The third week of my diet challenge is now behind me. I added some formalism to how I’m grading myself on each category each day, and therefore the weekly grade. I’m getting faster and stronger too, but for some reason I’m now being haunted by food dreams.
Goal1: Eat a strict nutritarian diet (A)
I’m nailing the diet at this point. I’m rarely finding myself hungry, except when I’m tired or stressed. I’m also getting better at not drinking water throughout the day like I used to with soda. This is cutting down on what I believe are the salt-related headaches. When I do have one and it lasts longer than an hour I have taken to eating two or three green olives. Olives are preserved in brine liquid so are actually packed with sodium. This usually does the trick. Thankfully I really only need to do this on days that I work out real hard.
Goal 2: Sleep at least 7 hours (A-)
This is the first week sleep has dipped below a straight A. I had one day where I just didn’t go to sleep early enough to wake up on the seven hour line. I will say that without caffeine or candy as stimulants it is much harder to power through the fatigue. That was one of the days that I just totally bailed on working out. The second one was the following day when I still was feeling sluggish
Goal 3: Walk (and/or Run) for a total of at least 10,000 steps (B)
I crossed it for all but two days, which puts me in solid B territory. For one day I got into the 5000 range, which I gave myself a C grade on. The other day I barely crossed the 1000 step mark. I was zoning on code I was working on an by the end of the day I had only walked 800 steps. By the time I was home and in bed it was just over the 1000 mark. That’s pretty damn bad. That’s an F. But with the rest of the days being A, the score settled out a solid B.
Goal 4: Do at least 5 minutes of calisthenics (B-)
I missed only two of the seven days on this one. By far the most progress I’ve had is on my calisthenics. I started off with a solid F score for the first week, followed by a C- last week. Missing only two days but hitting the other targets means I got a decent score. Better still is that I’m actually doing a lot more of each activity, whether it be the pushups, the jump squats, or the other core exercises.
Goal 5: Do at least 15 minutes of yoga (B-)
Yoga dropped down a notch to a B-. I totally skipped two of the days, but on a third I only did part of a routine. That gave me a little bump in score but not much. I feel so much better when I do the yoga, you’d think I would just ace the damn thing. But I don’t have to do it before I leave in the morning, already pushing my luck with traffic at the time I’m leaving, and at night I really only have an hour of time to do everything else. I either need to bang this out at the gym or be more expeditious in my food prep for the next day.
Summary (Overall grade B):
Once again my score has kept improving, now to a solid B. If I tweak just a few of these things I’ll at least be in B+ territory this week. I will still shoot for an A, of course. I am wondering if the food dreams are going to let up this week or just get worse. I have a strategy for how I’d incorporate this diet permanently into my lifestyle that would potentially help mitigate that. Once I’m done batting it around my mind I’ll commit to paper and see how it looks.