You’ll never understand until you live it

I had no idea I was suffering from malnutrition, but now that I am considered athletic (13% body fat) I looked back on my life with a better understanding. I remember when I first started tracking my weight, I was at 62kg and promptly went to 82kg within the span of 3 years and back down now to a healthy 72kg. The truth is not just in the numbers though. When I was at 62kg, I barely exercised (compared to now). I was skinny and didn’t have many muscles, but I didn’t know that because I exercised about once or twice every week by either running or biking. I was just weak and I’ve always been weak.

I was also very poor at one point and cannot afford the healthy food that are necessary to build a better body. An athletic body, I find, takes money and time to build, but man does it feel good to know I am strong. I used to think that the feats that people claim that they can do are impossible. I used to think running a marathon is impossible. (It still is). Now I understand that these people have trained a lot longer than me and with each passing day it gets closer. Several years later, I still haven’t achieved it, but looking back at my sedentary life, I realized that the gap in fitness between then and now is unimaginable. The amount of exercised needed to get here, even more incredible.

Think about this. For every pound of fat you have, you need to burn 3500 calories. That’s the equivalent of a 100km bike ride, or a 20 km run. It takes about 20 of either one of these to burn 10 kg of fat. So eating healthy as to not offset your workout due to the calorie intake is important. For me, this is not that hard to do because I look at food as just a way to sustain myself. So it wasn’t too much to switch from animal murderer to eating rabbit food. Prepping rabbit food to make it tasty though takes time.

I now know how fit people used to look at me, but back then, I had no idea we were different. Part of the reason I delayed so much before working out the way I am now has to do with overcoming some brainwash from a certain person in my life. In which he repeatedly told me that you can’t build muscles anymore after 20 as muscles only grow bigger instead of splitting. Not knowing that it was just an excuse for himself so he doesn’t have to try. Of course, I only have myself to blame for believing. Nowadays I reserve judgment for everything until I have experienced it myself. Otherwise, I restrict myself.