Nate Clark's Blog

Pandemic Weight Gain is Real. Here’s How to Lose It.

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Pandemic Weight Gain is Real. Here’s How to Lose It.

I gained weight during the pandemic. What people have been jokingly calling “the Covid 19” was literally a 17.9 lb increase in body fat for me according to the DEXA scan results I just received. Like many of my friends and family, I experienced a fitness setback during quarantine. Here’s how I plan to lose this fat and reclaim my health from the last 17 months of struggle.

Losing Fat is Simple Math

I wrote a book that explains how simple it is to lose fat. But, if it’s that “simple,” how did I end up falling into the pandemic weight gain trap? That’s simple, too. I ate too much and moved too little.

I know you know the pandemic was stressful. Social media was flooded with scary information about Covid, plus we were confronted by constant political turmoil and a much-needed racial rights reckoning. All that stress made me want to curl up into a ball on the couch and eat ice cream. So I did exactly that for most of the quarantine. I also started eating fried foods, candy, and junk that I hadn’t touched in years. Why? For emotional comfort.

Silly, I know, but life is hard and potato chips are “easy.”

Many of us are conditioned to find emotional comfort in food, and I’m susceptible to this trap, too. The past year and a half were an endless torrent of stress. In addition to the pandemic, we also suffered a miscarriage, began renovating a new house, started some new medications (don’t worry, I’m fine), and the list goes on. 

I’m not trying to invoke a pity party—EVERYONE has stressors like these (or worse). But all of our regular stress was compounded by the fear of a communicable virus and the isolation that resulted from quarantines and closures. The stress sent me into emotional survival mode, and for me, that means overeating and consuming junk food for comfort.

I Didn’t Burn Those Extra Calories

All that emotional eating led to a caloric surplus because I wasn’t burning off those extra calories. That surplus caused my pandemic weight gain.

Gyms in Los Angeles were closed during most of 2020. when they reopened they either didn’t offer hours or capacity that fit my schedule, or I didn’t feel safe going back. My husband and I didn’t have any help with childcare, so we split the day caring for our two-year-old son. This left barely any time for exercise… basically 30 minutes to jump in place in our garage/office.

It’s hard to commit to an exercise program under those conditions. I struggled to find an at-home workout program, but nothing worked for me. I tried Aaptiv, Apple Workouts, and the Peloton app. We bought a fan bike and it’s been helpful, but it’s not an everyday thing. We even snagged a set of Rogue dumbbells after spending 6 months on a waitlist. We’re pretty lucky to have all that equipment, but if all the equipment in the world is pointless if you don’t enjoy using it. I was so depressed most of last year that I didn’t enjoy much of anything.

I began to substitute exercise time with “mental health” time (i.e., watching television), even though I knew that was the wrong move. It seemed like everyone was saying things like “go easy on yourself” and “give yourself a break.” There was value in that, but there is also value in regular exercise.

My body had to put all those extra comfort food calories somewhere, and that somewhere was my waist.

How to Overcome Pandemic Weight Gain (aka, The Ultimate Fitness Setback)

In my book, I talk about fitness setbacks. These are times when fitness takes a back seat to more pressing matters; a global pandemic certainly qualifies as a “more pressing matter.” Setbacks can take the form of a single “off-plan” meal, or they can last weeks, months, or even years. The past 17 months have been the ultimate fitness setback for many of us. Pandemic weight gain is the result of a nearly universal fitness setback.

So what happens now? There are several steps to overcoming a setback:

Remember that setbacks happen to everyoneKnow that setbacks aren’t permanentMake a new plan to move forward again after your setbackStep three looks different for everyone coming out of the pandemic

You might not be able to get back into a gym yet, or you might not feel safe doing so. If your life can’t accommodate a focused exercise regimen right now, maybe you can rebalance your energy expenditure by cutting some of those comfort foods that are causing you to rack up a caloric surplus. If you track your calories you’ll see which foods/habits are leading to a surplus. You don’t need to starve yourself or “crash diet,” you just need to track calories and make small adjustments. Remember, a small caloric deficit goes a long way.

