After 9 months of mental and emotional assault from the COVID-19 pandemic, trapped in my own home and unable to live like a normal human being, my body had suffered. Already, before the pandemic, the signs had been building. Back in 2018, I was in the grip of crippling depression. Physical injury in 2017 and 2018 prevented me from running, which had been a primary means of relieving stress and keeping my weight stable. Back then, I was about 195lbs. Combined with mental and emotional stress from my work environment, then a case of hand, foot, and mouth disease, I had reached a health breaking point.
2019 was better. My injuries had healed with time and patience and care. I could run again, and so I did. My work environment improved substantially. But I stopped minding my diet, keeping track of the calories in and out of my body. My weight crept. I went from being “safely” in the overweight category toward being in the obese range again.
Then came the pandemic. Then came the requirement to quarantine after an international trip. Then came the lockdowns. My time was filled with digital teaching, or helping colleagues with their digital teaching. The goal was to just complete the spring semester and get to summer. I started running again, but my eating became worse. And, I won’t lie, I started drinking more alcohol. Apart from the risk of chemical addiction, this added more calories to my diet.
By the end of 2020, I was up to 215lbs. This was a real low point for me. In 2012, I was 248lbs. With hard work – a combination of steady and regular exercise and calorie-minding – I beat that down to 190 lbs at my lowest, sometime around 2017. I remember tearing up the first time I stood on a scale and my weight was 189lbs, but that was a small downward fluctuation. 190 lbs is a more honest “average” low point.
To race back up to 215 lbs in just 2 years was a real slap in the face. What was funny was just how out-of-control I felt in 2020. I ran over 1000 miles in 2020. But my weight went up by almost 10 lbs in that same year.
Th culprit was the calories. I mean … DUH. Ultimately, weight loss boils down to a simple formula: if you take in less calories than you expel, your body will be forced to use energy stores, like fats, to fuel itself. If you carry excess fat on your body, like I do, this brings with it significant increased risk of heart disease or other cardiovascular problems. My family has a risk of stroke and heart attack, so I really do need to take this seriously. What happened in 2020 – more running than in 2 years, and yet a 10 lb weight gain – signaled that I wasn’t minding my conservation of energy problem.
So at the beginning of 2021, after a Christmas weight spike up to 218 lbs, I doubled down on exercise and calorie-minding. I fired up my old MyFitnessPal account and began recording meals. It’s always a chore at first. Now it’s just a habit. Eat breakfast. Record food. Eat lunch. Record food. Eat dinner. Record food. Eat a snack. Record food.
My Samsung Gear watch transmits my exercise to my phone, and is very good at tracking walking and running automatically. The Samsung Health app does sync with MyFitnessPal, but as many people have noted Samsung seems to deliberately NOT transmit walking exercise to MyFitnessPal. I have to enter manually any walks I take into MyFitnessPal. It’s a small annoyance, but like a mosquito bite every day it does irritate me.
This has had quite an impact. Since recommitting myself in early January, my weight has come down to almost 207 lbs. Each day, I make sure to come in under my calories goal (right now, that is 2330 per day). Walks of about 1 hour burn 300 calories. Elliptical trainer workouts in our home gym burn about 400 calories every 45 minutes. Outdoor runs burn about 1000 calories per hour. I have had to mix it up since the weather in Texas has been so crazy this winter, with many days too cold for me to run (I HATE running in cold air).
But even with a mix of exercise, minding the calories has been the real winner. This combination is working for me, as it did for all those years from 2012-2017. It’s been fun also to do this with an old friend of mine, who also complained out loud at the beginning of the year that he was sick of being out-of-control of many of the same things affecting me. Together, we seem to be creeping toward betterment.
