How To Lose Weight Without Even Trying - Get A Job In The City
health·@winstonalden·
0.000 HBDHow To Lose Weight Without Even Trying - Get A Job In The City
## A new job can mean major lifestyle changes - especially when the previous job involved working from home and living as a hermit! And sometimes the health impacts can be surprising. For example: I've only been at [my new job in the city](https://steemit.com/life/@winstonalden/at-home-in-the-smoke-shop-the-new-job-i-absolutely-love) for a week. And I've already lost five pounds and an inch off my waist!  This was a big surprise, since I've done a bunch of stuff that most would classify as *blatantly unhealthy.* I've gone from running five days a week to none. I've swapped out healthy, protein rich meals for doughnuts, chips, and burritos. And I've introduced soft drinks to my diet for a lunchtime infusion of sugar and caffeine. I've consumed more soda in the past week than over the previous year.  I expected to find myself getting fatter. But yesterday I found myself notching my belt one hole tighter! ## Trying to figure it out, I realized I've made a few "healthier" changes as well: 1. I'm walking every day. It's only a mile and a half round trip to the station, as opposed to the six mile runs I've been used to. But maybe the fact that I'm been lugging a computer case and an umbrella around with me is making a difference? 2. Naps are out. But since this job has a regular 9-5 schedule, I've fallen into a routine where I go to bed a little after 9 PM and wake up around 5 AM. I'm sleeping like a rock and waking up energized. Maybe I'm not a narcoleptic after all? 3. I'm smoking a good deal more. How many jobs are there where you can smoke at work? I've gone from three pipe-fulls of tobacco a day to seven. (On average.) 4. Between walking and working, I'm on my feet for over nine hours a day. This'll change as I take over some more of the web-site duties (Projects are in the works!) but even so, this is a busy shop, and the predominant mode will never be *sitting around.* This is a big shift from staring at the computer all day long. 5. Alcohol consumption is way down. Like, to zero. That 5 AM wake-up time would be a lot-less pleasant with a low-grade hangover. Maybe ditching the old alcohol calories did something to counteract those new cola calories? 6. Just two meals a day. The absolute last thing I want to do after a 12-hour day of working and commuting is prepare a meal, and who wants to eat right before bed anyway? I'll just swallow some chips or peanuts to keep the stomach from rumbling at night. 7. I'm actually excited to get up in the morning, go somewhere, and do something. That, plus all the nicotine, must be doing *something* on a metabolic level.  It's not that I've been looking to lose weight, necessarily - but it's still a welcome shift. My old pants were getting a little bit tight, and I'd started developing one of those spare-tire love-handle kind of waists. I'm not sad to see it go. But for the most part I have to wonder: if this rate of weight loss continues, how am I going to find the time and interest to eat more? Food-prep and eating are *so damn boring.* That's why I turn to donuts. They're the closest thing we've got to energy pills, and they're cheap.  I guess I don't exactly have any useful diet advice, here, beyond finding an active job you love, and spending as much time as possible in a city where you've got to walk to public transportation. That's not an easy prescription for most people to fill, unfortunately. Mostly I just thought it was interesting to experience a sudden weight loss, accompanied by an increase in energy, while doing so many of the things associated with obesity: eating lots of carbs, sugars, and salts; smoking more; and cutting out vigorous aerobic exercise. It also has me thinking the "obesity epidemic" in America has a lot more to do with miserable living patterns than it does with food choices or lack of exercise. What if architecture and urban planning have more to do with health than diet and exercise. After all, well planned communities encourage healthy behavior, inherently. And when people have to *force* themselves to be healthy by *doing things they don't want to do,* something's come undone in the fabric of society. I'll have to save that argument for another post, and leave you with a photo of my beloved train station:  *** ###### All photos are mine, but feel free to copy, remix and share anything from this post according to the terms of a [Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 4.0 International license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). There's more where these came from! ###### If you'd like to read more, you can check out an organized [catalog of my posts on Steemit here](http://natewalkerdavis.com/winstonposts/).