EXERCISE had been one of my goals after losing weight through the low-carb diet. Low-carb doctors and coaches would always advise to add exercise once we’re fully adapted to the diet. But I took my time and only joined the gym two years after starting my low-carb journey.
It was only the morning after my first night at the gym that I noticed the date of that night—my second anniversary as a low-carb dieter. And I took that as a sign that God was again guiding me in this journey.
My blood pressure went crazy in January 2021, no thanks to the stay-home policy during the pandemic lockdowns.
What to do while staying home? Read, write, spring cleaning, eat, sleep—which have remained as my hard habits to break during weekends.
There was that period during the pandemic when I had writer’s block for six months. Me not writing is like me hating halo-halo—the most impossible thing to happen. But it did happen—the not writing, I mean. As for the halo-halo, hating it is still a work in progress.
My body weight, which was about 150 to 160 pounds during the pre-pandemic years, ballooned to 180 pounds during the pandemic.
In January 2021, I learned that my blood pressure might worsen to uncontrollable levels if it would continue to go crazy. I panicked and started to include finding the diet that works for me as part of my daily novena.
In October 2021, I saw a video of Dr. Josephine Grace Rojo-Tan on Facebook, explaining the perks of a low-carb diet, and that piqued my curiosity. I Googled for other low-carb-diet videos but it was only in February 2022 that I finally began my low-carb journey.
If this column is starting to sound familiar, it’s because I’ve been writing about that journey for so many times now. If it’s still not coming out of your ears, congratulations.
Writing often about the diet is actually for me, to constantly remind myself that I’m on a diet, and will forever be on a diet.
It’s not just a diet, though. It’s a lifestyle. I can’t stop dieting just because I’ve already lost weight. If I eat carbs again, my hypertension will worsen, my skin allergies and rhinitis will come back, I’ll have brain fog the whole day, the blues will always hover overhead, I won’t be able to do planks anymore, even Zumba, which we use as warmup for the group exercises and personal training, will leave me huffing and puffing like the wolf in “The Three Little Pigs,” and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
Talk of planks, we had a plank challenge on Wednesday as a finisher for the Abs Workout. That was Coach CJ’s last group exercise as he’s leaving the gym for now, thus, the challenge. Winner Judy Kim and first runner-up DJ Dublado won a P500 discount from their monthly fees. Yay!
My plank personal record for that day: more than five minutes. My longest so far. Puera buyag.
