– Lose some weight, not your mind –
As the great American philosopher Forrest Gump said so eloquently: “Life is like a box of chocolate. You never know what you gonna get”.
Nobody expected the pandemic and the stay-at-home order we’ve all been experiencing lately. Unless you’re a teenager playing video games all day in his mother’s basement, your lifestyle has probably been impacted greatly by this virus. Between the necessary sanitary precautions, the uncertainty of tomorrow, the constant mixed messages in the media, and the social distancing sometimes applied in mysterious ways, we all have to adapt to what seems to be a never-ending situation. At the moment, those who had to keep working at their working place, those working at home, and those not working alike, all share the same doubts and concerns about the real risks for their current health and their financial future.
Reading the Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Chuck Norris, makes you think about another way to deal with the present circumstances by asking a simple question: how can this make you grow?Therefore, I ask you: how can we use this situation to get better, stronger, leaner, more knowledgeable, more skilled? How can we find the many positive sides of the life we’re living right now? Many gyms have been closed to the public for many weeks, sometimes months, and at the time you’re reading these lines, the whole situation might have improved or not. The fitness industry had to adapt and move online and everyone has been offering some kind of courses or live-streamed classes to keep everyone motivated to keep training.
But we should also use this opportunity to work on our personal goals and to better ourselves in general. I personally attended a couple of online courses and certifications I never had time to do, trained every day and got some new personal records with a barbell, practiced on a daily basis some skills I wanted to improve, worked on Olympic rings movements, read several non-fiction books instead of watching 6 seasons of Downton Abbey to fine-tune my British accent, and pushed myself to drink a gallon of water a day instead of a gallon of French cognac. In a moment of pure craziness, I even stopped drinking coffee. After a whole week, and probably tipped by some concerned neighbors, the police had to force me to ingest some delicious Sumatra. Since then, the street is quiet and peaceful again.
If you spend more time at home, work on your culinary skills and watch your diet. If you can, also spend time outdoors and enjoy having your skin exposed to the sun, as many studies show how vitamin D helps the body to fight respiratory diseases. And keep moving every day, lifting weight or any other heavy objects, walking, running, dancing, or anything that makes your body feel good and alive. We all know that we don’t thrive on a BCD lifestyle (Beer-Couch-Doritos).