Four weeks of London lockdown and I am 4 lbs down in weight

As London lockdown reaches week 4 lbs, I have now lost 4 of the 5 lbs I gained in 2020.  When I stopped training with Odell back in January 2020, I weighed 138lbs with only 8 more pounds to go to reach my goal weight.  When I stopped working out with Odell, I was on the lookout for a new gym and my commuting and work patten changed and by the end of February 2020, I had already gained 6 lbs.  By the time London and the rest of the UK were on official lockdown on 23 March 2020, I had gained a further 3 lbs.

Gaining 9 lbs so quickly was very frightening.  A friend of mine who I talk to often told that she had no concerns about me and was confident that I would be back on track shortly.  I have to say that I never shared her confidence and was very worried that I had lost control for good and would never be able to get back on track.  The worst thing for me after the lockdown was making do with the wrong types of food.  I left my lockdown shopping spree so late in the day that I had to make do with what was on the supermarket shelves. I was eating wraps, normal bread, rice which lead to a quick weight gain on 3 lbs.  I never eliminated carbohydrates completely from my diet when working out with Odell but I did reduce my intake substantially and had it mainly in the morning.  I was eating carbohydrates whenever I felt like in the first few weeks of lockdown.  I have gone back to eating carbohydrates mainly for breakfast and then veggies, salad and proteins for the rest of the day.

The other thing that helped me get my head back into the game as it were is the fact that imposed structure back on my days.  I have had to impose some structure around the workout time table that Odell and his wife Nassim have published.  Doing the classes via Zoom was odd to start with.  The sound quality of the music is terrible and the screen of my phone is tiny.  I keep meaning to move the meeting to my laptop or desktop but I am worried that I might end up missing the meetings altogether. The other thing is that depending on how my internet connection is feeling on the day, the screen can keep freezing.  I would, however, say that I am now accustomed to the screen and the workouts are just as hard as Odell’s regular classes in the gym along with all the aches and pains that come whenever I restart exercising.

Then there is the food.  Shopping in the era of social distancing is a whole different ball game.  The queues are very long so that people can maintain a safe distance of at least 2 meters between each other.  In addition, once one makes it inside the supermarket there are times when some of the shopping aisles are so full of people that the safest option is to hover from a distance until the shoppers have vacated the spot in question.  As I don’t drive, I have to carry all my shopping home.  Obviously taking a taxi or Uber ride home is out of the question.  Public transport is also pointless, A, because the buses are not regular and do not drop me close enough to my home and B, the risk of infection on public transport.  On arrival home, there is the rigmarole to leave the shopping partially out of the kitchen, wash hands, wash clothes, clean purchases and so on.  It is such a long process that shopping every two to three days as I was doing before the lockdown is out of the question.

Now that I exercising and eating better, the next steps in my progress would be to try to do more cardio exercise.  I hope that I can up that slowly so I burn off the remaining 5 lbs and continue on my journey to my goal of 130lbs.  I now weigh 143 lbs so that is nearly a stone to go because a stone is 14 lbs.  I am going to take it in stages and aim to lose another 5 lbs to get me back to where I was with Odell at 138 lbs and then I will hatch a plan to lose the final 8 lbs once and for all.