Category: health

A (non-musical) Personal Challenge

For the last 23 days I’ve been able to get in at least 30 minutes of exercise and close all three rings on the iOS Activity app. My beloved wife started tracking exercise a little more than a week before I did and she managed to close all three rings for the entire month of September. I am so impressed by that and so proud of her that I am challenging myself to do the same for the month of October.

Today is October 1st and all three rings are closed for today. I can do this.

Intermittent Fasting Update

So hey, how’s the intermittent fasting thing going, he asked because he’s kinda feeling lazy when he knows he still has three songs to finish and the dishes need to be done and the dehumidifier in the cellar needs to be emptied and yadda yadda yadda?

It’s still going, if that helps. I still have a tad more than three hours to go in fast #20. I haven’t missed a day since I started this whole screwy thing. I had to mess with it a bit the other day. We had a lunch date with Harry booked for noon on Sunday. My fast period is supposed to end at 1:00. I adjusted things by ending the off period an hour early the night before so that fast was 8:00pm to noon instead of 9:00pm to 1:00pm. No problem. Lunch was eaten on time and all was right with the world. Of course, in order to get back onto the preferred schedule I had to make the next day’s fast 8:00pm to 1:00pm, meaning I had my first official 17 hour fasting period. I did it. It went okay.

Last night I actually didn’t eat anything after dinner. Not because I was being a good boy, but because dinner was HUGE and I never recovered. I think unofficially my current fast probably started before 7:00pm, but that’s okay. I’ll make it. As the clock strikes 10:00am though, I am already fantasizing about lunch. Mmmm, lunch.

It’s Tuesday today, and Tuesday is my self imposed weigh in day. The Zero app, which tracks intermittent fasting (it’s really just a timer with some statistics saved off) has a tie in to the iOS Health app and it allows me to track my weight. It has nice graphs and everything. My first week had a huge weight loss. My second had a very small weight loss. This is the third week and it fell happily in between.

I haven’t set any weight goals yet. Well, other than the lose 250 pounds or so (which is, sadly, not an exaggeration. Robbie is a fatty). I haven’t even started mucking with diet yet. I’m starting this little Autumn-Quarantine experiment with just the intermittent fasting and a little bit of regular exercise. I’ll add diet changes later, but for now chocolate is still on the menu. Let’s see how long that lasts.

In a moment of nerd glory, I setup a Google Spreadsheet with my weigh ins, including a column that tracks weekly changes and a column that tracks total changes, and a line graph… you know, like you do.

Two hours and 56 minutes until it’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch time, babie!

Pain

I was worried about getting my 30 minutes of exercise in today but I was able to pull it off. Did you know that riding a stationary bike uses a different set of muscles than walking in place? Who knew, right? So now I’ve got two different sets of muscles in pain. Nice.

Speaking of pain. I had a slightly positive outlook on the whole tendinitis in my thumb thing this morning. I still can’t really bend it at the knuckle without that weird getting stuck feeling, but the general, constant pain seemed to have passed. Progress, right? Then I put together an exercise bike. Oh, there you are, constant pain. Welcome home, my constant friend.

A Streak is in Jeopardy

An epic streak might come to an end today. For 16 days now I have been able to exercise for at least 30 minutes. I don’t know if I’ve ever pulled anything off in that scope. All I’m doing is walking in place at a quick pace. I work up a sweat, my heart rate rises, my legs burn. It’s not much at all, but for someone as painfully out of shape as I am, it’s something and something is better than nothing.

It was tough yesterday. My legs were killing me. I had to do it in five minute chunks because I couldn’t keep going any longer than that. Wuss. I haven’t done anything today, but already my legs feel like lead. I’m a little nervous I won’t be able to keep the streak alive.

Come on, fat boy. Git’er done.

Also, I looked at all of my past blog posts from September 24ths (yesterday) in history. Last year on 9/24 I finally saw Steve Hackett in concert. Awesome. On 9/24/14 I finished 50/90. Wait… what? The last time I finished 50/90 I did it with six days to spare? Why didn’t I pull that off this year? I’m behind schedule! Yikes!

Anyway. Hopefully I can get my 30 minutes of walking in. Ouch.

Intermittent Fasting Update

I have about an hour and a half left in my 14th consecutive intermittent fast. Two weeks seems like a huge deal for some reason. I figured I’d try it for a week and then I lost a bunch of weight on the first week. Cool! The second week’s weight loss would be better described as tiny, but there was weight loss. Every bit helps.

Two weeks. Jen tried it for a couple of days and stopped. She didn’t feel good. I hadn’t had that problem until yesterday. By hour 14 or 15 yesterday I wasn’t feeling all that great. By 15.5 I was actually feeling a little foggy. I was really hungry and it was messing with my head. So far today I don’t feel bad at all. I’m not sure what happened yesterday, but if that becomes a regular thing I’m going to stop all together. I didn’t like the way I felt yesterday.

We’re also keeping up with the daily exercise. It’s just walking in place, but it definitely helps. When I started this two weeks ago I would go for five minutes and then have to sit down. Today I did 12 minutes before it hurt my back too much to go on. That was great, but let’s see how I feel when I have to do another round during lunch. I might be down to five minutes (or less) again. We’ll see.