Lisa Curry has reflected on her health and fitness journey.
Throughout her athletic career, the former competitive swimmer won 15 national long course open titles and represented Australia 16 times in world-class competitions such as the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics.
Today, the 57-year-old is living on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast with husband Mark Tabone and spending time with her family, including her young grandson Flynn.
“I just love being a grandmother,” she told 9Honey. “We spent so much time together [during a recent holiday] in Japan and when we got home I just missed him so much.”
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Curry said when she was still active as an athlete, her routine consisted of training six days a week twice a day.
“It was my job, it was what I did,” she said. “You just had to do it and you couldn’t sleep in when you felt like it or if it was raining or if you were sore or tired.
“You had to push through and rest during recovery weeks and that was about it.
“It’s funny, it's hard to remember how dedicated you have to be, but you just are at the time.”
In 2008, Curry underwent a surgery to implant a cardio-defibrillator due to her irregular heartbeat, a condition also known as myocarditis.
Now Curry is aiming for “reasonable fitness and strength”, which would allow her to continue being able to carry Flynn around.
“Just travelling overseas to Japan with Flynn and carrying him in the snow or while he’s asleep, or just carrying luggage,” she says. “It’s about the kind of life you want to have as you get older.”
She now focuses on shorter sessions of high intensity exercise at the gym and healthy meal plans and supplements at home.
She said testing out exercise and diet plans for her business Happy Healthy YOU, which was opened in 2015, helped her recover from her health problems “naturally”.
“Practice what you preach,” she said.
“I’ve been in and out of menopause and people talk about piling on weight and over the past 12 months that’s certainly been true.
“But I think for me and for a lot of ladies it’s lifestyle related too.”
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Curry said she and husband Tabone are two weeks into a program test and have lost weight. “I’ve stopped drinking mocha coffees twice a day and also any alcohol, unless it’s a special occasion, and I’ve been eating really clean food and lots of veggies,” she said.
“He ‘cuts up’ really, really easily which is annoying but also nice to see the difference the program can make.”
This article originally appeared on Over60.