What if this is just due to people on average being the fattest and most stressed out they've ever been? Being inside for a few years didn't help everyone physically.
Yeah, I doubt this applies to majority of office workers, majority of people just stopped moving while WFH and get fatter, so obviously their physical condition deteroriated vax/COVID or not.
Since early 2022 when things began to normalize I have lost 10 pounds.
On a normal day during the pandemic, I would get like 1500 steps in. Before the pandemic, walking to/from the metro alone would take up nearly 8k steps. Total would easily be 12k+ steps.
It was a drastic reduction in activity. I attribute all my current health problems to it.
It took some time to recover, but I continued getting exercise, despite being a studio apartment dweller.
But after a shook COVID, I stopped listening to the news and government that said going outside was dangerous and got my walking in and continued to go out for fresh air.
I have fully recovered from COVID, and have actually lost weight (food got more expensive, my income did not go up to cover that).
I can understand how some people worked from home and got fat eating good food, but I also understand these things were choices. I choose to exercise. I choose to eat less healthy food instead of eating cheap crap.
I choose to think about my health, and put in the work to be healthy.
For me, COVID was an opportunity to control my health, and it seems like others suffered by failing to do so and following the media and masses.
I think I made the right choice. Do you have any regrets about your choices? Or do you think COVID was just a bad thing that happened to you and you had no control?
Covid killed all that momentum. And anytime I would get into a groove, a new round of lockdowns would put a giant pause on it. The gyms and parks were closed during all the multiple waves.
I would workout at home but it was just not enough activity - every hour long workout was followed by 23 hours of sitting/lying down. Whereas in a normal day, an hour long workout would be followed by a walk to the metro, walking around in the office, walking to the local market…way more motion.
Worse, there was nothing much to do except sit around and look at screens. No going out for drinks, no weekends at the park, no chatting around after gym.
I could have made some better choices, admittedly though.
I felt I needed to be extra cautious too since I'm middle aged, obese, and have asthma, so I didn't do a whole lot outside of the house until I got vaccinated, mostly just walks around the neighborhood or at forest preserves.
Last year I sort of got better and dropped that extra 20 lbs, this year is off to a bad start though with a muscle strain in my arm taking its sweet time to heal and making it difficult to work out and constantly being too cold to go on walks outside this past month. Hopefully I can start making things happen in a month or so though.
Overall I definitely think I'm in worse overall health than I would have been without the Covid pandemic being a thing. But I might be in even worse health if I got Covid that first year (and especially that first six months when we knew practically nothing about it and how to treat it in the hospital).