Friday, February 7, 2020

Exercise (238) Finding time to exercise

The difficult part of finding time to exercise in the beginning even for 20 minutes is that it actually takes more than 20 minutes to return back to normal life routines. I would say initially, the whole process will take about an hour. So for me mentally, I had to prepare an hour amount of time to exercise for 20 minutes. As time went on, I was able to streamline some of my steps to maybe 45 minutes.

To me, I plan it kind of like a flight. Although the air time is 2 hours, you have to schedule time to pack, travel to airport, and wait prior to the flight, then wait, travel to hotel/home, and unpack after you land. For exercise, I have to dress and warm-up before exercising, then cool-down, shower/freshen-up, and re-dress after exercising.

This takes longer initially because there are some factors that you don't initially prepare for like weather, temperature, gear, etc. But after a while, you can start preparing ahead of time.

Anyways the point is that I found it much easier to be more consistent with exercising when I plan to reserve more time than the actual exercising, otherwise, after preparing I find that I do not have enough time then eventually aborting the plan to do "more important" things (which ultimately really is not that important but because you already planned it; the appearance is that it is more important at that moment).

On a side note, I have been able to maintain a sub-240 weight on a consistent basis now (including my high ranges). This is not just from exercising, actually exercise had little impact to this round of weight loss because I just started this week. A big factor was my diet which I did know but was difficult to control. I would like to say it was my will-power, but actually is due to combination of many factors outside of my raw will-power.

Moved away from my parents who are very concerned for my weight but does not care to consider my views on weight-loss because clearly I do not have a good track record (which they are somewhat correct). Moved away from work because I would eat out with coworkers. This was more primarily in combination with my parents because they did not like the idea of me eating out. So I ate two meals because I also hate wasting food and too shameful to tell my parents that I went out to eat. I had to eat their food because I had to return the containers on my way home. The last factor is that I live with my wife. I seem to naturally cook for two people. Maybe I could have cooked less, but it was probably due to my laziness. I didn't like to just cut half of an object, so I would cut a whole onion, tomato, chicken breast, etc. So I would just end up eating the whole thing also because I did not like having leftovers. So even though I did cook quite healthy, the sheer amount of food was not good for weight loss. At least this would explain why I am still relatively healthy for my size. Naturally, my wife now eats half the food I cook. My wife cooks a little more as she likes more variety of dishes but that is still way less than what I was eating before.

Not sure how this will last because one other major factor is that I work from home majority of the time. I have "gained" so much time without my 2 hours commute per day, preparing for work, logging back on, doing more work at the office to avoid rush hour, etc. On top of that, I get more work done in less amount of time.

Sorry to those who are looking how to change your mentality, but do not give up on hope. Change still starts with you and that is important. I went through most of my life on my own, so I had a chance back then. But some times there are external factors that impact you, and those factors will feel very daunting even if they aren't in hindsight. I have argued with my parents a lot on stop making me food, and they continued to ignore me. I could have refused not to go pick up food, but to me it was not worth a lifetime's worth of disappointment (I would rather be fat and content than unhappy and fit).

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