Virago Health!

 As you may know, I am the proud owner of a podcast called Virago Voices, which is all about women's empowerment. 
I started this podcast out of my love of chatting to people and my desire to make the world a slightly better place for the next generation of girls. 
With this in mind, I recently had an experience where I shared some information on women's health on my social media, which led one of my followers to get a diagnosis. On hearing this, I thought about my privilege; being a doctor and being passionate about women's health means I have a lot of knowledge and access to knowledge on common women's health conditions - and potentially a better understanding of normal and abnormal. It led me to think, why not use my podcast as a vehicle for making more change, in the field of women's health! Something I am very passionate about. After discussing with friends and talking about it on my social media, I have created Virago Health. A weekly chat with subject matter experts on women's health issues...

Virago Health: 
"Virago women are fierce, they are the women who are unapologetically who they are, they are challenging societal views of what a woman should be, and pushing forward the fight of equality. Some people describe virago women as a violent and unpleasant woman, but here at the podcast we call them heroic warriors
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Here at Virago Voices, we are passionate about Virago women being spotlighted. Equally, we believe their health is important if they are going to be able to fight for their place in the world. 
As a doctor, our founder is passionate about women’s health and wellbeing. And therefore, inspired by a recent event, we have decided to introduce Virago Health, a weekly episode, interspersed with our usual Virago episodes, to discuss common topics in women’s health with expert help in each field we discuss. We also will answer your women’s health related questions through our episodes. 
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To keep up to date on the latest podcasts, follow Virago Voices on Instagram, Spotify or Apple music! 
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Please note we cannot give medical advice, for this you must speak to your doctor."

Tune in to stay updated, and forward the podcast to your friends and family! 

Progress

Let's start with a story... Recently I have been getting into running, with gyms closing due to Lockdown 2.0. Whilst out on a run the other night, at around 2km into my journey, a female runner sprints past me. She is approximately my age and size. Yet she ran past me. 

I gave myself a hard time, feeling that I should be faster, asking myself why I was so slow compared to her, trying to speed up to keep pace with her. 

However, around 200m of her running past me, I look up to see she has stopped. The girl stopped, took off her headphones and stopped her watch… she was on the final 200m of her run. Me on the other hand, had still another 3 km to run. 

The more I pondered over this on the rest of my run, the more I compared this to life. And to my horror, I realise I do this every day without realising. Particularly with other women. I beat myself up about my inability to keep pace with people who are at completely different places in their life than I am. 

And if you constantly do this, with an array of different people, you build this expectation, this race for yourself that you will never be able to finish. Which then leads to feelings of failure, when actually people are simply at a different place in their run than you are. And guess what… that is totally fine. You are still running, aren’t you? You are still finishing your race, who cares about what people are doing around you. 

So next time you see someone achieving “more than you”, someone you feel is overtaking you on your journey, just think about where you are at in your run, and how important that is to you. Focus on you, focus on your run. 

Don’t try and keep pace with people in different positions on their journey, keep pace with yourself. And always remember to enjoy the journey!