I’m going to App my Way out of this

So here’s what happened. After a few months of not being in an office environment (a.k.a working in my basement and wearing stretchy pants), I was able to go back to my office, and I had to put a suit back on. I want to be clear. I like wearing suits. It makes me feel professional, and it puts me in the “working” mindset. I will admit that since I’ve been working at home, I (Like so many of us) have been wearing t-shirts to “go to work,” and I would quickly throw on a dress shirt if I needed to be on a Zoom call, but other than that my wardrobe was reasonably casual. I discovered a couple of weeks ago that stretchy pants are not the most significant indicator of whether you were maintaining your weight when I had to put a suit on to go into my office, and found that nearly none of them fit! After a fair amount of ….”choice” ….words, I settled down enough to come up with a plan.

WARNING!!!!! SCIENCE FACTS!!!! – All of the things that I’m going to be talking about here are based on a previous plan I had before, designed by a doctor. It was a plan that I had a lot of success with and worked for me back. I am in no way advocating a specific diet plan or exercise plan.

1) Weight tracking – I’d been debating buying myself a scale for a few months, but one of the things that I’d always said was that I would want a scale that would update the app on my phone. I did some research and found the Scale that I’m going to use. I went with the Withings because A) My folks used it and had perfect things to say and B) It can connect automatically to MyFitnessPal, where I’m tracking my food intake.

2) Exercise – I’ve got a couple of things going on here. Because I’m (still) working from home half the time, I bought myself a TRX set and set it up in my office. Where before, when I would sit on my butt all day, now if I have some extra energy to burn, I can go and do some exercises in between meetings if I need to. This will allow me the flexibility to work out when I have the energy and time. There is also a TRX App that I’ve loaded onto my iPad, so I don’t have to guess what the heck I’m supposed to be doing; I follow along with whatever it is that the digital instructors are going to tell me to. Bodyweight exercises aren’t the only thing I’ve got going on; I’ve also got to get my cardio going again. I’ll be honest, I like walking, and I would (eventually) want to get back into running, but It’s getting colder and colder outside, so for the moment, I have my Peloton bike that my wife and I share.

3) Diet (ugh) – Eating whatever I want was what got me into this situation, so I have to curtail what I’m eating a bit to lose the pounds. It’s all good. Luckily I have an app called Myfitnesspal, which I”m able to track all of the food I eat. It also has several calories I’m allowed to have on a given day, so all I have to do is budget accordingly and follow the recommendations. Luckily MyFitnessPal lets you know when you are consuming too much salt or fat in a meal.

4) Have a program! – The first time I went through a significant weight loss program, I had a system and program that I could follow. Part of the plan is the diet (as covered in my previous point), and the other was the exercise. It’s not enough for me to have these things; I will develop a training program for myself that will hopefully get my butt back in some shape. Once I figure out on what days’ I’m going to do what, I’ll be able to get rocking and rolling on my plan.

5) Stick to it (the tricky part) – It’s the old story of man wants to get in shape, man gets in shape and then man falls back on bad habits. I don’t want to be Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill to have it fall back down again. At least, I don’t want to do that anymore. It seems clear to me that this will be a full lifestyle change and less of a temporary program that I can follow for a while and forget about.

This is something that I am planning on sticking with, and to that end (and to generate some content, let’s be honest here), I’m going to be coming back once a month and reporting back on my progress. My wife also told me that it’s good for my accountability. For now, I’ll be coming back and so and talking about the various digital products that I’ll be using to get into shape.

What do you use to keep in shape?

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