Getting Started…again.
I’d never been a fan of Cardio as an exercise, actually, I’ve never been a fan of exercise. I don’t like the idea of going to the gym to work out or going for a run on the street. It just doesn’t do anything for me. I’d much prefer to eat something delicious. It might have been almost 2 years ago now that I payed for a personal trainer to show me some weight training that I could do at home, give me a routine that I could stick to. At the time I was pushing 20st (127kg / 280lb) something needed to be done. After a while I joined a gym, began working out most days during lunch at work and starting experimenting with diets and I lost a bit of weight.
As with most, the diet thing died down, my place of work moved away from a gym and I put a few pounds back on. At the beginning of last year I committed to a diet that worked well for me, a ketosis diet. Low carb/low sugar, high fat. Google it — its not for everyone, but it worked for me, and by September of this year I managed to get myself to 15st 12lb. All this was diet — I hadn’t returned to lifting and I lost a lot of muscle mass by dieting alone, but I was a bit happier to have shed the weight.
Sometime in October I began running on my local common. I started off with 2km, worked myself up to 5km and was then going up to 8 and 10 in a few weeks. I still didn’t like it, but I found that after a run, I would have a lot more focus on something. The run had given me time to listen to an audiobook, a podcast or just think about something I was working on and by the time I had finished running, maybe I had worked out how to do something in my head or had been inspired to do something. For me Running === productivity.
Over this past Christmas I didn’t do any running. I also didn’t stick to any specific dietary regime. I probably should have because I was pretty miserable over the few weeks off. I didn’t want to do anything or see people. Maybe that was based on not doing any exercise, maybe that was diet, most likely it was a bit of both. I put on about 6lb by not controlling the food I was eating, so yesterday I went for my first run of 2016, 4.2 miles at a 14min pace and I started back on a diet regime. Back to Keto.
I am by no means an expert in the field of diet or running, but there are things that I found that helped me a lot. Like many of my peers, my job revolves around mostly sitting and staring at a screen and fueling long sessions of writing code by consuming food thats likely not too good for us and I rarely see many (except maybe Remy). Talking about Mental health in the realm of programming seemed to be a big thing last year (as it should be), maybe talking about physical health additionally would help a few more people too.