If you feel depressed or anxious from the trauma of the past year, I understand! Make a plan to address those feelings without reaching for ice cream or potato chips. Consider speaking to a therapist; I do and it helps a lot. There’s no shame in understanding your feelings, and mental clarity is the most crucial step in reaching your fitness goals. 

Alternatively, consider a meditation program or a yoga practice. You can do these things no matter where you live. And while mobility work (like yoga) might not lead to huge strength gains or increased muscle mass, it’s vital for health and wellbeing. Plus, losing the excess fat you gained during the pandemic should be your priority right now, so balancing your caloric intake is more vital than finding the perfect exercise routine.

The bottom line is that in order to move past this setback you need to make a plan. Set realistic goals, and then actually commit to making changes. Track your caloric energy in and out. A setback is as much a state of mind as it is an external stressor. You can move past it by actively participating in a program to counter that stress as soon as you are ready to begin.

My Plan For the Losing the Pandemic Weight

I’ve been here before. I even wrote a book about it. So what am I personally going to do to move past the pandemic? First, I got a DEXA scan to assess the damage. I know how much fat I gained and now I’m initiating a plan to lose it. I’m shooting to lose 1.5 lbs fat/week, which requires a 750 calorie deficit each day.

Second, I joined a gym. Today I had my second real workout in over 17 months. It feels great to be back in a real gym! I’m still nervous about Covid, and working out in a mask sucks. But the risk/reward ratio is clear for me; I need to exercise to feel good. I can deal with a little discomfort to ensure my mental health.

Third, and most importantly, I resumed planning and tracking my calories each day because knowing is half the battle. I’m setting small goals every day and scheduling my deficits based on my activity levels. If something comes up, I’ll reassess and roll with the punches. Do I expect everything to be smooth and easy? Nope. But I won’t let my fear of the unknown stop me from erasing this pandemic weight gain.

Finally, I am taking the time to write blog posts like this because writing keeps me focused on my goals. (BTW, thanks for reading!)

My medium-term goal is to lose this 19 lbs of fat in the next three months—just before my birthday. If you’re interested in following my progress or learning about my food and exercise plan, find me on Instagram, check out my book, or send me an email.

More to come. In the meantime, I wish you and yours peace and clarity as well all move toward a new normal. And if you experienced pandemic weight gain, know that you’re not alone. We’re all in this together.

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Nate Clark
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Don’t Watch “American Murder: The Family Next Door on Netflix”

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Don’t Watch “American Murder: The Family Next Door on Netflix”

Last weekend, we watched “American Murder: The Family Next Door” on Netflix and it’s got me feeling like shit about watching it. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s another true crime documentary on Netflix, it uses real footage from police body cams, interrogation video room cams, Facebook video posts and text messages to document the timeline of a murderer named Chris Watts in the days after he murdered his wife, Shanann Watts and their two infant girls, right up until the time when he confesses to those murders.

Turning a horrible tragedy like this into entertainment, is eroding our humanity in my opinion and I really, really regret watching it. So before you watch it, I just wanna point out a couple of the things that have been running through my mind.

When we watch this sort of reality television, it normalizes schadenfreude and that normalization is one of the things that I believe is tearing our society apart. Schadenfreude is defined as feeling pleasure from another person’s misfortune. It’s a kind of joy humans feel when someone else has it worse off than we do and it’s such an ambiguous emotion or a feeling that we don’t even have a word for it in the English language, in fact, I’m probably not even saying it right. It isn’t an actual appreciation for someone else’s tragedy but it’s like finding joy in knowing that you aren’t the one that it happened to. It’s a sense of relief mixed with pride and validation and also an othering, making someone else less than you and finding maybe even humor in that.

