I’ve posted a lot about what I accomplished, as I was going, in 2020, but for new readers of this very little-read blog, and for my own purposes to help with motivation, I wanted to try to go through and figure out my successes. But first, I’m going to remind you of where I came from, and then go through places I did not succeed (not using the “f-il” word). Since I’d like to end on the positive.
So, to re-cap, I made a decision in April to “re-start” my fitness journey. The idea was that, without work travel (due to COVID-19), my excuses of not carefully tracking food and forming good exercise habits were gone. I explicitly called it a “fitness journey” because I knew there would be ups and downs, and I hoped that by emphasizing that it is, indeed, a journey and not a limited-term limited-item goal (e.g., “I want to lose 25 lbs!”), it would set me up for success. Since, after you reach that goal, if you go back to what you were doing before, you’ll be right back where you started.
I had done this a lot before, starting and stopping, with my longest success being over a decade ago. So, I have a pretty good grasp on the method and what I need to do, I just don’t want to do it. I mean, really, almost no one ever goes into exercise saying, “I love to exercise, I really want to do that instead of watch TV or play video games or ‘hang’ with friends!” If you, reading this, really legit are one of those people who do think that, I envy you. So, that’s where I was and am, and almost certainly will be: I pretty much do know what I need to do, I just suck at implementing it because I don’t want to do it, I just want the end result. I strongly suspect that almost everyone reading this will know where I’m coming from there.
So, my journey through the year was quite positive at first, and then it turned dour, reverting to The Old Ways. Part of that was burn-out. Part of that was some mental health issues (depression) which don’t get talked about enough in our society. Part of it was work and poor work-life balance. And most of it was me – we shouldn’t shirk blame or responsibility for something when at least some of it is simply poor discipline. So, let’s get through the negatives first.
- I gained back about 8 lbs from my low point this year.
- I gained back a disproportionate amount of fat that I had lost this year.
- I have struggled to regain the habit of working out, both doing cardio and lifting weights.
- I have struggled to properly balance some work tasks, leading to 12+ hour days that negatively impact everything (I mean, except getting work done, I guess?).
- I am behind on where I had expected/hoped/wanted to be at this point.
- I have “cheated” the last several months on food, sneaking a chocolate here, or a roll there, that I did not count, as opposed to the goal and mandate of COUNT IT ALL.
So, with that all out of the way, now let’s get to some successes.
- One of my goals was to drastically reduce the amount of time I was napping. I have very much succeeded in that goal. I used to not nap maybe once a week, which significantly affected the amount of time I had for work, and therefore for exercise. Now, I nap maybe once a week.
- Another goal related to sleep (well, the only other goal related to sleep) was to get at least 8 hours of sleep per night. The reason was to minimize the amount of napping I did. So, even if I sleep at night for 10 hours, that is still less time in bed than sleeping 7 hours at night and taking a 3-hour nap in the afternoon, due to the setup/teardown time (like, waking up, falling asleep, etc.).
- Despite backtracking a bit, I did manage to lose up to 25 lbs, though net I managed to lose just about 15 lbs. (Depends on exactly how you count things.) 15 lbs lost over 7.5 months is nothing to sneeze at. Now, certainly I would like to have lost more, but seriously, it took me a lot longer to gain that weight than it did to lose it (this time), so really, this is a win.
- Similarly, despite backtracking a bit, I managed to lose several percentage bodyfat. Again, not as much as I would have liked, but still, this is a win because I did lose some.
- I made some progress on increasing my VO2max, though resetting my Apple Watch’s fitness calibration might have erased that … which also means it wasn’t actually improving. So, TBD.
- I did 6,687 minutes of cardio this year. Drastically more than last year. It averages to only 18.3 minutes per day, but still, that is also nothing to sneeze at compared with 2019, when I did 3,815 minutes. So, I almost doubled it.
- I managed to do 1,745 minutes of weight lifting / strength training in 2020. Averages to 33.6 minutes per week, so I’d like to see that at least tripled for 2021, but compared with 2019 when it was pretty much zero, this is again a dramatic improvement and a big win.
- I stuck impressively close to my plans/goals while on two weeks of travel to family. That included exercising while at my parents’ house, and cooking for them and my boyfriend’s mom while at their respective houses.
- Finally, food. I did pretty well on food, all things considered, once I started to track in late April when “re-started” my fitness journey. Based on my records, I averaged 126% of my calorie goal (which was higher) from mid-April 2020 back to January 2019. Mid-April to the end of December, 99%. Fat was 148% vs 99%, carbs 160% vs 101%, protein 80% vs 100%. Cholesterol was 113% vs 131%, so I increased that, but it’s because of the significant increase in protein content, and meat has cholesterol. Sodium, however, was 172% vs 133%, so that’s about 900 mg of sodium per day, on average, that I dropped. (This bullet must come with the caveat of the last bullet in the “naughty” list.)
So … where am I at the end of 2020? I improved. Yes. Let’s leave it at that, and go no further. I made significant improvements, and I know I can do this, I just need the discipline to implement and stick with it. This blog is part of that discipline and motivation, trying to keep me honest and on top of things.
