I didn’t know I didn’t feel good. Yes, I put on a few pounds during the COVID lock downs and stay home orders during 2020. I have heard that a lot of people did. I have finally gotten rid of that weight. It was in the process of starting to shed that weight that I figured out, I hadn’t realized I didn’t feel good until I started to feel so much better.
The process of shedding the weight has been multifaceted, as it should be. What I discovered, and to be fair the process of gaining the weight started well before 2020. What I discovered, or, realized was that I had slipped into bad habits in several areas of my life. For this story the reasons don’t really matter. What matters is that I had let my habits regarding feeding myself become convenience, not what was nourishing. While I continued my Taekwondo, it really was my primary exercise and just not enough for what my body needs. But I didn’t start to make progress in dropping the weight and getting things straightened out on my own, though I tried.
Earlier this year I got an email to join a program that was being funded by my insurance. (I guess insurance companies have finally figured out it is more profitable to keep us healthy than to pay for all the chronic illnesses that come with being sedentary.) I ended up signing up before I realized what I had done. And then, because I felt I’d been duped, I resented signing up for a while. But I got a new scale which was incredibly helpful as I was soon to discover, the one I had was no longer working right.
I will say two things regards the program and working with it. Like some other programs, the biggest part is accountability. When I record what I ate, do I really want to say I had a whole bag of cookies or M&Ms for lunch. And having a “coach” to help look for patterns has helped. I/we figured out I wasn’t feeding myself properly, I wasn’t staying properly hydrated, and I wasn’t getting near the movement my body needed. That high hamstring issue is from sitting too much and was a clue I was missing.
So I’ve been getting much more activity, staying better hydrated, and eating better for a few months now. And one day I was marveling in my head about how much better I feel. And that’s when it hit me that I had so slowly fallen into not feeling that good that I didn’t even know I didn’t feel good. It’s like the story of the frog in the pot of water. If you raise the heat gradually it doesn’t register it is in danger of boiling to death.
It turns out there are side effects of feeling better. Not the ones you might expect. Yes, I have clothes I can wear again and some things aren’t as hard as they once seemed. Those side effects I expected, or at least hoped for. There are things that I didn’t expect to be impacted. I’ll try to share some of that in a future post. And I’ll work on getting a picture or two for the next post.