The Day I Decided to Change My Body

It was somewhere in year two of the pandemic.

I was teaching PE during the day, reading books and financial news at night, slowly trying to figure out what I actually wanted from my life.

But something was happening in the background. Something was quietly accumulating.

Fat, to be specific.

The thing about gradual change is that you don’t notice it until you do. And when I finally did, it was pretty clear. The athleticism I’d spent years building had slowly slipped away.

I was going through old photos one day and came across pictures of myself from my competitive years. Then I stood in front of the mirror and looked at where I was now.

There was a reality I needed to face.

The body I’d trained for years was drifting away. Not suddenly. Just slowly, steadily, in the wrong direction.

For a PE teacher, that’s a particular kind of awkward.

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A Surprisingly Easy Goodbye

There’s something I should mention first.

When I graduated and retired from competitive track and field, I wasn’t sad. Not even a little.

That surprised even me. I’d been doing it since middle school. It had been a huge part of my identity for years. You’d expect at least some grief.

But honestly, it felt like a relief.

By that point, reading had already changed something in me. My world had gotten bigger. I still loved watching athletics, and I still do. But the part of my identity that had depended on competing had quietly shifted. The obligation was gone. The guilt I used to feel on rest days. The sense that I had to show up to the track even when I couldn’t really train. All of it, just gone.

I’ve heard people say that reading changes you. For me, it literally felt like becoming a different person.

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Starting for the Wrong Reasons

A lot of people started working out during the pandemic. I was definitely one of them.

But my starting point was a little different from someone who’d never really exercised before. I’d been an athlete. Watching my body change like this felt embarrassing. Like I was letting something go that I shouldn’t have.

And then there was the PE teacher thing.

here’s a Japanese saying: 医者の不養生 (isha no fuyōjō). It describes a professional who fails to practice what they preach in their own life. A doctor who smokes. A nutritionist who skips meals. That kind of thing.

Here I was teaching students about fitness, coaching the school sports team, telling kids how to train and take care of their bodies. And my own body was getting softer every week.

That bothered me more than I expected.

If I’m going to stand in front of students and be taken seriously, I need to actually look and move like someone who knows what he’s talking about. That’s what being a professional means to me. So I started.

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The Same Feeling

Because I’d studied sports science, I assumed I already understood how training worked.

I did not.

I knew the basics. But actually understanding training, nutrition, and how muscle develops in practice? That was a different world. I’d spent years as an athlete without really knowing what was happening inside my own body.

So I started from scratch. YouTube, books, anything useful I could find. And I got completely absorbed.

I’ve always been drawn to understanding how things work at a structural level. Not just what happens, but why. That kind of knowledge has always made sense to me in a way that other things don’t.

Applying it to my own body, running little experiments and watching the results show up, that was immediately satisfying.

And that familiar feeling came back. The same one I’d had with track and field, with reading, with investing. Put in the work, pay attention, and things start to move.

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All In

I’ve tried the gradual approach before. It never really works for me.

What works is going all in from the start. Treating something like it’s already part of your life, even before it feels that way.

With reading, I restructured my whole commute on day one. With investing, I went from zero to reading financial news every single day. Training was the same.

The uncomfortable part is mostly just the beginning. You keep showing up, and at some point the forced feeling disappears. It just becomes what you do.

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What I Actually Got

My body changed. That part worked. Honestly, I knew it would.

But the bigger thing was something else.

I started to actually understand my own body. How it responds to food, sleep, different kinds of training. What works, what doesn’t, and why. There’s something genuinely satisfying about that kind of knowledge, especially when you can see it in the results.

I still train around four times a week. Split by body part, adjusted based on how I feel that day. I’m not trying to become a bodybuilder, so I keep it flexible.

It’s been part of my life ever since that first day. Workout has this intense image, but honestly, for me it’s closer to meditation. It just calms me down.

Do you work out? If you’ve been thinking about starting, I genuinely think you should just try it. You don’t need to have everything figured out. You just need to show up.