But when we feel schadenfreude, we filter someone else’s tragedy through our own self worth or self-interest. When we do that, we lose our ability to empathize with that person. It’s like creating a wall with that TV screen between us and someone else who’s another human person. Schadenfreude is something we should be ashamed of, in my opinion, ashamed to feel, we should strive to recognize that feeling in ourselves and then to move past it, to get rid of it. And we definitely shouldn’t seek it out as a form of entertainment, because it does nothing for us, it has no biological or psychological value, it creates a false sense of self-worth and it fabricates a fake feeling of security, like this is happening to them but it’s happening to me, which logically doesn’t really track.

Watching TV and movies that make us feel schadenfreude, erodes our self-awareness of it, which makes it easier for us to avoid empathy for other people in the real world and real world situations. Because when we’re watching these sorts of shows, it degrades our moral compass, because these shows portray other people’s tragedy as being very separate from our own, even though we are all really just humans and we’re all in this world together, this murder took place in 2018 in Colorado, I think, so it’s actually… It’s a lot closer to home than you might really think when you’re watching the movie.

And add to that, the fact that the protagonist in this movie is Chris Watts, a guy who murdered his family, following him around this way, the way the camera follows him, it humanizes him, which further normalizes these murders, it desensitizes us to it. He’s handsome, they show him smiling, which at least on a subconscious level, makes the audience like him or identify with him. They kind of skirt around villainizing his wife, they show him shirtless and working out and he’s kind of fit, he’s had a weight loss transformation and those sorts of things appeal to people’s most base attraction towards seeing other fit humans. All of those things, they’re choices that a director or producers use to manipulate the audience and the way the audience feels about this murderer. They move our perception away from these tragic events and away from the victims and put the spotlight on the perpetrator. But why? Is there anything to be gained by watching this tragedy from the perspective of Chris Watts? I don’t think so.

This sort of storytelling, centering him in this tragedy, it only just muddies the truth and the truth is that this is a guy who killed his wife and his infant daughters, he threw them into oil tankers, it’s horrendous. Reality television warps our sense of reality, turning real life into entertainment, manipulates us into seeing these real people as if they were characters in a story, instead of seeing them as real people who’ve experienced really terrible events. We’ve gotta keep reminding ourselves that these people are not characters in a story, they’re actual people involved in an unspeakable tragedy at the hands of a terrible person. Scripting these stories and creating entertainment from real life, it creates a distance between us and these very real people, as if we’re watching them in a museum, like through a lens in the safety of our dark living room late at night, when nobody else can see us peeking.

When we trivialize these stories, we talk about them casually at the water cooler, or we make jokes about these people or the situations, we normalize antipathy, we make it okay to other people to hate the villains or cheer for the heroes, but these are real people who happened to be in very real situations, sometimes very tragic situations. When we do this, when we make ourselves comfortable watching them as if we were in a museum, we make it more acceptable for us to create that distance toward or with other people in real life. Like we other, other people. To treat people in real life like characters in our own story, instead of like people as part of the story and all of this, all of this desensitization to other people’s tragedy, is making it easier for us to hate one another, especially to hate strangers and to not feel any shame about that hatred.

I’m really disappointed in myself for watching this movie. It’s highlighting my own cognitive dissonance, because I know I need to avoid this kind of bullshit television, I know it does bad things to my brain, to my psychology and to the way I treat other people in real life. It’s desensitizing me to the collective human experience and it’s impeding my ability to connect with people in the real world, instead of treating them as part of a narrative I’m writing in my own head.

So if you’re thinking about watching this movie, maybe just don’t. Even if you’re thinking about watching other reality shows, even ones that aren’t about tragedies, just ask yourself, why? Why are you entertained by this? Would you be comfortable sitting in the audience, watching a gladiator be torn apart by lions? Another human person. And if so, why?

It’s just something I’ve been thinking about because I’m super, super disappointed in myself for watching this movie and I hope that maybe you were thinking about this stuff too. So thanks for listening and letting me share.

