This is the most important month of the year for your health and fitness. What you do this month will have a drastic effect on your goals and results for this year. It really is a make or break month (or longer) for you this year. Let me tell you why.
The world has been turned upside down right now and no one knows how much longer this will go on. We are all stuck inside our houses, the gym is closed, and motivation is at an all time low. Anxiety is at (or close to) an all time high. It can be really easy to just write this time off as a loss and treat this as almost a vacation. Being in the house all day every day makes it much easier to snack a lot, lay around a lot, drink a lot, and generally just not do much of anything. Those hard earned healthy habits that you have developed over months and months of consistency start to be replaced by bad habits. This is a road to disaster. Let me give you an example.
Let's say your goal at the start of the year was to lose 25 pounds. Broken down over 12 months this is about 2 pounds per month, which is a very doable and sustainable pace (.5 pounds a week). You started the year off well and by mid March you had lost 10, which is ahead of schedule. You have been monitoring your body composition with the InBody and have maintained muscle. Things are going great. But all of the sudden we are hit with this quarantine. For the month of April you have a really hard time sticking to your routine. Your workouts are hit or miss. You are eating and drinking a lot more. You can't go to the gym so you might as well enjoy yourself. By the end quarantine you are scared to step back on the scale. You are excited to get back to the gym when it opens but when you check your body scan you have put on not only the 10 pounds that you lost, but another 5. This sounds drastic but we all know that the weight comes on much faster and easier than it comes off. So if (and that's a big if at this point) you can get back in the gym by May you are 5 months into the year and are 5 pounds heavier than you were at the start of the year. Now you have 7 months to lose 30 pounds, which is a much more difficult task. It's still doable but it's going to take a lot of work.
There is another issue that will arise that is even more detrimental than the unwanted weight gain. It's the bad habits you will form. Habits are incredibly hard to break. Good habits are very hard to acquire and easy to break, while bad habits are very easy to acquire and very hard to break. If you give up on your health and fitness routine during this time then it's going to be very, very hard for you when this is over with. You will most likely have developed a lot of very bad habits that it's going to take a while to break. You will also have to redevelop your good habits all over again. It's a double whammy. If it takes about a month to develop a habit then you're looking at at least June (assuming this is all over in May which is a big if) before you are back to normal. See what I'm getting at here? Half a year of progress and work is gone. You will basically be starting over with half a year left, and you might even be worse off than you were at the beginning of the year.
Let's look at the opposite example of someone who really buckles down during this time. They have more free time than ever so they decide to spend it by putting in even more effort into their health and fitness. They have the same goal as the first person (lose 25 pounds in a year) and have already lost the same amount of weight going into this (10 pounds). They, however increase their workout time each day and double down on their nutrition and recovery. Their results pick up speed, and they start to develop even more good habits. By May they have lost an additional 10 pounds and have developed good habits that they will be able to easily keep once life gets back to normal. By June they are down 20 pounds (5 away from their yearly goal) and are well on their way to exceeding their goals.
Let's compare these two people on July 1. The person who treated this like a vacation is at best back where they started at the beginning of the year (and possibly even worse off). They still have 25 pounds to lose this year but they only have 6 months to do it. They also have developed a lot of bad habits that they are struggling to break (snacking before bed, drinking multiple nights a week, staying up late) and are struggling to get back into their weekly gym routine. The person who treated this like an opportunity, however is thriving. They have already lost 20 pounds and are 5 pounds away from their goal. They have also developed even more good habits that will make achieving their goals even easier. By the end of the year these two people will look like completely different people.
How you treat this time is crucial and that can't be overstated. The people who treat this like a vacation are going to have a really, really hard time of it when things get back to normal. The people who treat this like an opportunity, however, will set themselves up to exponentially improve their chance of achieving and surpassing your goals. There are only two types of people right now-which one are you going to be?