It’s a been of the same story here, having been very active in my youth, then slacked too much (sedentary work + all sports replaced by video-games), and now I’ve been as active as ever.

So after my youth, when I started working, I went through ~10 years of low to no physical activities, which obviously wasn’t good for my health.

So I’ve decided to have a baseline of doing physical activity again (about 10 hours per week, mostly cardio sports like soccer) + going 95% vegan after having read The China Study, which led to a big weight loss and no visible health issues.

Then I got bored with running and our soccer mates also lost interest, so I picked up CrossFit 5 years ago, doing about 4 hours a week, and ramped up to 6 hours per week over time.

I was in the best shape of my life overall, and then Covid hit, which put a big damper on exercising, but I managed to train at home or outside at night like an outlaw. I also picked up intermittent fasting, and swapped from Vegan to a full-on 90% meat based diet, which led to a noticeable mass increase, again with no health issues (so far).

I’ve dropped intermittent fasting after 1000 days because as I’ve kept ramping up exercising (so, more mass increase, I saw I had low energy levels in some on my workouts compared to my mates, and because I had increased my training time to about 10h again per week.

Now I’m loading up in the morning with eggs and bacon, or fruits and honey if I’m exercising very early. I notice that carbs that you take in the right quantity at the right time (about 1h) before working out have a big difference on your energy level during your workouts.

And this year I’ve picked up weightlifting because I much prefer lifting heavy stuff than doing gym work, along with CrossFit which I’ve toned down a bit.

I think we are about the same age, and what changed over time for me was realizing my body wasn’t going to get younger by itself, and that I needed to keep it in the best shape possible if I wanted to have the best life possible, both physically and mentally.

Now I plan my days where I always put a baseline of allocated time for the following, in that order :

Family time (spend time with kids and wife), physical workout, mental workout (learning Spanish at the moment), and then the rest of my day is spent either working, reading, spending time with friends… depending on whatever is most urgent.

In the end, I think that the more you plan ahead and arrange your priorities, and the more you can get into the same routines/flow daily helps you manage life without feeling mentally overcrowded. I don’t think daily about what I’ll need to do because I plans my days to not having to think about what to do, which leaves me the most mind space available to be present with the people around me and just focus on the things I do one at a time.