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Nate Clark

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Can the Supreme Court Overturn Marriage Equality?

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Can the Supreme Court Overturn Marriage Equality?

Hi there. I’m just thinking about religious liberty and the First Amendment and what it means to have my marriage up for debate by someone like justice, Clarence Thomas, who by all accounts, or at least the accounts of five credible witnesses, likes to talk to his coworkers about pornography showing women having sex with animals. In case you missed it—because this has been an absolute shitstorm of a crazy week—Supreme Court justice Thomas, joined by justice Alito, issued a four page statement this week about why they think the Supreme Court’s decision to protect same sex. Marriage did more harm to the abstract idea of religious freedom than it did to protect the actual freedom of people like me. Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk. Do you remember her? Yeah. She’s the one who was sued when she refused to issue marriage licenses to two same sex couples.

Anyway, she tried to appeal her case to the Supreme Court all these years later because she just, she’s still, she still doesn’t get it. The Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal, but Thomas and Alito used the decision to decline her appeal as an opportunity to release a statement trashing the Obergefell decision—the marriage equality decision—and it seems urging the Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling on same-sex marriage. So what did old “pubic-hair-on-the-Coke-can” say about it in this statement? There’s a lot. He says that the marriage equality decision allows society to cast people of good will as bigots. He calls the 14th Amendment’s equal protection for all people under the law, “a novel constitutional right,” and implies that it undermines the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment. If you subscribe to that logic, he’s basically saying that the First Amendment should have protected slave owners, which is a crazy thing for Clarence Thomas to say.

And also he overtly threatens the marriage equality ruling by saying that in ruling in favor of marriage equality, “the court has created a problem that only it can fix.” I mean, that is like right out of a Godfather movie. It’s a pretty obvious threat to my marriage. First of all, the First Amendment doesn’t use the words “religious liberty.” What it does say is this: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” When the court legalized same sex marriage, it actually affirmed the First Amendment by making sure that local governments and the Federal government and state governments aren’t relying on religion to define a legal institution like marriage. Further, the ruling did nothing to prohibit the free exercise of religion or freedom of speech or anything else. Everyone is still able to believe whatever the hell they want to believe. They can assemble.

They can talk about it. They just aren’t allowed to establish those beliefs in a governmental capacity, which is exactly what the First Amendment says. Clarence Thomas claims that the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell, the marriage equality case, that that decision circumnavigated the democratic process. He argues that if the case for marriage equality were argued at the state level, states would be able to provide protections for those people in society who object to same-sex marriage on the basis of their religion. But why the hell do those people need protections? Protections from what? Thomas thinks that if states were able to, on a state-by-state basis, determine if same-sex marriage should be legal, that they could then also at the same time, consider new laws to protect the people who disagree with that idea. He implies that people like Kim Davis—a government employee who also happens to be a devout Christian—should be protected from repercussions when they declined to provide government services, for which they’re paid for, to same-sex couples.

But why? Why should the Kim Davis’s of the world have that protection? Why should someone whose salary is paid by our tax dollars be able to decline us services based on her religious beliefs? The First Amendment does not protect government employees from doing their jobs on the basis of religion. It doesn’t say that. Of course you have the right to believe whatever you want. That right is protected by the Constitution. You can hate me and make a religion out of hating me because of the way I look or the things I believe or the people I love. Nobody is stopping you from your right to think that you are better than me. But we also have a separation of church and state in this country, spelled out by the First Amendment for exactly that reason. Because, since everyone has the right to believe what they want, that might mean someone else hates you because of the way you look or the things you believe or the people you love.

