Unemployment: It's Hard on the Body

I exercise pretty regularly.

Even when I was unemployed, I normally went walking about two hours a day.  I kinda watched what I ate, and I considered myself fairly fit.

However, my girth expanded a tad.  True, I wasn't close to wearing Women's sizes, but there was a bit of a difference.

Ok.  You realize that even if you go out walking about 2 hours a day that there is still the time that you sat around or slept in.  Plus, you can eat things like vast quantities of spaghetti at lunch instead of making due with the portions in your TV dinner.  But it wasn't merely weight gain.

My knees creaked and I walked around as stiff as all get out.

I'm not very old compared to the usual person who has this problem, but I had some problems with agility.  And it didn't really happen gradually.  It felt like it became noticeable during my unemployment.

I wasn't sure if I would get it back, or if this signaled the downhill slide that came with age.  I used to use equipment at the school gym, and considering that I still made it a point to get exercise on a daily basis I didn't see much hope for returning to how things were when I was in my 20s.

It took a year of working out with Yoga and cardio exercises, but my knees felt "normal" again.

And I had never really done any of those exercises in any quantity before all of this happened.

It took a few months for the creaky feeling to go away.  It took even longer for the stiffness to leave.

It's like I had to spend an entire year rebuilding myself from what I considered to be a very non-physically demanding lifestyle.