Health and Fitness: Pandemic Style

 

A feeble action selfie of
today's walk 😆

It was a beautiful globally warm December day today.  The skies were blue and cloudless, and the air was clear.  After I finished entered my grades for the semester, I decided to take a walk.  I have been walking a lot more this year than last and that is a good thing.

A year ago, I spent Thanksgiving in Germany.  I was visiting our sister school, the Applied Science University, in Aschaffenburg.  Aschaffenburg is a smaller city of about 70,000 in Bavaria.  Like much of Germany it was a mix of old and new.  I loved it.  Being a smaller city, there was little public transport, a few taxis, and, surprisingly, no Uber.  If you didn’t drive, you walked.  And, they walk… a lot more than we do.

We did a lot of walking, and frankly, it was a big challenge for me.  I was horribly out of shape and achy in both knees and soles.  We walked from the hotel through the town to get to the two campuses of the university.  We walked to restaurants every night for dinner.  We walked from train stations to our various excursion destinations.  It seemed like every walk was at least a mile.

To make matters worse, I was the oldest and slowest of our group which consisted mostly of students and a handful of professors.  I felt older than I should and negligent for getting, once more to a position of having to start yet another start of a weight loss and fitness program.  I also felt mentally deficient as I predictably keep getting older and each of these starts becomes more difficult and pressing to avoid larger looming health issues.

When I got back from Germany, I was resolved to change by walking more and eating better.  I reenforced the resolution at the start of the new year.  These were good resolutions as my doctor also wanted me to start a walking regimen.  I basically did nothing until the pandemic hit and we were in the March lockdown.  About the ides of March, I decided to take a walk.  It is still a bit wintry.  I dressed appropriately and walked a half mile or so.  I was pretty slow.

I tried to walk four to five times a week.  I built up to a mile by the end of March and took that up to two miles by the end of April.  By mid-summer my walks were 2-3 miles and I had gone from a pace of about 2.2 miles per hour to 3.1 mph (yes there is an app for that).  These are modest improvements to be sure.

At the same time, I decided to eat more sensibly and I have.  I try to eat three smaller or normal (not normal for the old me mind you) meals a day and avoid unhealthy snacks and desserts.  The goal was to lose weight but slowly as I change my behavior to eat more sensibly and healthier.  Basically, it is working.  I am down a shirt size and a pant size.

I am getting to the point where this walking and better eating regimen is becoming my new norm.  It is even OK to splurge a bit here or there.

My paternal grandfather had a motto of “moderation in all things.”  I understood the value of that tenet but never really practiced it.  Some years ago, I saw that this wise advice was attributed to Aristotle.  Today, in trying to verify that, I found this on oxfordreference.com on “moderation in all things”: 

Proverbial saying, mid 19th century; a more recent formulation of the idea contained in there is measure in all things. The essential thought is found in the work of the Greek poet Hesiod (c.700 bc), ‘observe due measure; moderation is best in all things’, and of the Roman comic dramatist Plautus (c. 250–184 bc), ‘moderation in all things is the best policy.’

There will be more to follow on this subject.