Exercise
I've been reading through my old posts, bit by bit. Apparently I stopped writing in 2012, and almost everything from 2010 to 2012 was a private entry.
So far I haven't come across any records of my experiments with exercise. I call them "experiments" because in those days, I am fairly certain I didn't know what I was doing. I'm still not sure I know what I'm doing, but I know more than I did then.
I joined a gym for the first time probably in 2009, possibly earlier. My company had an exclusive deal with a local gym (actually an elementary school with a gym attached), and we had free access to it. I figured, why not. As long as I wasn't trying to do stuff that would cause injury, experimenting with weights and cardio could only be a benefit, if it did anything.
I know my life became a lot busier from 2010 through 2012. I know I didn't stop going to the gym, but I may have cut down on it. At any rate, what I was doing then didn't cause me to be limping around in pain the next day, which is what a good exercise ought to do.
I really can't remember specifics about my gym activities until roughly 2016 or 2017. On one day in early September, after hurting from the gym (good) and not having had anything to eat that morning (bad), being incredibly tired (bad) and suffocating from the humidity (also bad), I went into Yeoksam station to pick up some coffee, and I passed out in the station. I'm pretty sure I just collapsed onto the floor, having set my coffee down safely first just in time. I woke up feeling okay, surrounded by subway station personnel wondering what had happened to me.
What followed was a series of hospital checkups to make sure I didn't have anything serious going on (I didn't), a test to make sure I had vasal vago syncope (I did), and a final recommendation/scolding from the doctor that I wasn't eating enough, and that for the amount of exercise I was doing (4 to 5 times a week), I should be eating a whole lot more.
And so I started to eat more, and that fixed everything.
I used to have IBS, and I guess I still do, as it's not something you stop having. But I suppose I used to eat light so as not to feel bloated or stomach-weird for the whole day, and yet never gave thought to what eating lots of chips and junk food might do. The point is, a combination of exercising regularly and eating a lot fixed that. Before changing my diet, I used to feel varying degrees of discomfort at various points of the day. After changing my diet, I would be dying if I felt hungry, and then feel amazing after eating. Just two states of being. It was life-changing.
It didn't solve all my problems. Specifically, for all the exercising I was doing, I was frustrated that I had never managed to see my abs, ever.
In 2019, somehow I finally figured everything out. I knew what kinds of food I should eat, and how much of it throughout the day, and then how much I would need to exercise.
And so finally, by spring 2020, I had abs. Yay. I also got a checkup and clocked in just under the average BMI threshold . . . average was something like 25 to 35, and I was at 24. Something like that.
And then . . . well, a lot of things interfered with that. There was covid, and having to mask up while exercising. There was the occasion gym lockdown. There were the breaks I took the two times I moved apartments, and also the two-month break in the summer of 2021 prior to the second move, and then my vacation to New York in November-December 2021, where I did exercise, but where I also ate a ton of junk food, and then the 10 days of quarantining and eating poorly. So it's a struggle to get back to where I was two years ago.
There's also the fact that I now almost entirely work from home, and that makes a big difference, because that's roughly an hour of walking (20/25 minutes each way to and from work, plus walking to and from lunch) that I no longer do each day. I am happy to be out of that office, and yet there are so many small things I miss about that lifestyle. Passing through Gangnam Station at off hours, picking up coffee on the way to work, clocking in when everyone was already there, etc. I've wondered if I would feel better renting out a very tiny work space somewhere nearby my apartment, just to see if that environment would make a difference. I dunno.
Work is another matter for another entry.