Decision
The day-by-day repetition made my days completely forgettable and tasteless, making me frustrated. I felt I needed a different environment to change my mood. Looking back, I’ve hardly ever traveled—especially after coming to Canada, I’ve never traveled anywhere in Canada. Maybe this time is a good opportunity to take a trip and refresh my mind. Alright, since I’ve made the decision, then I should go for it, take action, not just stop at the idea. But before taking action, I still need to make a plan.
Before that, I touched my belly and realized that many of my old clothes no longer fit. For example, my pants used to fall off without a belt, but now I can’t even get into them without one. I often wonder why I bought such slim-fitting clothes. Thinking about it, I haven’t managed my body shape actively for a long time, especially in terms of diet. I remember I used to check nutrition labels carefully when buying food, but now I eat all sorts of things, including junk food, until I’m stuffed. That’s caused me to gain quite a bit of weight. I want to get back to myself, so I’ll start by returning to my previous body shape.
Since I’ve decided to travel, I’ll try to get back in shape before the trip—meaning I’ll need to lose weight in a short period of time. Fortunately, even though my training intensity dropped, I’ve still been working out, and my nutrition intake has generally been excessive. That means I should still be holding onto most of my muscle, since the intensity required to maintain muscle is lower than the intensity needed to build it. And because I’ve continued training, even at a somewhat reduced intensity, my body hasn’t gained unlimited weight but stayed at a stable level. In this way, getting back in shape in a short time is still quite feasible.
The Planning and Problems
The core theory of weight loss is to burn more than you consume, so my plan must revolve around that. To reduce intake, I’ll first cut out all the junk food I usually eat, like pizza and burgers, and replace them with healthy food. But the problem is, I eat work-provided meals most of the time at my workplace, and I don’t have much choice in what to eat. Plus, the job is somewhat physically demanding, so I can’t eat too little. So I’ll slightly reduce my intake of work meals.
As for burning calories, I’ll increase exercise output by raising the intensity of strength training and adding aerobic workouts, which I previously didn’t do much. But the issue here is that I can’t drastically increase strength training intensity right away, and since my job is physically demanding, my body needs recovery and can’t handle high-intensity strength training too frequently.
Also, my idea is to do aerobic exercise nearly every day, but I usually can’t make it to the gym after work due to its closing time. So I thought about doing aerobic exercises at home after work. Fortunately, there’s one aerobic activity that’s both efficient and requires very little space—my favorite: jump rope. However, jumping rope at home is inconvenient due to the rope itself. Luckily, I found something called a “cordless jump rope,” which I had never noticed before. So, the specific plan is:
- Ban all junk food and sugary drinks, and reduce work meal intake to about 3/4 of the original. On rest days, eat some non-junk food and try to limit intake.
- Slightly increase strength training intensity and add a large amount of aerobic exercise, about 6 to 7 times per week, mainly doing cordless jump rope at home for 30 to 45 minutes each session.
The Process
Surprisingly, I didn’t find the eating part too difficult. I didn’t miss junk food because of the dietary changes, nor did I feel overly hungry. That’s not to say I wasn’t hungry at all—there was a normal level of hunger. But maybe it was due to my mood at the time; within three to four weeks, I didn’t feel it was hard.
As for exercise, I didn’t feel any difficulty with strength training, since the intensity only increased slightly. Regarding aerobic training, even on days when I worked physically hard all day, I was still able to do cordless jump rope after coming home. I didn’t feel like “I’m too tired to do this.” I think it was because of how I felt at the time—like I had “had enough.”
That said, it wasn’t like that every single time. Sometimes work was just too exhausting, and I’d think maybe I’d skip that day. In those cases, if I’d already done it 6 times that week, I’d rest. If I hadn’t reached 6, I’d do a shorter session—or if I was too tired, I’d still rest.
Speaking of the cordless jump rope, I did have some thoughts after using it. Compared to traditional jump rope, it feels more like a simulation. Whether it’s equally effective depends, I think, on whether you’re skilled at jump roping. With a real rope, you’re forced to coordinate your hands and feet—otherwise, you can’t continue. But with no rope to trip you, your hands and feet can “do their own thing” and you can still keep going. I’m not sure if this “doing their own thing” state yields the same results as real jump rope. But if you’re good at jump rope, you can fully simulate the coordination between hands and feet.
I feel it gets quite close to real jump roping, especially during speed jumping. But even then, occasionally, you’ll get a brief moment where your hands and feet aren’t coordinated.
As for people who can’t or aren’t good at jump roping—since they don’t know how coordination and timing are supposed to feel, I think they’ll probably have a “what am I even doing” feeling. With a real rope, you at least know your goal is to jump as the rope passes under you—you can follow that cue to keep going. But if there’s no rope, and you don’t have the right sense of rhythm, can you even keep going when you don’t know what you’re doing? I think the effectiveness might drop a lot.
The biggest issue I encountered while jumping rope was knee pain. There was no problem at first, but after almost three consecutive weeks of jumping, my knees started to hurt noticeably—especially during the jumping motion. This might have to do with the floor, shoes, or jump rope frequency. I tried laying down a softer mat, switching shoes, and using knee supports, but since the pain had already begun, I had to significantly reduce the intensity.
After that, I could only jump once or twice a week, and for the rest, I would use a stationary bike or elliptical at the gym when I could. But since I couldn’t go to the gym often, the overall aerobic intensity dropped by about 40%.
The Result
The whole weight control process lasted two months, but this part will only summarize the first month, since the second month was quite different and will be covered in the next summary. Overall, the plan was followed, but I made slight adjustments later due to knee pain. After about a month, my weight dropped from around 162 pounds to around 154 pounds. That’s not particularly fast, but considering the healthy pace of 2 pounds per week, it’s still a good result. At least I can now fit into many of my old clothes again. I think it’s a very solid start.