When I was a child I was pretty thin, a healthy thin, a thin with muscles built by the swimming pool and good nutrition. I started to have problems with my weight when I stopped doing synchronized swimming every day replacing it with a twice-per-week course. The problem became serious when I went to the USA for one year: there I gained around ten kilos and I became literally fat. When I came back home I lost some of those kilos, probably half of them, but then I wasn’t able to keep it up and I remained overweight for some five years. I say overweight because I know from what I studied at school that there are some charts that can tell you the weight-high ratio that you should have (Body mass index). According to those charts I was (and still am) overweight. Those five years of overweight were made of diets, frustration, more diets and failed attempts until I gave up. I knew I was eating good because my mother is a nutrition freak and I knew that my main problem was the lack of physical activity, so I decided not to think about it anymore: it was a worthless waste of energy to set my mind on a diet if I didn’t even care about the results.
Why didn’t I start to exercise more? This is weird and I know it: I somehow developed this mindset that impedes me to do things (especially physical activity) if the thing itself has no purpose at all. For example to go out and run for an hour or bike for an hour and then come back home has the only scope of running and biking and then go back home. The same applies to gym and to swimming. I somehow can’t do that especially because I would have to do it by myself. Maybe if I had a group it would be different, but I’m not sure of that. I don’t even take into consideration those sports that have a fixed schedule because I have a crazy life and fixed schedules aren’t really the best for me.
Everything changed when I moved to Vienna in order to do a Master. Vienna is, in fact, one of the best cities to go by bike: there are bicycle lanes everywhere and the bike sharing works wonderfully. I went by bike everywhere and I took public transports only when it rained too much to go by bike. I didn’t have a goal, I had only decided to go places by bike as much as I could, as I had the opportunity to do so. Well, this time it worked: I really lost some fat, I could really see it in the mirror. I was keeping eating a lot of fruits and vegetables and thanks to good nutrition and some movement I lost some fat. Even my mother could see it, and she has always been very frank about my overweight. I must say, though, that the scale wasn’t of our same opinion, in fact when I went home and I tried to see how much I had lost, the scale declared that I hadn’t lost a thing. This is the problem when you start to exercise: you loose fat while building muscles, so your weight stays more or less the same, but its component has changed for the better. The only solution to find out how much overweight I still was, would have been to go to a doctor and ask him to calculate the Body fat percentage (the ratio between the total mass of fat and the total body mass) instead of the Body mass index, which doesn’t differentiate between the weight of fat and the weight of muscles. But, no, I never did it. I guess I didn’t want to find out the truth.
My pink roller
Hafer, Coffee, Milk, Sacchetti di Plastica 