am show at the Mardi Gras party was
a gym-influenced show – yep, about 50 gym junkies doing their stuff: the
grapevine, the Mambo and the Ezy Walk all to the Yazz hit, ‘The Only Way is
Up’.
The
Fitness Network joined up with the Oxford Gym and relocated to a wonderful old
warehouse in Riley Street and for the next 10 years it was my second home. It
was a heady time. We had a young Marcus Irwin as an instructor, who I recall
invented his famous Cardio Funk exercise craze at this time. He became the
World Aerobic Champion in 1992 and later travelled the world teaching other
fitness professionals. Later that decade, we were in the hands of Michael
Thomas, who taught a very dance-based aerobics class. He went on to a very
successful career with California Fitness Asia as their Regional Director of
Group Exercise and is now a Zumba Master, training instructors in Europe.