It is hard to believe that quarantine started over a year ago. It feels like just yesterday my spring break was being extended, and the future looked super uncertain. For me, the prospect of being home every day was daunting. My New Year’s resolution to drop my freshman-fifteen and my new relationship weight was already faltering. Being stuck in my home with no place to work out, surrounded by snacks and temptations to be lazy were very apparent. Therefore, I had to evaluate what I wanted from quarantine. Did I want to feel stuck, sad and unaccomplished, or did I want to be proud of something that I had done in a time of such uncertainty? I decided that I was not going to let quarantine stop me from becoming the best version of myself. 

Thus, I made a quarantine resolution: I was going to get healthy again. The hardest thing for me was the snacking. I love to eat, and I am an emotional eater. At the time, I ate when I was happy, I ate when I was sad, and I ate when I was stressed. Training myself to avoid that extra unhealthy food and replace it with something that was beneficial for me. I also needed to ensure that I was not overeating. I want to stress the difference between making sure I was not overeating and just straight up denying my body the food it needs. I still ate three meals a day, and they were not small meals either. However, I made sure I was only providing my body with what it needed to function, not a ton of extra unhealthy and fattening foods that were not benefiting me at all. For example, I cut out all sugar from my diet, and lowered the amount of carbs that I was intaking. I really tuned into how my body processed foods and what my body needed to become strong again. Carbs are something you need to survive and trying to completely cut it out of everyone’s diet is stupid. However for me, I listened and watched my body, and learned that my metabolism is slow, and I was not burning the carbs that I was intaking. 

I also had the challenge of keeping myself motivated. A diet change seems simple on paper, but in reality it can become a change in lifestyle. I like food, dang it. At the time I was working in a kitchen, so there were cookies, cakes, puddings and all of my favorite foods surrounding me. It took a lot of discipline and a large amount of mental strength to keep myself on track. I decided the best way to keep myself from going off track was to motivate myself with my temptations. I set different weight goals for myself, and once I hit those weight goals, then I could cheat and indulge on anything my heart desired. I knew that I could bounce back from a cheat day, so it was never a huge issue to fall off the wagon because I ate what I wanted for once. 

My decisions came based on what I could handle. I knew that changing my whole lifestyle at a single point in time would burn me out, so I started with just the diet and told myself that after two months of following the diet, I would add exercise into the mix. That worked wonderfully for me. It helped me adjust slowly and didn’t require me changing my entire day to day schedule all at once. It gave my body a chance to learn what it needed, and then take it up a notch. When it came to working out, I knew I needed to challenge myself and that I would need some type of plan to follow or else I would never get anything done. The Beachbody Insanity program had been in my basement for awhile, so I pulled that bad boy out. It was tough, and it pushed my limits. But it definitely worked, and being able to have a workout laid out in front of me at home was perfect. 

Over the course of a year, I have lost almost 50 lbs through a healthier diet and exercise. It is a gigantic accomplishment, but it has not come without its challenges. For me, I have struggled a lot with body dysmorphia. Throughout the entire process, the scale was showing me that I was losing weight, but my mind would always contradict that fact. I looked in the mirror and convinced myself that nothing was changing. Those thoughts are pretty damaging. It almost demotivated me. If it were not for the constant support and reinforcement of my family and friends, those thoughts definitely would have gotten me back into my old habits. I still struggle with this daily and have spent a lot of time learning about how to deal with those thoughts. I have to keep a positive mindset and realize how far I’ve come. 

Overall, my quarantine resolution was to change my lifestyle, and over a year later I am extremely proud of how far I have come. Although there have been challenges within it, I know that what I am doing is going to benefit me in the long run.