Happy Easter!

I hope you enjoyed the Best of Operation Melt posts for the past six weeks. As you may know I gave up writing new posts for Lent this year and decided to share some of my favorite posts from the past 147 weeks of my journey. My plan was to revisit these posts, to get re-inspired by them and to reinvigorate my writing. And it worked to some extent. I am ready to start getting back to writing and have some new things planned to help bring you even more value.

Back to Normal

My plan, 6+ weeks ago, was to come back today and say that I am ready to return to “normal” now that my break is over. Well I guess I won’t be saying that right now. It seems that the word “normal” is something that none of us will be saying for some time in our pandemic world.

Our world certainly is different today than it was just 6 weeks ago. Our restaurants, bars, hair salons and nearly every other business is closed. For those of us who still have jobs we are working at home but many aren’t as fortunate. When it comes to fitness, all gyms are closed, races are cancelled and all we have are solo activities. People are sick and dying from this disease and those who are still healthy are pretty much stuck at home on lockdown.

The word “normal” is far from how I would describe our current situation.

Keeping Focused

Despite the lack of normalcy I am still focused on maintaining my achievements and am still going strong on my quest to live a fit life. I am pretty confident, though I haven’t weighed myself for over six weeks because I also gave up my scale for lent, that I have maintained or progressed in my journey.

I am very deliberate every day to fit in as much exercise as I possibly can and have done pretty well with it. My activity has actually increased during this time as I have reinvested my morning prep time and commute back into fitness. I have set new personal record weekly step counts almost every week since the pandemic pause hit us. I stay super active and I walk or run about 8-10 miles per day on average.

But exercise is just part of the equation. I heard somebody today refer to the “COVID 15” as the fifteen pounds that everybody is going to gain by overeating while confined to home. Not me! While I am probably eating a bit more frequently and may tend to graze a bit through the day, I am still tracking my foods and am staying on track with my calorie targets. In fact, when you factor in the increased exercise, I have significantly below my net calories by a record amount.

As you can tell, I am doing everything in my power to maintain and improve my physical fitness through this trying time.

Helping Others

In addition to caring for my physical (and mental) health during this time I am also working hard to help others do the same.

We try to do our part to help others survive this trying time by continuing to eat and drink local (primarily through delivery) and we tip well. We also have contributed to multiple staff support funds to help keep businesses and their staff afloat.

I have also developed a set of daily habits focused on helping people stay healthy. I launched something I am calling my #PandemicOfGratitude where I start each day by posting pictures of things I am grateful for from the prior day. My goal is to keep myself and others focused on what is still going right in our lives versus the negativity and feelings of loss. This has gone well and has inspired multiple other people to do the same.

Plus I am sharing my daily Pandemic Fitness Tips on social media at @OperationMelt and on the Operation Melt Blog to help give people insight on the small habits I am embracing to stay healthy.

Every day I am looking for ways that I can keep myself healthy (again, both physically and mentally) and ways to help other people do the same. As I have said before, I am hopeful that this leadership helps others get through this time as happy, healthy and productive as possible.

The Future

I am working on some new things to add to the Operation Melt blog. I had hoped to bring some of them to you immediately after my break but I don’t think that is the right approach. I am going to continue focusing on my new daily habits for now to help lead us through this difficult time.

As we start seeing some light at the end of this dark tunnel, I will start phasing in some of the new things. Just trust that I am working on bringing you things that will help you continue to live your best life after this disruption is at least partially behind us.

I hope you go out there this week and live your best life and show this virus that you are the boss of you!