COVID-19 and the whole quarantine thing have more or less changed everything. For my family and I, very much has changed in some ways, and a few were even near-instant in changing. On the other side of the coin, in other aspects, not that much has changed. Some of these changes have shifted into something else as we progressed through this COVID-19 pandemic, some have remained the same even with time, and a few have disappeared altogether. There was one thing that all these changes had in common, though: they were all health-related, one way or the other; be it in the physical, psychological, or mental, these changes were related to our health.
I should probably tackle the elephant in the room, and sometimes I think it’s quite the elephant sometimes. This pandemic and quarantine caused me to gain weight, a whole kilo to be exact, or 2.2 pounds. Though I haven’t asked my kids just yet, I’m pretty sure the quarantine and pandemic have affected them one way or another in terms of weight department. I’m more than sure that it was all weight loss, mostly in the form of muscle atrophy with them being so inactive and on a device one way or another, most of the time.
Of course, this had to be corrected as soon as possible, and I don’t want my kids and me to come out of this quarantine looking like withered husks.
My initial move to counteract the weight loss and muscle atrophy for them was, of course, to tell my children about it. The threat of having their muscles wasting away seemed to have succeeded somewhat initially as they would begin to put themselves in more exercises; mostly simple ones involving the stairs or lifting heavy things, with the occasional exercise session orchestrated by me. And at the start, it seemed to go well, that is until they started forgetting about it and would get drawn into sedentariness by their devices. I was able to lessen this by constantly reminding them. My initial move seems to be the best move I’ve done so far in countering weight loss and possible muscle atrophy in my children.
As for me, I kept on checking my weight and compared it to my ideal weight. I am currently at 66 kg. right now but the ideal weight calculator told me that I should be weighing 52.92 kg. Therefore, I am about 13 kg. plus overweight!
It wasn’t just weight and ultimately physical issues that we had to tackle in this time of pandemic and quarantine though, we also had to deal with the mental and psychological parts of this new world, most visible of all being our ways of coping with the stress of being cooped up so long at home, and the entire COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine hanging over our heads.
There wasn’t that much issue at first, and even now there seems to be little issues still, but I can definitely tell you that being cooped up for so long at home tends to make one a little bit irritable. But other than a higher amount of irritability in the house, the fact that we were quarantined for so long seems to have had little impact, with my kids and I mostly being some degree of introvert one way or the other. And whatever any of our extroverted characteristics would pop up, we had could simply go online to talk to others, and if something real was needed, we would simply talk with each other.
The food situation seemed to have been affected the most by the quarantine and the stresses it induces though. My youngest daughter eating up most of whatever bread was bought during the early days, but it seemed to have mellowed out later on. And as for my only son, he seems to have had the same kinds of stress eating as my younger daughter, but on a lesser scale, drinking coffee mostly and eating bread with it. As for my eldest daughter, she seems to have not been affected all that much by the quarantine in terms of the food department and seems to be coping quite well with it in fact.
And in terms of our sleeping schedule and its situation, its pretty poor I must say. With most of us staying up to twelve and beyond either through work or simple play on the computer or phone. My son seems to be the most affected in this situation though, as I’ve spotted him playing on his phone up to five in the morning!
For better or worse this pandemic has changed us, and I’m sure that it won’t stop changing us. We can do our best to stop the bad changes though, at the very least.