Tag: keto

The other day, a fellow fast-er and low carb friend sent me a message, dryly reflecting on how many posts there’d been in our facebook group about people falling off the wagon lately. She then asked, “So how hard did you fall off?”

And my answer was, “… I didn’t?”

**Disclaimer: This is going to be a long post. I sort of forgot about this blog, and some rather large things have happened since my last post on January 19th. Brace yourselves!

So, COVID-19 came along and turned the world on its head. I’m definitely one of the lucky ones – I got to keep my job and choose out my own project to work on while it was going on. And while things all around me (and everyone else) have been chaotic, so many things changing and closing, from a strictly work-related standpoint, things have honestly been pretty great.

At the beginning of the lockdown, I found myself very suddenly without the very rigid schedule I’m using to following at the museum where I work. I’ve never minded that structure – if anything, it’s played right into the strictness of my fasting routine and even reinforced it. Finding myself wholly without impositions on my schedule apart from texting my supervisor every day at 8:30am and 4:30pm, I was left to organize my days any way I wanted. I knew from the start that I would need to keep to my regular fasting schedule to maintain any semblance of mental and physical health during this. For me personally, the work-from-home thing started as “two weeks and then we’ll see”. That quickly got extended to a full month, then two, and now three. My teammates and I go back to the museum next week, so here at the end of Week 12 of lockdown, I thought I would share a few reflections about how it’s been.

At the beginning, as someone who lives alone, I felt almost as though the universe was going out of its way to underscore the fact of my solitariness. I wondered how long I would be forced to be alone – which I love being, but I also love being with other people, in a good balance. I think I felt every feeling that it’s possible to feel that week. I fasted. I watched my social media feeds fill with people panicking about toilet paper shortages and joking that they’d already eaten all of their snacks. The gym in my building announced it was closing the first day of that week. Having once had to stop working out for a full three weeks back in November when I had shingles, I really didn’t want to experience that again. There’s a whole story behind the fact that the 35-lb free weights are basically mine (seriously, no one else ever uses them, and they only replaced them after months of me nagging when someone stole the 35’s during my shingles absence)… so I popped by the gym and, um, borrowed them. I mean, I will give them back when the gym reopens! I really will! Meanwhile, here they are.

I thought about cardio next and how to replace my beloved elliptical and my HIIT cardio workouts. HIIT = high intensity interval training, wherein you attempt to jack your heart rate up to close to its maximum for a short while (30 seconds to 2 minutes is the norm), then take a rest period of equal or longer time. It occurred to me that I live on the 17^th floor of an 18-storey high rise that has stairwells. I came up with a plan. It went like this:

• jog down to the 2^nd floor in the slightly-less-dodgy stairwell (has windows and only goes down to the 2^nd floor, aka no street-level access)
• sprint up to the 5^th floor, then sprint down the length of the hallway and back
• walk the length of the hallway and back for the rest portion
• sprint up to the 8^th floor, then sprint the hallway
• walk the length of the 8^th and back
• sprint up to the 11^th, sprint the hallway, then walk it
• sprint up to the 15^th, sprint the hallway, then walk it
• sprint up to the 18^th, sprint the hallway
• instead of walking it, jog back down to the 10^th
• sprint up to the 14^th, sprint the hallway, then walk it
• sprint up to the 17^th, sprint the hallway, then walk it, stopping in front of my own door, where I had pre-placed a Lysol wipe to clean the hand that touched all of those hallway doorknobs

It was a Process! But it was working pretty well… until the morning when I encountered meth users directly on the other side of the 17^th floor doorway at 7:30am on a Friday morning. I noped right out of there, went back to my apartment, and did a cardio circuit HIIT workout instead. Speaking of which… I had only just recently discovered this: a HIIT routine based on a mix of straight-up cardio and bodyweight exercises. I saw it in a Livestrong article and misread the instructions, which were to do 10 different exercises for 30 seconds each, then repeat the entire routine. I thought it said to repeat the whole thing for a total of three rounds. The routine went: squats, 10-second squat holds, jumping jacks, burpees, lunges, curtsey lunges, push-ups, mountain climbers, sit-ups, and Russian twists. I didn’t know what some of them were and had to google. I had, at that point, done maybe a grand total of 8 (???) real push-ups in my whole entire life to date, like without my knees on the floor. I discovered to my delight that, at that point, I could do about 15 of them in 30 seconds. So in total, I went from maybe 8 cumulative, to 45 in one day.

I was in pain for four straight days after. Haha.

Quarantine went on. Two weeks became a month. Then two months. I took up running (HIIT sprints) outside once the weather became warm enough. Running is something I have never been able to do, so this was a particular accomplishment! I kept fasting. I resolutely admired, but ignored the 200 photos of sourdough loaves every human I know was posting on social media. I perfected keto meatballs and tried out an almond flour bread eventually.

Psyllium husk powder = purple bread

It actually made a quite decent grilled cheese!

I kept working out. Missing my daily 10-12 km of walking at the museum, I took to walking outside for the pure sake of walking, which is something I had never enjoyed. I would walk long distances to get somewhere, but never just for its own sake. I developed a vastly more intimate knowledge of downtown Winnipeg. I walked in snow boots, then runners, sometimes rain boots, then sandals, as the seasons changed. I watched the snow turn dirty, then melt, saw the mud and the puddles form and then clear, watched the grass beneath them dry and turn green. Eventually, finally, the trees budded and then exploded into leaf and blossom. The coming of spring is something I witnessed in vastly more detail this year than in any year before in all forty years of my life so far. It’s never felt like more of a miracle than this year.

Meanwhile, I wondered if the temptation of being at home with the unusual and unexpected leisure of time to cook – something I love doing – would pull me from my discipline or even right off the wagon. I wondered whether I would gain back the “quarantine fifteen” social media was joking about. What I did notice was that, while I wasn’t actively losing weight anymore, I wasn’t gaining any size. I was steadily maintaining a workout ratio of 5/7 days – three cardio workouts (most weeks that’s been two of the cardio/bodyweight routines and one HIIT sprint) and two weight training sessions. I’ve walked anywhere from 3-9 km per day, depending. If anything, the scale has basically stayed the same, but I’ve gotten denser and more muscular as my body has adjusted to now regularly to using new muscle groups and doing things like 55-60 push-ups in a single day, how to actually do burpees properly, and how to do mountain climbers without actual death occurring. I’ve had to remind myself yet again that this journey has never been about the number on the scale – it’s been about gaining more and better health, and I’ve done that. I’m still doing it. There will never be a day that comes and I say, “Okay, I think that’s good enough. Let’s just let everything slide now.” The world and my own life have been in a state of emergency since the pandemic hit, and the main thing for everyone has been just to get through it. To survive it, whether in a very literal sense, but also in the very real sense of mental health. It’s been a very isolated time. And yet, I’ve discovered just how much of an introvert I really can be, how content it turns out I am to be at home, alone, doing my own thing. That I really, really am disciplined, even when there’s no one to witness it apart from my own sense of integrity. I have no idea where this discipline came from, but I feel grateful to have it, and to have been able to keep it during the past few months. I’m still working at my body, at my health, and every last part of it is an act of self-love.

For a reminder, this is how I looked when I first started this in January 2018:

Conducting the cathedral choir in Québec City, ca late 2017

This is me now. Last gym selfie before lockdown started, and all the rest have been taken in isolation:

I would say that I’ve not only survived this three months, but thrived.

It’s been twelve long weeks, but the journey continues. I hope you’ve all been surviving and thriving, too. ❤