Jun 10, 2020 3 min read

Well, we’re in the “green phase” now in most of Southwestern Pennsylvania after months of a lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

How are you doing?

Are you emerging from your cocoon like a brand new butterfly or more like a sluggish, sleepy bear just awakening from a long hibernation?

I’m more in the bear category myself right now.

You know the old saying about the “Freshman 15” referring to the typical weight gain students experience when entering their first year of college?

The stay-at-home orders have prompted many to call the weight they’ve gained during these weeks of isolation the “Quarantine 15.”

Now you would think being told to stay at home, being deprived of any outside activities and especially not being able to visit restaurants or bars would be a good thing for my eating patterns. Working from home has been stressful at times, but it also has added more free time to my schedule because of cutting out hours of commuting each week. You would think having more free time and nowhere to go would leave me plenty of time to do nothing but exercise so that I could emerge from quarantine nice and slim.

Right.

I would like to think that I’m not alone and apparently I’m not. Check online and you’ll see people talking about the long weeks of being home bound, tempted to snack at all hours, staying away from gyms and calling their weight gain the “COVID 19,” or how they are “fattening the curve.”

I’m a stress eater and the worry about the virus and uncertainty about what would happen gave me ample excuses to eat more than I should have and to indulge in comfort foods. I had no excuse not to exercise indoors with all sorts of online video workouts available for free these days. Still, I found excuses, especially when our weather was so chilly and uncooperative in early May, I wanted nothing more than to curl up on the sofa and binge watch some amusing British television series.

Now that the weather has broken and sunshine and warmth have returned, it’s boosted my spirits enough to energize and motivate me. Plenty of lawn mowing and yard work projects are giving me good exercise and I’m eating plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables and ditching the bad snacks.

Why is it that pounds come on so easily and quickly, but take so long and so much hard work to lose? So much for emerging from quarantine with my best beach body, but maybe by the time I can actually get to a beach again I’ll have attained some “Reopening Results.”

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.