Susan living with cancer

‘Get Active’ trial at Huntingdon Community Cancer Network

I am Susan and I am living with cancer. I chose to be a part of the ‘Get Active’ trial run by HCCN because there were three things I wanted to work on; increased activity, weight loss and recovering my mobility.

As well as being overweight as a consequence of medication and over eating I couldn’t walk far because last September I fractured my ankle in two places. That meant I was almost completely inactive. But I was optimistic about what I was going to do as soon as things got better!

I joined the trial and quickly learned that when you have an Activ8rlives BuddyBand2 you have much more than a watch/pedometer strapped to your wrist. You also get individual support. Marion our Personal Trainer suggested that I build up slowly and set myself realistic activity targets, targets that I stood a good chance of achieving. The BuddyBand2 lets you keep all sorts of records of your achievements. We agreed to share these with Marion using her Activ8rlives trainer dashboard so that she can step in when we seem to falter and get us motivated again. When you live with cancer you learn that sometimes, when your appetite and activity levels drop, you might be in need of some nursing support as well. But of course because I own the data I can share it with others as well, in my case my husband.

Being naturally competitive I overdid it in the early days and hurt my foot again and thought it would be back to inactivity again but Marion showed me exercises I could do to build myself up whilst waiting to get going again.

I’ve built up to 6,000 steps a day, which is nothing like my peers have achieved but their efforts spur me on as I still don’t love exercise but I do feel good afterwards.

I have also actually started losing weight, 11lbs off now and I feel really good about that. I bought myself the Activ8rlives smart scales as well and use the Activ8rlives App to monitor my diet. I read that when losing weight one can build up stores of fat, but Marion was there to help me understand what I could do about that as well.

Now that I am experienced with my BuddyBand2 I can confidently say that everything you need to know really is in the book. At first I got a bit confused and there were some things I couldn’t fix for myself. The help that comes from the people at Activ8rlives, the HCCN nursing team admin, Amanda, Marion and Steve from Forefront Fitness always got me going again really quickly.

The trial is over but staying active managing my weight loss goes on, secure in the knowledge that if I need a safety net the whole team is still there for me. My BuddyBand really has become my buddy!