Using quarantine to improve: Nutrition and exercise

by: George Rafti

​When school was canceled due to COVID-19, my Journalism teacher Mr. Martin gave us all an assignment to choose a personal goal to improve ourselves. This personal goal lasts for four weeks and longer if we wish to continue. 

For my personal goal, I chose to improve my diet and workout at home without weights. So far, I don't like working out at home because when I am home I can stop whenever I want, but when I am at the gym I make myself workout for at least half an hour. 

Furthermore, I want to better my diet for the future and working out at home would also keep me in shape during the quarantine. 

Before quarantine, I had a horrible diet which was made up of mostly carbs, so this is a big change for me. If I stick to this, I believe I will begin to see changes within 2-3 weeks. 

I chose this because I want to see how much of a change a consistent workout plan with a change in diet can make on me personally. Also, I will not change my diet all at once, I will tweak it slowly. Furthermore, I have begun to add more protein to my diet, such as steak, eggs, chicken, and nuts. 

Also for my workouts I am going to do 10 sets of 15 pushups, 15 squats, 20 calf raises, 6 tricep dips, 5 pullups, and 5 chin ups. I’ll be continuing this for 4-5 days a week . As long as I do this, I'll add more to every set depending on what is easy and what is difficult. 

Currently, the hardest part is to keep up with the workouts, because I am lazy when I am home.. For now I just have to keep pushing myself to do the workouts. 

The diet is actually pretty easy to be honest. As long as I eat the foods I like that contain protein I'm pretty alright with it. I have to keep away from anything too sugary like chocolate or frosted flakes. Everynow and then I do eat some sugar but that's because I also want to enjoy my diet, so I do cheat a bit.