The separation between church and state ensures that everyone has the right to their religious beliefs without the government telling them what to believe. Marriage as an institution is explicitly tied to our government. Aside from the many religious associations that marriage has, marriage is essentially a corporate structure that people use to protect their families in the eyes of the law, to protect their property and their assets in the eyes of the law, to protect their children in the eyes of the law, and much, much more than that. Marriage is not just a private club reserved for people with similar religious beliefs. All the different religions have some form of marriage or most of them do anyway. Marriage in the United States is a legal contract between us and the government and it’s well established. So why should one person’s religious belief dictate the ability of another person to enter into that contract with their government?

The First Amendment explicitly prevents the government from establishing rules like that. What if someone’s religion tells them that they can’t recognize a marriage between people of different races, which sadly actually used to be the case for some religions. If someone believes that bullshit today and they work for the government, should they be allowed to deny government services to a mixed-race couple? Of course not. Justices Thomas and Alito might have argued that race is a trait while sexuality is a choice or a preference, even though that has been thoroughly debunked by modern science, but they didn’t even argue that. That’s not the argument they’re making. They seek to use the religious freedom argument as a pathway for states to legalize discrimination, pure and simple. Thomas and Alito argue that Federally recognized marriage equality undermines religious freedom and undermines state’s rights. But this is just a thinly veiled way of saying that what they believe is that states should decide if discrimination is acceptable. It’s Jim Crow, except they would have us segregating people by sexuality and by state. Thomas also wines in this statement—a lot—about how the marriage equality decision paints conservative Christians as bigots. And you know what, he’s right about that because they are bigots.

At least that’s what I believe. But if I were working for my local government, I’d still let those bigots access all the same services that everyone else gets to access because they’re protected. That’s a protection the Constitution provides for them, even for hypocrites like Clarence Thomas. Oh, I’m so tired. Before I get off my soapbox, I just want to say one more thing. For anyone who thought the fight for same-sex marriage was settled and done, this statement this week from two current Supreme Court justices confirms that it’s not. They will overturn that ruling if they have a majority. If you know, or you love, an LGBTQ person or their family, please vote for leaders who protect our rights. If you don’t care about our rights, if don’t care about equal protection for everyone under the eyes of the law, if you don’t care about the 14th Amendment, you can fuck right off. And yeah, I’m actually talking to members of my own family right now. Fuck you. But for everybody else, get out there and vote. And thanks for listening.

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Nate Clark

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Well… they got it!

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Well… they got it!

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Nate Clark

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Do You Trust Cops?

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Do You Trust Cops?

We walked past a bunch of sheriffs who weren’t wearing masks, and it got me thinking about why some people don’t trust law enforcement… and some other people do.

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Nate Clark

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The Dumbbells Podcast

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The Dumbbells Podcast

Eugene Cordero and I performed together in Quick & Funny Musicals at the UCB, and he and Ryan Stanger have a super awesome fitness podcast called The Dumbbells. It’s so good. Not my episode specifically, the podcast in general is SO GOOD. They discuss diet and exercise in an honest, relatable way, and they are hilarious. Professionally hilarious. They are both genius improvisers, so the podcast feels like you’re listening to two comedians chatting about gym life… because that’s exactly what it is.

I was thrilled to catch up with them and chat about fitness, nutrition, and my book. We discuss the state of mind required when you embark on any new fitness regimen. (Especially relevant because we recorded this episode during month 6 of the quarandemic.)

Listen to the episode here:

https://headgum.com/the-dumbbells/198-how-i-did-it-with-nate-clark

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Nate Clark

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Replacing Racist Dr. Seuss

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Replacing Racist Dr. Seuss

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Nate Clark

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Is Donald Trump Pro-Gay?

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Is Donald Trump Pro-Gay?

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Nate Clark

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An Open Letter to a Racist

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An Open Letter to a Racist

I scribbled this text to a racist relative a few weeks ago, and then I chickened out and didn’t send it. So, instead, I’m sharing it here.

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Nate Clark

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Cheddar & Newsy

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Cheddar & Newsy

These two video news sources keep popping up on my Amazon Alexa screen. What are they are what is “news?”

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Nate Clark

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