December 30th, 2020
I’ve been thinking about exercise and diet as it’s something I’d like to get under control. I am certainly not fit, and the whole COVID situation has kept me from being active, but I would like to change that. My main goal would be that I’d like to lose weight and look more lean and fit, but at present, I’m not really sure how to go about doing this. Having ADHD doesn’t help either, although I’ve seen some things that suggest that exercise helps with ADHD. I was going to Planet Fitness for a time and noticed that I was getting stronger. I was able to do pull-ups on a pull-up that was at my Mom’s house during Christmas 2019, which I hadn’t been able to do before, but I don’t know if I looked more fit. I was going to the gym every weekday from August to December 2019. I didn’t stick with it after the new year and once Covid hit, I stopped going entirely and I’ve definitely suffered the consequences. I want to develop a routine for 2021 though and I’m trying to figure out what makes sense. Being at home since mid November-2020 has made it apparent that I have an unhealthy relationship with food and that it mostly stems from having ADHD. I attended a webinar on healthy-eating for folks with ADHD and it was very insightful and I was able to stick with a semblance of a routine, but that changed once the rest of my family came home for Christmas, which disrupted routines and started me back on unhealthy habits (mostly due to having more dessert type foods readily available). Between mid-November and the end of December, I’ve gained 5 pounds, lost 5 pounds, and gained 5 pounds back again. I’m currently around 205 and I hate it. I’d rather be below 200. The challenging thing about weight is that it is dependent on activity and nutrition, which depend on a whole plethora of different things that are hard to control for: relationships, mood, weather, schedule, etc. Sometimes I feel like eating healthy, but I don’t have anything healthy available to me. Sometimes I feel like working out, but I don’t have the time. The thing that I want to develop is a system of habits that all work in conjunction with one another to get me toward my goals. I need to be consistently working out and consistently eating healthy in a way that I do it almost unconsciously. I need to be able to not have to think about it at all, but just do it and not worry about whether it is working. I’ve heard that HIIT workouts are fairly good and I’m thinking I might do something with that. I think what I would need to do is to have some sort of protein shake afterwards that would tide me over until the next morning when I have my overnight oats. I would also want to have cooked food for lunch, but would I be able to do meal prep if I’m busy on the weekends. As much as I want to make meals from scratch and learn new recipes, I think I need to stick with some frozen items so that I can make them quick for lunch. I enjoy cooking and I don’t want to completely abandon making “gourmet” meals, but I might not be able to make them as fresh as I would like. Unfortunately, there is hardly any room in the freezer for frozen foods. I might have to get a small freezer to handle the extra capacity. So I’ll have to look into frozen foods, a small freezer, protein shakes, starting back at Planet Fitness, and good workout routines. The unfortunate thing is that any exercise and diet system that I develop seems to be really fragile and the slightest perturbance can mess up a piece of the chain and the whole thing will unravel such as a work trip where I won’t have access to my carefully curated food selection or my gym and have to get back into the routine whenever I got home. I’ll continue thinking about this, but this is where I am at the moment.