So. A little bit of Then-And-Now.
In 2019, I weighed the most I've ever weighed in my life--283 pounds. I'm a pretty tall fellow at 6'-8", and I'm almost 50 years old, so this added weight was playing havoc with my knees. At my annual physical, my doctor mentioned knee replacement surgery was going to be in my future. He also mentioned cholesterol medication, since my TCL was almost 300. So clearly, I had to make some changes if I wanted to stay healthy.
We talked about options, and decided that we would try to address these issues with diet and exercise first, and save medication/surgery for later. He put me on a high-fiber, low-calorie diet, and had me doing 20 minutes of moderate exercise five days a week. ("High fiber" meant that I would have to work my way up to 50g of fiber per day, 35g of which should be soluble. "Low calorie" meant 1800 calories a day, and no more than 600 kCal in a single meal. "Moderate exercise" meant getting my heart rate up to 140 bpm, and keeping it there for 20 minutes straight.) I was to keep a weekly Fitness Diary to track my progress.
That was summer, 2019. We all know what happened just a few months later.
So the Covid-19 pandemic struck. My wife and I were stuck at home, so there was no "going to the gym." Heck, even "going outside for a run" was frowned upon for the first half of 2020. Instead, we ordered some dumbbells and yoga mats from Amazon (for much less than the cost of a gym membership, I might add), and spent the weeks working our way through YouTube yoga videos and free online exercise programs like the best fitness website on the whole Internet,
Darebee.com. With all the restaurants closed, we cooked our own meals as well--and there are tons of high fiber, low calorie recipes on the internet. Eventually the local restaurants and food carts had figured out their meal delivery services and DoorDash, etc., but we learned a lot about nutrition and food prep in the meantime.
The pandemic was awful, but it turned our eyes inward to our own health. It gave me the motivation and the opportunity to make changes for my health (often whether I wanted it or not!), and removed a lot of the excuses that I would fall back on in the past--"the gym is all the way across town," "I'm too tired to cook," "My gym membership expired," etc.
Fast-forward to 2023.
This morning I got an email from my doctor, containing the results from my annual physical. As of last Tuesday, I weigh 227 pounds, and my total cholesterol is 138 mg/dL. I am no longer overweight (I am 6'-8" tall, remember), either. I cut my cholesterol in half, and dropped 56 pounds. Not only that, I went from getting winded walking up a single flight of stairs, to being able to run a mile in 8 minutes 10 seconds. And here's the best part: these numbers haven't changed in over a year...they are identical to my 2022 results. This is now my steady-state: I've kept the weight off and the cholesterol low for 13 months and counting.
Sorry if this comes across as "bragging," but I'm very proud of myself. It was a
lot of hard work.
