Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

Meaning “a sound mind in a sound body”, for those who haven’t studied Latin. Hey, sometimes a girl gets to brag about all those things she’s learnt in the past.

This has been my mantra on the 3FC forums for a few months, and with each passing week, I now realize how inspired I was the day I picked it. It’s not about weight, it’s not about being successful. It’s just about a goal I wanted and needed to pursue, for I know that being in good health and with a keen mind is something everyone, and all the more every student, could do with.

Usually, I try to follow the 90/10 rule, or even the 80/20 one when the going gets tough. I don’t have many social opportunities, due to my self-imposed ‘exile’ in my apartment to study, and I know that if I eat in a healthy way most of the time, I can lose weight, maintain what I’ve already lost, and generally remain in a good overall physical state. Even if I’m not perfect and eat at McDonald’s now and then, even if I sometimes allow myself to choose French fries instead of rice at the campus restaurant. As a general rule, it works.

And so, especially since around April (the month when I seriously recommitted to all of this stuff after having bullshitted myself for a good year, without any positive result, of course), I think I can safely say that “I am very often eating healthy enough foods”.

Coincidentally, early April (the Easter week-end, to be more precise) is also the last time I caught a cold. Coincidentally, did I say? Maybe not so much.

Colds are my weakness. They’ve always been, as far as I can remember, although they were worse when I was a child. I’m of a naturally strong and healthy build, but I’m of these people whoalso can’t wash their hair before going to school/work in the morning and not drying them, whether we’re in summer or winter. And colds always start the same way, too, which makes them quite predictable: a feeling of something rasp at the back of my throat/pharynx, then the day after I start blowing my nose more and more often, then the third day, there it is: the runny nose, the stuffed head, the headaches, losing my voice for a couple of days, and finally an annoying cough. It always goes the same way. This is my own plague, so to say.

This past Sunday, I started to feel something weird in my throat again. Because, of course, we all know that going back to school in September without falling ill or breaking something isn’t funny. I thought I would be sick this week. Yet I’m not. The feeling persisted until Tuesday, and then it was gone. Exactly the way it happened three times this summer, between April and August. Which makes it four. Four times my weakest body area has been able to ward off its traditional illness.

I am positive that this is all due to the Powers of Fruits and Vegetables Combined. In other words, I am giving my body enough nutrients to be stronger on its own, to be more efficient when it comes to resisting bacterias, viruses and the likes. I had already noticed that trend in the past, but by then I still wasn’t too keen on many vegetables, so it was harder to be sure of it. I honestly can’t see another explanation, because nothing else would actually make as much sense as that. (You have to keep in mind that before, I barely ate any vegetable except green beans and a few tomatoes now and then, and fruits were limited to an apple a week or something. What I did was really quite the change.)

A sound mind in a sound body, indeed. I don’t get sick as easily as before, which in turn allows me to be more efficient at keeping up with my pace of work/school/homework, and it’s all for the best.

If only for that, regardless of the weight loss, I say that my efforts have paid off, and that I absolutely DO NOT regret having undertaken them.