This isn't a tale of miraculous weight loss as a result of changing just one thing in my life. It's mostly about benefits that I hadn't expected from changing just one thing in my life.
I began putting on weight during COVID, which there was no excuse for. Unlike so many people, I wasn't suddenly home and sedentary due to the lockdowns. In fact, the only thing about my daily routine that changed in 2020 was the addition of Zoom happy hours at random times during the day.
My friends who weren't used to being home were discovering the joy of frequent day drinking and I was sort of their Sherpa guide through the phase.
Anyway, my "COVID weight" was not only still here five years later; more of it was showing up every day.
While visiting my sister in Michigan in January, I stayed in a room that had a full-length mirror, which made it impossible to ignore the reality of my expanding girth. I looked like I could cause an eclipse. While unsure of how I was going to go about it, I decided to get back to the desert and tackle the problem. The winter weather here is nice, which made me think that walking would be a good place to start.
Because I'm a runner, I'd never given walking the credit it deserves as exercise. A bad foot has kept me from running for a few years, but I can still walk without too much pain. I do like cycling, but that wasn't fitting into my schedule well lately, so walking it was.
For the last five years, my diet willpower and workout consistency had been weaker than Hillary Clinton's sex appeal. I might get a good streak of four or five days with a workout regimen, then I would remember that I have 10 craft brew tap rooms near my house. Things have also been insanely busy for those of us in conservative media of late, and that gave me a convenient excuse. I needed something simple to get me going again.
Ten thousand steps a day is what everyone talks about. I have no idea if there's a lot of research behind that, but I do know it's better than zero steps a day. I set a goal of 10K a day, along with 100 kettlebell swings every day.
Whaddya know, I stuck with both for almost a month before I took a day off.
It's now a month after that, and those first few thousand steps have led to a complete overhaul of my diet, as well as my sleep, work, and workout (there's a lot more than walking) schedules. Oh, and my productivity. Yes, I've lost some weight as well.
The earliest benefit I noticed was in my creative brain. I would take a walking break after writing a column and be ready to write something else as soon as I got home. I write a lot of jokes when I run, so this wasn't entirely new to me. I'd just never walked enough before for my right brain to get into it. I've been hemorrhaging jokes, as well as writing more columns here at the old PJ Media ranch.
All because I began getting off of my butt.
What I needed more than anything was to know that I could be consistent about something other than work again. I didn't even know how badly I needed to know that. Getting outside for some fresh air several times a day did the trick.
Reducing the size of my shadow was the original motivation for this journey, but a far more powerful one soon emerged. I haven't been on stage enough in the last several years, and I'm dying to go back on the road. No, I'm not abandoning my duties here — I can do both at the same time. There's some vanity involved in my approach to stand-up. Hitting the road always did make me work out harder. I wasn't in the mood to go on stage and start telling fat jokes, although I have written a bit about the temptation to do so.
I realized that I wasn't going to want to hit the stage again until I got rid of my third-trimester chic silhouette. It's finally happening. Another few months of this and I'll be a lean(ish), mean, joke-telling machine. It's taking this long because I was only about 15 pounds shy of getting a fat comic Netflix special.
That's all for now. I'm heading out for a walk.
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