It will be interesting to see how the long-term illness of Covid-19 compares to the long-term illness of obesity.
I had Asthma as a kid but COVID has triggered it back on again. I'm now a lot more sensitive to pollution.
I don't think the "obesity is really worse than COVID" thought process takes into account how much worse the pair are than either one individually.
Since then I have kicked out the emotional terrorist, taken up several disciplines of biking, and my gym opened back up. I am still fighting my weight, but I can see how directly my overeating is tied to stressful events at work, how it gets worse when I can't get out riding often, etc.
It has inspired me to accelerate my plans to quit IT as a career since that's my current major source of stress.
Careers are interesting... who wouldn't be stressed with a car in your rear!
Stress is addictive, it's a choice to be stressed, it's a choice to take things seriously, it's a choice to deny, deflect, and downright lie to yourself and make up stories and make excuses, it's a choice to grab that piece of food, it's a choice to not put it down, and it's a choice to swallow it after "properly" (uh oh here comes the stories) masticating every bite into a fine mash by chewing 30 times or more, 30 choices to spit out that food.
Take it easy on yourself, it takes time and focus to sustain enough attention to mold the body into a vision you have for yourself... If you constantly spike that vision with mind poisons known as "problems" or "management", how much awareness do you actually have left to put that doughnut down, let alone be in a state of mind to chose something your much rather be doing than dreaming about tossing Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and other gross elements in the form of a doughnut into your divine cosmic cauldron?
Your overeating is tied to your choice, simple as that, you are addicted to stress, and you choose the medicine of overeating to mitiGATE and relieve that stress... there's other methods, but with all of them you will still lean into the addictive nature that is systemic to the OG stress addiction. Fighting this, fighting anything is almost always a fire vs fire fight, you want something to remain, resolve?
Give it space... that means allowing it to be, allowing yourself to just be, that is just being yourself, not being the stories you make up about yourself that serve to distract and put you in a mood of self-sabotage and self-annihilatory behavior to persist in the upkeep and to be quite frank, the hard work of doing all of that heavy psychological work and mind games to maintain--part of the way you can motivate persistence is to dualistically and ritualistically swap victimization/villinilization, or in other words you keep moving the goal posts away from you because you really enjoy all of it--You realize that all of it the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly... it's all love, and it is precisely this resistance to this love that perpetuates it, the stress, the manifestation of everything you want and do not want.
Dream the dream you want to be in, not the dream you don't, or better yet leave it and give it space as you go explore the unknown.
You got this star wars kid!
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This is totally tangential, but I've been forced onto a low-/no-fat diet (fewer than 30g a day) due to a health problem of indeterminate cause (thankfully, COVID was ruled out completely)—of which acute necrotizing pancreatitis was one of the outcomes— which puts me in the place where I'm eating a lot more carbs to make up my caloric requirements than I was when I was in the gym every day.
I'm losing stubborn fat I couldn't drop previously like crazy. That said, I loved cooking and food is not exciting now. But I didn't realize how many calories I may have been missing in my counts due to added olive oil here and there, etc etc.
I know keto/low-carb diets are all the craze right now, and the faddy low-fat diets of the 80s/90s had glaring problems, but it might be worth reassessment given the current circumstances.
My current situation, to sum it up is:
• working from home, at a desk 4-5 days a week
• go for a walk most days, but not every day (I should be doing more, but bouts of pain have interrupted forming better habits)
• no weights — I'd like to reintroduce this to prevent further muscle loss after years of so much hard work, but again—been warned against this for now
• under 30g of fat in my diet a day — doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" fat. Just total volume. This means I have to select food options I used to think were awful. If I want cheese I have to pick the cheaper, non-fat options like store-brand plastic-like slices. A lot of chicken and turkey cold cuts. Low-fat bread and bagels (I used to avoid bagels like the plague)—nothing with seeds or nuts. Hardly any oils. No butter, no margarine, no nut butters or spreads. I can have small amounts of low-fat cream cheese.
I previously lost a great deal of weight suddenly due to the inability to eat properly for two weeks, and being taken off solid foods for several days entirely.
In June 2020 I was up to 225 from 198lbs. From mid-June to early July I went from 225 to around 205 (I suspect mostly muscle loss since I was still flabby). Since returning to solid food and the new, unwanted diet I have gone from that 205 down to 186 today. Some of that loss may be due to other health factors as the rate is probably a bit high for healthy, but a large part is due to a much more calorie-restricted diet. It's actually a lot harder to read my caloric requirements without those fats and things I actually want to eat...
This is a prime case of YMMV, and my diet is a bit extreme, but I was in exactly the same case as you prior to the emergence of my health problem and am on a diet I would never have considered otherwise. Also—my heart has been in great shape so I don't know how this would hurt someone with heart issues—I probably get a lot of salt, but my needs for electrolytes recently probably also buffer that a bit.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/07/obesity-is-co...
The other thing about COVID, though, is that I don't even need to know the person who I can catch it from.
[1] If your obese parents raised you, it's quite likely you'll be obese. If you and your extended family fell into poverty, and your cousins became obese, it's quite likely you will become obese, too. But subtract direct role models, direct sources of your habits, changes to your economic status, and the fact that as time goes on, you get older (And older people tend to be more obese), geographic effects (The rust belt started becoming depressed and poor over the years, which lead to obesity)... And what sort of effect is left?