Give yourself a break for pandemic pounds

At the start of the pandemic, many of us feared that we were all going to die. So, why the hell not have that buttery croissant, that plate of pasta, that glass of hoppy ale, that flagon of big-shouldered red wine?

I was later than I should have been sitting down at the laptop Tuesday. I almost always am.

If these decades of typing for money have taught me anything, it is that a whole sea of justifications exist to avoid sitting down and putting fingers to keyboard.

Tuesday morning, I hemmed and hawed for a while about what this column should be about. I took the dog for a walk in the hope of getting something, anything, zinging around in my brain.

On my iphone, I killed some time on social media — what in hell is wrong with the Raptors? How do things actually look in Georgia? Who and what is Bean Dad? — and was on my way upstairs, where the cursor blinked accusingly on my blank Word document, when I stopped and circled back to the kitchen.

I had, you see, a compelling urge to go and eat a piece of cake, which is a good thing, because that, in a roundabout way, is what this column is about.

We Canadians are already big; 61 per cent of us were overweight or obese in 2017 when Statistics Canada asked. The pandemic has only made things worse.

As you probably read on thechronicleherald.ca, according to a survey commissioned by athletic shoe guide website Run repeat, around 36 per cent of Canadians surveyed have packed on some pounds during the pandemic.

The good news, I suppose, is that 36 per cent of those surveyed have actually shed some weight since COVID19 hit.

I must sadly report that I am not among them. There are a whole range of reasons for this.

The big one, I suppose, is that the pandemic has wreaked havoc upon my activity level, as it has with most people's.

Gyms have by-and-large been closed. So, for much of the time, have sporting venues like hockey rinks and tennis courts.

For a time, I laced on the running shoes, but an old meniscus tear flared up, and a gimpy hip throbbed.

That left walking, and what I laughingly refer to as my at-home “strength workout.”

Mostly, though, it meant karate, either by myself, or with a few people in a field somewhere, or via a zoom class where my instructor did their best, while on a computer screen, to replicate the immediacy, intimacy and energy of 40 people together in a dojo.

If you're looking for a single activity to cover all the fitness needs — strength, cardio, flexibility, co- ordination and balance — karate may well be it.

Yet, for me, even that wasn't enough to fight the impacts of the global pandemic to a draw. The road back to fighting trim stretches before me, all the way to the horizon.

I will be honest, my change in attitude hasn't helped matters.

At the start of the pandemic, many of us feared that we were all going to die. So, why the hell not have that buttery croissant, that plate of pasta, that glass of hoppy ale, that flagon of big-shouldered red wine? You know, stress eating.

Now, though something else may get us, it seems the coronavirus will not. The let-us-eat-and-drink-for-tomorrow-we-die way of looking at things no longer seems relevant.

My view on life, though, has altered.

For now, at least, it is hard to get too excited about how much I can bench, or what my BMI number is, knowing full well that a pandemic can smite us at any moment, as it just has.

On the other hand, if I want a slab of caramel cake at 10:30 in the morning, well, why the hell not?

This is not an attitude that will necessarily get you to a ripe old age. But maybe for now my thinking is that maybe we should all just cut ourselves a little slack.

I don't know that I necessarily see the future like Nicholas Christakis, the Yale University social epidemiologist who predicts “an unprecedented recovery” including “sex parties and lavish spending” ahead, in the same way that the Roaring 20s followed the bloodshed of the First World War and the 1918 influenza epidemic which took an estimated 50 million lives.

But I do think it will be okay to eat a piece of cake and drink a beer to celebrate walking the Earth, then maybe worry about the core strength a little later on.