After the Coronavirus lockdown, we started to experience the challenges we never knew before. Forced isolation, job loss anxiety, boredom, panic shopping and panic eating. However, it’s impossible to live in stress and fear for a long time! Many people start to make jokes about the situation: ‘Is anyone else eating 3 days worth of food in 1 day during the quarantine? If not, me neither!’
Humor is a normal reaction of a healthy brain in order to overcome the stress and stop the panic. Please make jokes, even if sometimes they get dark. Listening to and playing music helps to relax. Watching movies is good too, but it’s very time-consuming. Don’t try to escape from reality, but accept it and adapt to it.
Even if it looks like you have plenty of time while sitting at home, it’s not really the case with Coronavirus lockdown. You still need to pay the bills, rent or mortgage. Clean the house. Take care of your kids (if you have any). And finally, take care of your body and mind the way you used to.
Depending on your country quarantine restrictions, you may or may not go outside your house. I can’t believe I’m writing this! If you can, walk outside for one hour every day. Choose the area with less people and keep a big distance from them. Don’t go to public parks and don’t bring your kids to playgrounds. If you have to stay home, do a 30 min exercise session at home. There are many exercise videos online.
And finally food! The panic eating starts because of stress, anxiety, boredom, isolation and social inactivity. I’m not talking about people with eating disorders right now. I’m talking about healthy people who were put in unprecedented conditions. Remember, we are not starving yet! There’s no reason to stock extra food in your body. Unless you are underweight, of course.
Me and my husband, we have been on a healthy diet for many years. By ‘healthy’ I mean a diet that doesn’t ruin your stomach. We know how to control our bodies and train them to consume less food. But it wasn’t always like this. At the beginning of our journey (12 years ago), we knew nothing about diets, fasting and exercising.
I used to eat as much as I wanted without watching my weight or exercising. But when I turned 26 years old, I began to notice that I don’t fit in my favorite clothes anymore. I started walking and jogging, and even went to the gym! But the exercises didn’t seem to help. I took a personal trainer class. For the first time in my life, I learned that what you eat matters! Slowly I trained my body to consume less food and my body transformed! That was a long hard journey!
Even after witnessing my transformation, my husband was in denial. He has always been a chubby guy, but his lifestyle became so unhealthy that I couldn’t ignore it anymore. He worked until 3 am and slept until 3 pm. At midnight he went to 7-Eleven to buy chicken wings, pizza and cookies! He gained a lot of weight. His personality changed a lot. When I tried talking to him about that, he felt insulted. Once he got back from vacation from Israel (where his mom was cooking for him every day), and I could not recognize him at the airport!
My husband didn’t believe that diet and exercise could change his body. He gave up! After our son was born, he gained even more weight, because he watched me gaining weight during pregnancy. But I didn’t give up on myself. It took me many years to lose the postpartum weight. Now I still need to lose 10 pounds to get back to my before pregnancy weight. And I’m not giving up on that either!
The first time my husband realized that his lifestyle has to change happened when he took our son to the playground. It requires a lot of energy to watch a kid running around the park! My husband understood that he needs to lose weight to keep up. He educated himself about fasting on the Internet. My tips he was still ignoring)) He decided to open a YouTube channel while losing weight with OMAD (One Meal a Day) diet. After doing it for a few months, his channel got more than 5000 subscribers. Many people wrote to him in the comments section.
Now we decided to open a weight-watching website guidedweight.com to help people like us who struggle to lose weight. The subscription is free. Please have a look!