Yogi Cat Meffan: Why I Love/Hate Being Flexible
Welcome to Love/Hate Stories, the 657Journal’s series exploring our unique relationship with exercise, by those who’ve fallen for it after years of stubborn resistance.
Cat Meffan can contort into shapes even Harry Houdini would balk at.
On one hand it’s one of the reasons she has a devoted following on her health, fitness and travel blog Imperfect Matter, with thousands enthralled by the mesmerising yoga flow videos she posts daily.
But on the other it’s her greatest weakness. The yoga teacher has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, meaning her joints are hypermobile and prone to injury.
We caught up with her at the health and fitness festival Be:Fit London to find out how she’s learned to take this condition in her stride and embrace all the good and bad things that have come her way through fitness.
This is her love/hate story with exercise.
Further reading: Marathon Runner Amy Hughes: Why I Love/Hate Running
I hate getting injured. I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. My joints are hypermobile. As much as that is great in some ways and makes my yoga pictures all lovely that also means I’m prone to injury. I snapped my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and had a knee reconstruction. I’ve torn the meniscus on my left knee. I have postural issues that have caused back problems. In social media you see all these beautiful pictures but you might not notice I haven’t done any backbends for ages because I simply can’t at the moment.
I love running but I used to hate it. The one thing I can tell anyone about running is you will learn to enjoy it. The competitive side is not for me. It wasn’t about getting a PB [personal best] or covering a certain distance. Instead I learnt to enjoy the time I spent outside in my own mind, on my own. I go out twice a week for half an hour with no music and that’s just time to be with me.
You don’t have to beat yourself up with exercise. I don’t run myself into the ground. Fitness is ultimately my job so there’s no point putting my body through stress that is inevitably going to harm it.
Further reading: 5 Things We Learned About The Future of Protein At Be:Fit London
I’ve always been immersed in fitness without realising it. I was a gymnast and a dancer growing up. I started working in health and wellbeing PR but quickly I realised the world of PR was absolutely 100% not for me. I decided to train as a yoga teacher and started my blog to share what I was doing and I’ve gone from there.
I love the self-motivating side of fitness. I still get days when I absolutely do not want to get out of bed. I’m a morning workout person so if I miss that workout then it’s probably not going to happen for the rest of the day.
Fitness is self-motivating. I do it because I know how I’m going to feel afterwards.
There are days when I need to find motivation, such as on Instagram, but the majority of the time I do the fitness or yoga class because of how it makes me feel and how I know I’m going to feel afterwards. That’s something you develop over time.
Fitness is a lifestyle that you learn over a very long period of time. I still have days when I miss a workout. In the past I would have beaten myself up for that and thought I have to train extra. Now I can be like that’s just life. I can have a bad day. I can have an extra rest day. In the grand scheme of life is that really going to have an effect on me? Of course not.
Ten years ago I wish I had known that it’s OK to not be OK. I struggled with eating disorders when I was growing up. But I wish I had known it’s OK to be on a journey, grow from something, accept you’re having a bad time and sit with that. You put pressure on yourself by going, “I need to be happy, I need to be positive, I need to be this thing…”. Just sit with the fact you’re having a really crap day and that’s fine.
It’s OK to not be OK.
If I could have told myself ten years ago to just accept that rather than rushing around at a 100 miles an hour trying to fix everything I might have done things a bit differently.
You can learn more about Cat Meffan here, follow her on Instagram here and watch her yoga videos here.
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