What an entertaining spring this has been. Two months after my fateful encounter with a cold virus, I’m finally feeling better. I cough very little now, I haven’t had to use my inhaler in a week, and even my energy is beginning to return to normal. However, another, more unexpected, side effect emerged from this ordeal: I’ve lost six percent of myself. Since I started recording my weight in early March (doctor’s orders), I’ve lost over ten pounds (I just typed that while finishing a small bag of Cheetos), and my weight loss since the illness goes on.
When you’re a fat dude like myself, losing weight is fantastic. I’m still about thirty pounds overweight, and dropping some pounds can’t hurt. On the other hand, I don’t feel like I really earned my weight loss. Bronchitis makes losing weight incredibly easy; who wants to stuff food in their mouth when they’re constantly coughing stuff out of their mouth? It’s just not worth the effort, and that’s the problem: I lost weight without putting much effort into it. That’s not the way to lose weight: what if I lost muscle mass instead of fat, and I’m even flabbier than before? Maybe I’m just a giant lump of lard. How totally gross.
Given, I did take advantage of my illness to make slight adjustments to my diet. The most important change I made is during mealtimes. I decided I was eating far more food towards the end of the day than any other time, so I switched my big meal from dinner to lunch. I now eat light dinners and heavy lunches; this way I work off the lunch during the afternoon, and I don’t go to bed full.
Some foods have recently disappeared from the fridge, or are now present only part-time. We have less bread and cold cuts in the fridge than usual, for example. Instead, I buy tortillas or flatbread. Instead of, for example, eating four slices of bread (two sandwiches) for dinner, I’ll eat two burritos, filling them with slightly more food (and far more veggies) but eating less bread in the process. I eat similarly with flatbread, making gyros (or simply grabbing a couple slices and eating it with hummus), eating about the same but cutting the bread and ramping up the veggies. Ice cream has virtually disappeared from the freezer; in its place are juice pops. And if I do get ice cream, it’s at a restaurant, where I’ll eat only one serving instead of gulping down half a container at home. I am careful to eat breakfast as often as possible, usually cereal, occasionally with fruit. For dessert, fresh fruit or the aforementioned juice pops.
Another food I’ve eaten less of as of late is cheese. When you have bronchitis, the very last thing you want to eat is cheese; it feels horrible going down, and you feel like you’re coughing it all back up for the next several hours. So my dairy intake took a nosedive during my illness and hasn’t completely returned to normal. I still eat cheese: I throw some on my burritos or on my pasta. However, I don’t need it as much. If I have sour cream and cheddar available for my burritos, I choose one instead of both. These are all minor adjustments at best, but if you make enough minor adjustments to your daily diet, you will eventually see results.
I don’t expect to continue to lose weight; eventually my weight will bottom out at a certain point, and I will have to make further adjustments to lose more weight. I’ll have to start exercising. Count calories. Eat low-fat cheese. (NEVER!) For the time being, I’m happy that I’ve managed to keep off the weight I lost during my illness, plus a little extra besides. Maybe I’ll celebrate with a bigger bag of Cheetos.
