How COVID lockdown helped me reduce my blood pressure and sleep heart rate
Since lockdown, I have lost 12kg weight, reduced my blood pressure, and my sleeping heart rate has dropped by about 10bpm. Here’s how:
It was when I was last home in Scotland, at Christmas, and I tried on my kilt for the first time in a while, that I realised something might be wrong. Last time I was home, I had left my kilt there to be repaired last time as one of the waist buckles was falling off. To my annoyance it seemed as though during the repair the tailor had moved the buckles to make the kilt tighter. Why on earth would he make it tighter?!
Well reader, it turns out he had not moved the buckles. I had got fat. Well, not “fat”, fat, but the invisible, sneaks up on you, just turned 40, technically now overweight fat.
After two trips to the US throughout 2019 (portion sizes there are crazy!), a Summer holiday in Mallorca, and now Christmas at home, I was now tipping the scales at 87kg. Usually I weighed about 84kg. Somewhat delusional, I had always considered about 90kg to be a good weight for my height, since that’s what rugby players typically weigh. Except, they go to the gym and are professional sportsmen, and I… I don’t and I am not.
I’ve had a Withings wifi-connected scale for a while, so I can see my weight trend over the past few years. 87kg was more or less my peak (I hit 88kg immediately after one of those US trips) which did mean my Body Mass Index (BMI) was now in the unhealthy range (>25). Perhaps more importantly, my body fat percentage, according to the scales at least, was now 23%!
As soon as I got back to Germany after Christmas, I decided to get serious on the erg (rowing machine) again. I leapt back into the Pete Plan, and set myself the target of trying to hit a couple of personal bests (PBs). I especially wanted to hit my long-standing target of rowing 8000m in 30 minutes. And erg I did, usually managing 4–6 sessions a week for an average of 25,000 metres per week. It was pretty frustrating at first, as my times were miles off my PBs and even my last consistent period some time earlier in 2019, but my pace did slowly, but surely, improve.
Then lockdown happened, and with it came a few behavioural changes that helped me with my fitness.
By saving just 30min a day from not commuting, I was able to increase my average weekly metres to about 30k, and my erg pace kept improving. Also around this time, I started cycling “properly”. I have always been a cyclist, and in Berlin a bicycle is often the best way to get around, but over the past year I had had a wee taste of road cycling and had bought myself a new carbon-framed road bike at the end of the 2019 season. From October ’19 to March ’20 it had hung on my wall, waiting to be ridden. I’m lucky to have nearby access to the old Berlin airport Tempelhofer Feld, which is great for short training runs — 25–30km rides, including a few flying miles up and down the old runways. Further afield, there is some pretty decent cycling to be had outside Berlin in Brandenburg.
Also, my eating habits changed drastically. When I was working in the UK, lunch would typically be sandwich from etc supermarket or a sandwich shop. In Germany, sandwiches are not so popular, but most restaurants have “business lunch” offers. Your local Asian restaurant will offer you a full meal for about €7, and you will have that for lunch nearly every day. It’s not the healthiest way to eat.
I love cooking, but I have always hated grocery shopping. When I walk into a supermarket I can’t think of a single recipe other than spaghetti bolognese, so I would end up eating out fairly frequently, or getting takeaway. With all restaurants shut, that eating habit had to change too. The main way I changed this, was by using a fantastic app called AnyList. There is a Chrome extension which can take a structured recipe from a webpage (BBC Food works well), and add all the ingredients to the shopping list app. Then when you are in the supermarket you have a list of ingredients, sorted by produce section. The list can be shared so that between my girlfriend and I we can go our separate ways in the supermarket, picking up everything we need so we can be in and out with recipe ingredients for a week in less than half an hour. After a while you build up a repertoire of recipes in the app, so it is easy to repeat your favourites.
The last change, which started pre-lockdown, was changing my breakfast. I had got used to every morning eating bread and cheese. Lots of bread and cheese. Now I have changed to usually having porridge with half a banana, raisins, ground linseed and psyllium husk.
Does that mean my eating is boring now? Not really — every Sunday morning I still make pancakes, I still get the occasional pizza or diner kebab, and I still have occasional beers or wine. It just seems that eating generally healthier, planning meals properly and having everything else in moderation actually works.
My blood pressure has been a problem the last few years and I am on Olmesatron to keep it down to a reasonable level. Thanks, presumably, to the increased fitness and reduced weight, I am now down to a quarter of the dose that I started the year on. Seems I can’t quite get off the medicine, but I’m glad to keep the dose low.
Maybe the best health indicator is that my sleeping heart rate — as tracked by a Withings sleep tracking pad — has reduced from about 60bpm down to 50. Moreover, my body fat percentage (according to the Withings scale) has reduced from ~23% to <17%!
What’s more, I managed to hit two erging PBs I managed my first sub 18:30 5k, and I finally managed to row >8000m in 30 minutes!
Overall, my weight reduced from 87kg to 75kg, which is quite handy when riding the bike up hills! I am writing this post on my first trip back to Scotland since Christmas, so I assume I will manage to put a few of those kg back on over the next few weeks, but hopefully the good habits stick once I am back in Germany.
