June 19, 2016
The true test of one’s convictions is measured by how well they hold up under stress. Stress was abound last week, when I joined the realm of the unemployed.
I won’t make it out like I’m actually under duress. I left on good terms with the magazine for reasons I won’t get into here, had a few prospects lined up already, and can more than get by for months before panic starts to set in. Still, it’s unemployment, and that’s stressful.
In the days before I left, I was starting to get into a routine. I’d duck out for 30 minutes instead of taking a lunch break, head down to the gym, put in a few miles on the stationary bikes, shower, and get back to work. The process was working, as evidenced by the moving numbers on my scale.
Having it all blow up rather abruptly could have resulted in one of two things. Either it torpedoed my whole routine and deflated whatever momentum I was building towards a meaningful lifestyle change, or it didn’t.
For the first few days, it did. That second weekend of Adam 2.0 was gloomy as hell. I managed to avoid falling backwards on the food front, but I stopped exercising, and stopped taking daily weigh-ins as a result. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the number start creeping back up after just a few days.
But by the middle of this past week, once things stabilized a bit, something magical happened. I started to get back on the program. That included one major glass ceiling shattered: my gym. And not the crummy little office gym, but rather a real, adult gym that you pay for. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I am a dues-paying member at Planet Fitness. But to say my trips were infrequent doesn’t fully encapsulate my absence. It’s not that I didn’t want to go; it’s that I didn’t want to go while other people might be there. Which is always.
And yet on Tuesday, I packed up a gym bag, drove the 15 minutes to Ivy City, parked, and walked right up to the front desk like a regular. And as it happened, so far a regular is what I have become. As I write this, I have ended up there four days out of the last 5. I skipped yesterday after putting nearly 20,000 steps on the Apple Watch walking around DC with a friend.
I also trekked over to Sports Authority, which is soon going out of business. I picked up a pair of adjustable weight dumbbells to go along with the workout bench that had been sitting, unassembled, in my living room for months. At 2am, after hours of futzing over the incomprehensible instructions, I went to bed with the thing fully assembled and ready for use.
I haven’t done as much cooking as I would have liked so far, but I’ve nonetheless managed to avoid most garbage. No fast food, no take out, no juice: a lot of cold cut sandwiches, tuna, salmon, chili, and some homemade corn muffins (my specialty!). I also started making daily use of my scale again, and the weight started peeling off once again.
Next week will be the first under this new normal, and it’s a chance to refine a routine that, hopefully, lasts for a long time to come. I don’t have a job at the moment, but there is so much work to be done.
