I’m back. I’ve had to take some time off from the blog and the podcast for a few reasons that I will get into here in a bit but mostly I just wanted to take a minute to get back into the swing of things and see if I even remembered the password to get back in to blog. (I did!)
Here in no particular order is what I’ve been dealing with in the time since I last posted.
Covid
Covid was the biggest thing I think for all of us. It disrupted my life but mostly in good ways. When covid started I was the frozen food manager for Kroger but as it wore on I couldn’t stand to work there any longer. It was a mad house in so many ways.
We would come in every day it seemed like to new rules about how to do our job safely that didn’t seem to be based in any logic, we would constantly lose people for different reasons and couldn’t hire anyone because the state was essentially paying people to not work, and the amount of work we needed to do skyrocketed because there were no restaurants open and everyone had to shop at the grocery store more.
It was chaos every day for months but tolerable because they had at least started to increase our pay with bonuses but as the summer wore on, the bonuses went away and all we were left with was more work than any of us could ever actually get done. So that led to my new job, driving for Uber.
Uber
It was when I started driving for Uber full time that I really stopped doing anything on the blog. One reason was just because of the time. I was driving 60-80 hours a week and when I wasn’t driving I literally didn’t want to do anything else.
The other issue that came up was probably the main one. Sitting on my ass for 80 hours a week caused some weight gain. Then more weight gain, then more weight gain. I was out of control and couldn’t figure out how to stop this freight train I seemed to be on.
Weight Gain
When covid hit, I was hovering just above 200 but by the summer of 2020 I had gone up to 240. I wasn’t too worried about it because I just didn’t have time to be worried, there was so much to do and life was absolutely crazy. But when I started Ubering, that’s when the wheels totally fell off.
By the end of 2020 I was about 280 and I am now 300 lbs. That’s about a 100 pound weight gain in about a year and a half. Just an absolutely staggering amount of weight put on in a very short amount of time.
Now I don’t want anyone to think my diet was perfect during this time because it wasn’t. Way too many meals on the go shoved in while I was working, way too many fast food burgers both bunned and bunless, and my old nemesis just old fashioned overeating. I have always been the guy that won’t eat one when 2 are available and 3 is always better 2. I eat like it is my last meal all the time.
What I Have Been Doing
In 2020 I started doing DDPYoga fairly regularly and then at the start of 2021 I started taking Ju Jitsu. The Ju Jitsu has been very start and stop because so far this year I had to take off 2 weeks when I got covid, (I’m fine and so is everyone in my family including my 92 year old MIL that got it and recovered at home.) then another 2 weeks or so when I got a dental bridge installed, and right now I am recovering from a large cyst removal that will put me out for another 2 weeks.
So in 5 months I’ve gotten 1 stripe on my white belt. Not the fastest moving student in the world. However, the experience has been a positive one except for when they put the stripe on my belt and there was barely enough of the belt out of the knot to put the stripe on. And I’m sure I’ve gotten bigger since then.
So Now What
Well, I’m kind of at the end of my rope but I know one thing that helped was the accountability that the blog brought me. Just me talking about my life, what I’m doing and how things are going for me. I am still absolutely fascinated by nutrition and the role it plays on the body and new medical advances we come up with to get around our inability to eat right so I’m sure that will show up here at some point but mostly, I just need to get smaller.
Podcast
One other quick note about the podcast, at some point during covid the card that Libsyn was charging expired and I missed switching it over to the new one and now the podcast is gone forever which sucks. I would have loved to keep it up for posterity’s sake if nothing else but such is life and the wild vagaries of covid.