Um … okay. This is embarrassing. Or is it? None of you know me (I hope) and I’m just some random guy online doing what a lot of other people are trying to do, lose weight, get fit, improve physical health through diet and exercise, etc.
And, I kinda failed.
Well, did I?
First off, what happened to me the last two months? My last post was back at the end of March, and the one before that was the day before covering a two-week period. In that second-to-last-before-this-one post, I mentioned “The Lodger,” who had been staying here with my boyfriend and me since June of 2020. They were the bf’s friend who had lost their condo and needed a place to stay and didn’t trust their other friends to deal with COVID-19 safely. I also mentioned in the last post that The Lodger and I were not getting along, and we hadn’t for awhile.
They’re gone now, have been since 4:30 p.m. May 01 and I hope never to see nor hear from them again. I have never lived with someone so frustrating nor so – and I mean this literally – insane. While I’m not a psychologist, based on my college psych books and the latest and greatest online, they are a: Conartist, sociopath, and have antisocial personality disorder (which doesn’t mean they are antisocial).
Why does this matter, here? Their last month in the house (April) was a bit scorched-Earth. It was painful to live here, and they made sure to make things as unpleasant as they could without outright violence. It was not physical abuse, it was psychological. It was also the little things – death from a thousand paper cuts, as the saying goes. For example, we live in the mountains and are on well water. We discovered in the last week, when the cistern indicated it was low on water, that the well was indicating it was dry. Why? We looked back through the records and found that The Lodger that morning had somehow used 200 gallons of water. And six days before, they had used 350 gallons of water. We have no idea how, the best guess is simply leaving a sink running. To give you an idea, 200 gallons of water is filling a standard bathtub about 5–10 times. It’s letting a sink run on full for about 2–3 hours. It’s a lot of water.
Okay, again, why does that matter? It matters because I couldn’t deal with a lot of things when I was trying to deal with that (or, avoid it as much as possible). I either stayed in my home office and just worked, or I cooked, or I was in the bedroom sleeping (or doing nothing). With them finally gone, the bf and I both have PTSD. Like, dreams about The Lodger being back and not leaving and not being able to properly dial “911” on a phone. That, combined with work obligations, has made the last two months effectively “lost” with respect to fitness.
Combined with treading water the previous several (really since August 2020), I’ve practically returned to where I started: I’m about 220 lbs, down about 7 from last April, but up 15 from my most recent low back in ≈July 2020.
I keep telling myself I need to get back to it, that I certainly can’t let The Lodger have that much power over me. Then I look at my tracking sheets and where I was and where I thought I’d be and I don’t want to put down that I backtracked … and it’s just easier to ignore it. And there’s always work to keep me busy.
With respect to work, when I was losing weight starting last April and going through last July, I worked an average of 39.2 hours per week. Since March 2021, I have worked an average of 52.5 hours per week. If you exclude the mental “sigh” the week The Lodger left, it’s an average of 55.0 hours per week.
Now, clearly there’s more time during the week to do exercise. However, if you keep all other things the same (like, amount of sleep, amount of time for meals, amount of downtime just “surfing the ‘net” or watching TV, 13 or 16 hours taken up by work is quite easily 1 hour of cardio every day plus 1 hour of weight lifting three times a week plus 15–30 minutes of core exercises every day. In other words, I worked instead of exercised.
Is that justifiable? Maybe. I certainly accomplished stuff with work. The long hours writing grant proposals October thru February paid off with at least two, one giving me about a months’ salary per year for three years, the other six months’ salary per year for three years, moving my funding cliff from March 2022 (9 months away!!) to October 2024 (whew!!).
But on the other hand, if you’re not happy with how you look and your physical condition, is it worth it? If you don’t have your health, other things don’t matter as much. With my birthday three weeks ago, I’m also now 38, the clock doesn’t tick backwards, and I’m starting to get to that “I’m not invincible” age, where I do need to pay more careful attention to my health.
Also, all other things being equal, it will never be as easy as it is today to lose weight and gain muscle. Metabolism drops by around 5 cal/year at my age, which isn’t much, but it adds up and it’s a harbinger of other changes that make it hard to, well, change.
So, I will again return to that second question: Is last year lost?
I guess it depends on what “lost” means. Physically, I have almost reverted to where I was, though I’m very roughly 5 lbs lighter. I’m dreading measuring my bodyfat tomorrow … I haven’t done a measurement in two months. Tracking-wise, I’m still tracking food, but I also kinda stopped weighing myself because it was going up, and as noted I stopped measuring my bodyfat percentage … looks back at notes … the first week of April when I was back up to 25.9%. That’s down from 29.5% where I was when I started last April, but we’ll see what tomorrow brings.
Mindset? I have been struggling to get back into things. Every Sunday, I keep saying, “This is it!” And then it’s not. Lately, I’ve blamed it on the rain, where I was going to start strong and walk in the morning, but it’s just poured. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do core exercises, the elliptical, or weights. So, it’s just an excuse like everything else.
Am I being too hard on myself? Probably. But that’s the thought process, and the viciousness of the cycle: I feel bad that I haven’t done anything, but feeling bad hurts the motivation further, and then when I think I’ll do something, I don’t because I come up with an excuse, which makes me feel more bad, and …
So, that’s where I am right now, at the beginning of June 2021. I need to move forward. I need to sever the issues of the past, but keep what I’ve learned. I can’t change that I didn’t do things before, I can only change myself now and affect the future.
And, while that sounds good and might even sound pretty motivating, putting it into action is a completely different beast.
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