The Health Benefits

Before I started changing my lifestyle I had heard that weight-loss and exercise are meant to help increase your energy levels and help improve your mental health. It’s now been four months since I changed what I eat and almost as long since I started doing regular exercise. I’ve lost 15 KG and am demonstrably fitter so I wanted to share how it has changed me and perhaps this is something I’ll review again in a few more months.

Feeling Old

Back in January my body ached and was stiff. I ached when I got up in the morning and I felt stiff and inflexible when I was doing something like bending down to pick up a cat food bowl. I’d put it down to just getting older but the cat food bowl bit did worry me and was definitely a contributory factor in me shaking my life up.

I ache a lot less now and I am more flexible. The cat bowl problem is definitely improving but at the same time I am perhaps even more acutely aware of how stiff my body still is. I can do stretches before and after a run but I can’t touch my toes or do low squats although things are slowly improving. I know that I have some muscle tightness issues in specific areas which I intend to go and get some professional advice about.

I don’t feel as old as I did and my knees feel less ‘creaky’. I don’t have a sore back when I get out of bed and I don’t hobble around as much. I do still get odd twinges here and there but things are improving and so reducing my weight and exercising more is definitely helping.

Energy Levels

The whole “you’ll feel more energetic” thing is really hard to quantify. I don’t bounce out of bed or spring through each day like Tigger but I don’t feel as tired and listless as I think I used to. And it is ‘think’ because this is the hardest thing for me to work out if things have changed much or not.

I no longer finish work, slump on the sofa and have a snooze. That might be because I now finish work and go and take some exercise. I do still feel tired (as I write this I’m wishing I has more sleep last night) and perhaps that’s my problem. My sleeping routine hasn’t changed or improved much and this is something I definitely do need to work on. I think that increasing exercise is meant to help you sleep better because your body is tired but my lack of a proper sleep routine is essentially just fighting the benefits.

However I do now crave exercise and I enjoy going out for a run or doing a Zwift Ride and the urge to do something physical is presumably part of this increased energy levels thing. I just find this benefit really hard to quantify so either my expectations of how I am meant to feel are too high or it just hasn’t happened for me.

Mental Health

This is much easier for me to reflect on because I’m generally pretty aware of my mental health state. One of my earliest (surviving… I do prune really out of date things) blog posts was about my mental health and I am pretty conscious about the ups-and-downs I can go through.

Weight Loss

It’s really important to remember that what I say here is about me and my view of myself. This is not about body-shaming anyone or judging people who might be obese or overweight.

For me, loosing weight is a separate mental health benefit to exercise. Loosing weight means that I am no longer feel awkward in my own body. I am no longer ashamed of it. I still have a visible stomach but it is far less visible and approaching “dad bod” levels.

I used to dread the idea of going to something like a school reunion because I’d imagine people wondering why the person who used to be really skinny when they were in the teens and twenties was now so fat. They probably wouldn’t and I think this is a problem in my own head and a reflection of how unhappy I was with myself. I’m getting closer to this not being a fear any more. I am not yet happy with how I look but then I’m only about half way through loosing the weight I want to.

Until I changed my lifestyle in January I was feeling trapped in a body I didn’t like and felt I had no ability to alter. I ate to make myself happier about it (brains are very odd!) which just made things worse and I was slowly descending into a form of self-loathing whilst feeling helpless to change anything. I was just lucky that the right external prompts allowed me to start resolving it without needing to seek professional help. And I probably would never have sought that because it is only by reflecting on it now that I have proper perspective about it.

Loosing weight is definitely helping my mental health and my relationship with my own body. I now feel in control of my weight and I am feeling a lot happier about how I am starting to look.

Exercise

After that slightly concerning bit about my view of myself I can be more positive overall about exercise and my mental health. It is well established that exercise help improve your mental health and for me this has been true and it manifests itself in several ways.

Sometimes during, and always after, taking some exercise I feel a sense of achievement and generally very positive (even if I am dripping in sweat, and feeling exhausted) which will be thanks to the endorphins.

Seeing my fitness improvements over time (such as the pace increase mentioned in my last post where I declared myself to be a runner) gives me a great sense of achievement and satisfaction. I am very slowly creep up “rankings” of how my fitness compares to other people: Garmin Connect tells me, for example, that this month I have spent more time running than 63% of other male Garmin users in my age bracket.

Exercise is also helping with my work-life balance. I work for a company I co-own and work from home so the temptation for work to dominate my life is high and it has been a problem over the years. My stress levels can be high and I don’t always cope well with the pressure. Over the last few months I have started to deliberately finish work each day at around 5pm and then go for a run or a bike ride. It gives me an ‘off-switch’ and a buffer between stopping work and starting my evening and it has been noticeably beneficial. I even sometimes go for a run at lunchtime if I’ve had an intense morning and need to clear my head. Introducing exercise into my daily routine to help me unwind and using it as a ‘release valve’ has been an incredible improvement to my mental health.

Exercise is also giving me achievable goals which help when you feel, at times, that life can be out of your control. My first running goal of wanting to be able to run 5K and complete a Parkrun is hopefully only two or three weeks away and then I am already thinking about 10K runs and taking part in local running events. It all feels achievable but something I know I will need to work towards and setting and reaching those sorts of goals is incredibly satisfying.

Some Final Thoughts

So, perhaps unexpectedly, I look on both my diet and exercise changes as being incredibly positive. I have a way to go before I’ll properly feel comfortable in my body (and I am acutely aware that this could become a problem and something I need to be conscious about). But I am seeing and feeling the improvements whether it is by fitting into old clothes which were too tight, moving to the next notch on a belt, being able to run or cycle a bit further or faster than I could before, and that helps all of this become a self-motivating cycle.

I cannot say that I definitively feel more energetic but I know that my physical well-being has improved demonstrably. I am sure that my mental health has improved however and that is hugely important since I can struggle with depression at times.

Ryan Condon, the person who unknowingly helped me find the motivation to start this process back in January, posted some advice to someone in his Discord forum a little while ago and it stuck with me because it’s what I am now doing. He said, “Find your happy place and then overstay your welcome.” That’s exactly what I’m doing.