Changing our lifestyle

Ha. A slightly dramatic title, making it seem like we are doing a massive change here. It’s not massive, but I think the impact is considerable, at least for a few factors and reasons.

Living on my own

I was 23 when I moved from my parents’ house to my own apartment. I was a bit spoiled, in the sense that I never had to cook my own meal. So now, living alone, I was responsible for also that area. If I didn’t work for a fruit company at the time, I would have not eaten that much fruit. I didn’t drink alcohol on a regular basis (not much of a alone-at-home-drinker) and also meat-wise, I didn’t exaggerate. Sport-wise, I could have done better 😉 All-in-all, not too bad.

Living together (Amsterdam)

When I moved in with Vittorio in Amsterdam, my habits changed. For the worst, I would say. Food-wise I tried to keep the balance, but I admit we tended to eat more unhealthy (creamy, cheesy, ..) and less fruit. My alcohol intake increased (new job, more after work drinks, dinners with friends,..) and my fitness didn’t increase much.

I gained about 3kg in the first year. It’s not so much about my actual weight, but I felt it was going in the wrong direction. So we decided to make a (small) change.

The first thing we did, was giving up alcohol during the week (unless we had a good reason). We experimented more with vegetarian meat. And I joined a gym and started going regularly. But the real change only came in Hamburg.

Living together (Hamburg)

We live 30 min. away from the centre, and we had to build our social lives from basically 0. My new job doesn’t have the casual-after-work-drinks policy and the gym memberships cost only € 20/month. Boom. Add on top of that the working-from-home situation due to Corona, and this is where we are:

1. We only drink alcohol during weekends (exceptions are holidays and special events)
2. We eat way less meat (1-2/week, more often it’s not even our main dish but the aperitivo that has meat)
3. We work out regularly (10-15 min of exercises every day and 1h on Sunday)
4. We eat more fruit/veggies (we got a blender to make smoothies + we do active menu planning)

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The impact

Ok, so I’m gonna be honest: the impact was there but because I’m a lazy bitch, I slacked in the 2nd half of the year with the exercises (and also a bit the healthy food). Going 2 weeks to Lanzarote beginning of November and drinking alcohol there every day, also didn’t help…

This is my weight curve in the beginning of the year. The spikes are the daily measures and the line is the average:

Looking at today, I am back to square 1 – but I’m committed to getting the line down again! Up intil June, the line was going down. But then it went sideways 😀 So here’s what happened to my weight curve in 2020:

Although the scale doesn’t show so, in general, I feel better, have more energy, can focus more and my spirit is also quite good! This pandemic has (had) a serious impact on so many levels but (so far) I managed to cope with it by working on myself.

And that is still the most important person in my life 😉
Have you made any lifestyle changes recently?