Alison Cork defies her 61 years with the gleaming skin, toned shoulders and shapely biceps of someone two decades younger. Indeed, she admits that she is in far better shape than she was in her twenties: leaner, stronger and able to deadlift more than her body weight.
Yet it wasn’t always this way. Cork clearly remembers the life-changing moment in 2021 when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and decided to change her life. “I just got out of bed one day, glanced at my reflection and this horrible realisation swept over me,” she says. “I saw this out-of-shape middle-aged woman and thought, ‘Is this it? Am I destined to live a life where I quietly put on weight every year going forward?’.” It is a realisation that confronts many in their fifties and yet Cork insists she was the least likely…