How not to go about losing lockdown lovehandles; a cautionary tale | This is my newspaper column
I didn’t think I’d been that bad actually.
During lockdown I bought some weights and leapt about in the dining room in my gym gear to various online workouts.
Post-lockdown, I signed up to an eight week socially-distanced bootcamp where I registered a distinct downturn in my fitness level but congratulated myself for being 40-odd and bothering with burpees at all.
My everyday diet didn’t really change. In fact I stopped frittering cash on junk food in supermarkets and flapjacks at sandwich shops and instead focused on buying fresh, locally-produced foods from newly-created online initiatives that deliver to your door.
With no bad-influence colleagues in the smallest room of my house/office, I am not subject to the temptations of the birthday ‘cake tax’ or devilish newspaper sales teams who keep their desk stocked with a shared cache of multi-coloured sweets.
The sugary stuff in my house is minimal. I no longer spent the majority of my wages at coffee shops and I had a period of three months where I didn’t eat a chocolate muffin at all.
In other words, I was a paragon, for me. But it was all a waste.
Following the end of bootcamp we were weighed and measured.
In case you are the lucky uninitiated this means standing on a bodyfat scale and being measured at various inconvenient points around the body by a super-fit trainer who has never eaten a whole packet of Haribo in one sitting.
Not everyone aims to lose weight and lose inches, nor do they need to. But this was my aim and I can confirmed that my ‘before’ was considerably better than my ‘after’.
It’s become incredibly clear that my new working lifestyle which includes six days a week banished to the smallest room in my house for maybe 9-11 hours a day is not, after, all a dream come true.
I may be three steps from my bed and 15 steps from fridge (convenient) and no longer need to commute but in between boot camp sessions I’m barely moving at all and the results of that change are not pretty. Time for change?
Sadly I think even more burpees are required.
…….
( If you read this far I’ll be upfront – I’ve gained a stone and inches everywhere – oops)
I start a new bootcamp today – wish me luck! And this time I’m invoking Myfitnesspal
