As anyone over 50 will tell you, staying on top of your health and fitness gets harder as the years progress. Demands on your time increase, energy levels dip – and self-care can take a back seat. But could presenter and novelist Clare Balding have cracked it?
Clare, 55, decided to take her health in hand once she hit her 50s, opting for the low-carb diet recommended by the much-loved TV presenter Dr Michael Mosley. ‘I’ve worked hard at it and feel better,’ she told Hello!. ‘I got into my 50s and thought, “I’m just going to be fat and happy”, but then a friend talked about a low-carb diet and the late Michael Mosley publicised this form of weight loss, too, and I thought, “I’ll give it one more go – as I’ve tried so many diets over the years – and see if it works”. And it did!’
She combined this with her favourite form of exercise, walking, saying that it’s key to ‘mental as well as my physical wellbeing’. ‘I’ve known lots of people turn to therapy and found it supportive and positive but I’ve never felt the need, and I think that’s because I walk in nature,’ she told The Times. ‘It’s one of the reasons I don’t get stressed and can cope with high pressure and a big workload – I just walk and everything settles for me.’
For the past 25 years, Clare has shared her passion for walking on the BBC Radio 4 series Ramblings, where she shares inspiring conversations with other walkers in the great outdoors. ‘Walking has become an integral part of my life and I’ve worked out that I’ve walked more than 3,400 miles – 25 years of 21 programmes a year, each one involving a walk of about six and a half miles,’ she previously said on BBC Radio 4.
And the latest science suggests that Clare’s walking habit could be integral to her weight-loss success. Recent research presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Istanbul looked at 14 trials involving 3,758 people from the UK, US, Australia and Japan, and found that people who increased their step count after weight loss were able to keep the pounds off when they stopped their diets. Scientists even pinpointed the exact number of steps that are necessary per day to avoid putting pounds back on – 8,241. So now you know…
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