Generally avoiding people, it's not the social distance that has been hard, it's the high potential for weight gain. Then we entered swamp-ass season, when I want to be outside even less. I was pretty worried that my general weight trajectory would be up, despite the doctor's orders to lose weight and get my slightly high cholesterol and blood pressure back down. I'm not gonna lie, the "freshman 15" was a certainty, but the "Covid 19" looked even more likely.
Look, I hate exercise for the sake of exercise. That's never going to change for me. So my usual strategy is to keep moving as much as I can, even though I have a job that encourages the opposite. Fortunately, there were some changes that have helped me not only avoid extra weight, but very slowly lose it. First off, I'm not working at a job with a chef that cooks several times a week, and I'm not eating out. A year and a half of that scene, with stress, put me up 11 pounds. Then I transitioned myself off of soda, trying the various flavored carbonated water products, until I was down to about 6 to 8 ounces a day (down from at least 24). I also got back into the rhythm of not eating after 7, mostly. I've tried to not eat before 11, but I'm less consistent about that.
The short story is that I'm definitely consuming fewer calories than I'm burning, which is a small miracle considering I'm not moving enough and I'm not counting calories in any way. It's the most control I've had over eating in a long time, which I attribute to therapy, my variation on meditation, keeping my hands busy on a ton of different things and generally processing stress. The anxiety is still challenging, but it doesn't make me want to eat.
In recent weeks, I've avoided drinking a bunch on Friday nights, which became pretty routine for us. Swamp-ass season will end soon, and we'll start having days again where a brisk walk or bike ride a day is easy. I'm getting better about moving around a bit between meetings, too, and to somewhere not the fridge. I could pretty easily get back to my "volleyball weight" by the end of the year without a ton of hard work, which is good because I'm super lazy. I've come to realize that the challenge isn't so much the activity, but the eating habits. That's where I have to get it to stick.
Mentally, I can roll with this weirdness for another six months, maybe. I sure miss Epcot lunches though.
No comments yet.