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The onset of the pandemic was sort of like the beginning of the movie Seven, as much like Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman’s characters, we were suddenly thrust into a world where sloth, gluttony, and (thanks to the people who hoarded toilet paper and canned goods) greed came to consume our daily lives.
I know I’m far from the only person who embraced a lifestyle that was largely defined by those first two deadly sins, and the onset of the new reality we found ourselves inhabiting was the perfect storm of factors that led to healthy habits getting absolutely defenestrated. With gyms closed and the summer essentially canceled, the “Diet Starts Monday” crowd had no real reason to actually commit to new habits in preparation for #ShirtlessSZN, and it turns out turning to alcohol and comfort food to cope while spending most of your time crushing Netflix with the outside world doing its best Bird Box impression isn’t exactly conducive to staying in shape.
I personally did what I could to ignore the reality that confronted me every single time I looked into the mirror until being forced to have a pair of jeans shipped to my place overnight back in June after realizing I couldn’t fit into any of the pants I already owned ahead of an occasion where I was required to look somewhat presentable.
That moment served as a bit of a wakeup call, and while I’ve managed to take a few inches off of my waist since then, I still haven’t hopped on a scale in well over a year because I don’t feel the need to quantify the consequences of the many ill-advised decisions I’ve made since self-isolating became all the rage.
The same can’t be said for the brave souls that participated in a study conducted by researchers at the San Francisco branch of the University of California, who recently published a paper that gives us the best idea of exactly how much weight the average person gained as a result of the pandemic. With the help of data collected from 300 people around the United States who made routine visits to their Bluetooth scales between February 1st and June 1st of 2020, they determined those who embraced a sedentary existence as the result of stay-at-home orders added half-a-pound every 10 days, meaning they gained an average of 1.5 pounds every month.
The “Quarantine 15” has a nice ring to it, but based on the numbers, anyone who’s failed to realize the error of their unhealthy ways over the past year has probably packed on close to 20 pounds on average. With that said, it’s not too late to start working on the summer bod you should hopefully be able to debut when the warm weather rolls around based on how the vaccine rollout is currently going.