20 • THE GRIFFON • Fall 2021
The Inevitable Weight Gain Known as the ‘COVID 15’ Staff Sgt. Robert N. Ralstin
Instructor B Co., 3rd Battalion, 414th Regiment (Cadet Summer Training), 1st Brigade, 104th Division
The year 2020 was a difficult and unprecedented year for humans worldwide. We were mostly stuck inside, forced to change our work locations to our homes, if possible, wear masks, and socially distance from others for over a year. Once vibrant, recreational public places largely shut down such as COVID-19 swept across the globe impacting every community. The virus has caused millions worldwide to lose loved ones and created a new reality that the invisible is deadly and we should take it seriously. I was fortunate enough to be in a position to work from home for the entirety of the COVID pandemic. This brought on many new challenges that many of us never thought we’d experience. We lost our workplace social interactions, learned to be our own IT departments, became more independent on our own culinary abilities, and had to be creative in our means for
sustaining our physical fitness requirements. The U.S. Army Reserve moved to conducting our battle assemblies completely remote through the support of Microsoft Teams. This inevitably prevented leaders from the ability to provide 100% accountability through participation and observation of physical readiness training to the same degree that was accomplished previously with in-person unit training assemblies. At the beginning of the pandemic, we all generally believed that we would have the virus under control within the first few weeks to perhaps a couple of months. This was a major over estimation of the reality of an airborne virus. What happened to me I think happened to a lot of Soldiers and Americans alike. Early on what we didn’t realize was that we were all starting to create bad habits that would end up lasting for a year or more. Happy hours were starting earlier in the day, became more frequent, and we were eating more convenient foods. These habits, that we all thought were temporary, spiraled into a year
of a sedentary lifestyle. Several months into the pandemic, colleagues, Soldiers, and family members began joking about the “COVID 15”, a term used by college students who gain weight in their freshman year of college, the “Freshman 15” after their lives are changed drastically as they leave home and venture into new habits and lifestyles. The “15” represents 15 pounds of personal weight gain. Unfortunately, I was a victim,
like many, to the stressors and bad habit forming that were subsequent consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic I was an avid user of my local gym and was in relatively good shape. When my access to the gym was cutoff, my drive to workout was gone with the wind. As the pandemic raged on so did my loss of muscle mass and the increase in fat began to take hold. I gained 30 pounds of fat and was in the worst shape of my life. I
