The year 2021 was not a good one for me in a lot of ways. I mean, it was a good one in a lot of ways, too, like I did well in my work, my relationship held though there were also some issues there, and I got two adorable kittens. I didn’t get COVID (got a triple dose of the Pfizer vaccine), I saw family in-person, and no one close to me died. Low bar.
But it was still a horrible year. Politics aside:
- Dealing with The Lodger, who the bf and I now refer to as “it.” Dehumanizing “it” helps us both to deal with the PTSD. Despite it leaving in May, we both still have nightmares of it coming back, so, that’s an issue.
- Relationship stress. I’m not going to go into things in detail, especially since HIPPA becomes involved, but let’s just say that my personal relationship with the bf has taken a hit this year, but we’re still doing okay.
- Clearly, fitness was an issue. You can look back at how much I was posting about progress in 2020, and then the dramatic fall-off in 2021 with my last post basically half a year ago. Excuses are just excuses, but they’re also excuses: Stress from it, work from work, stress from issues with the bf, and just general “blah”-ness all contributed to those issues. And, I’m basically back where I started in April 2020, but with better tracking spreadsheets.
But, let’s move forward. I’m a man with a plan. Literally. At least for work. One of the big issues with what I do is I do too much. I have my hands in well over a dozen different projects at work, and keeping everything straight and keeping track of deadlines is a major source of stress for me. Also planning things out on when I need to do what. I’ve been experimenting with different project management programs over the last two or three months and I think I have something that works for me. But, we’ll see. There are only a few weeks where I need to do more than 190 hours of work. 🙄
That also aside, I do, of course, also have a plan for getting fit (again? for the first time? something). After all, this blog is called, “Yet Again Fitness.” For a reason: I keep starting, but I have always had trouble keeping it up. As in, sustaining it for a long period of time. Okay, mind out of the gutter …
Habits are important, and I have at least two months before my next travel. Shockingly, a spacecraft mission I’m involved with does not have a team meeting this month, since they always have since I’ve been involved with it. Next trip would be a conference in March that I’ve always gone to, in Texas. In 2020 it was cancelled, in 2021 it was virtual. It was horrible as virtual. So, either I’m going in-person, or I’m not going to attend.
If I’m able to stick with my plan, which is based on what worked last year and my research from last year, I’ll be able to almost get down to where I was in Summer 2020: <210 lbs and around 26% body fat. That’s based on losing 0.725% of my weight per week, and 80% of that being fat. And, I could be at 170 lbs and 15% body fat by ≈mid-October.
To support that, I’m back to meal planning: While I’ve still managed to track meals for the vast majority of days in the last 90(!!!) weeks, the last few months have been, 5:00pm rolls around, and “What do you want for dinner?” “I dunno.” “Okay, we’ll forage” which leads to prepared food with relatively little nutritional value. I mean, it’s not crap, but it’s not great. I don’t plan to plan out 5–6 weeks like I was doing at the start of COVID when we didn’t want to leave the house at all, but I’d like to plan at least two weeks out so I know what I’m doing and what I can fit in. So far, I’ve planned 5 days out because again the bf is being a pain and not participating. Also, his stomach has been hurting for the last week since he got food poisoning last weekend. Sigh. That said, we’ve both talked about working more on cooking bulk things on the weekend to eat during the week, like preparing vegetables (two pounds of broccoli) or a few cups of rice for him, or a few “fill-in” meals or snacks for me like Korean fire chicken or chili. Moving on …
To support that further, I have attempted to plan out a typical day:
- Up at 7:30 to read the news for a half hour and look at stocks (I started to get more into actively managing my money last year).
- 8:00, look at the project management software and plan the work I need to get done for the day.
- 8:30, any tracking (fitness/food/etc.) updates.
- 8:45, spend 15 minutes cleaning the house, hitting some high-priority target (like, my desk one day, or the kitchen stove, or doing laundry another day), since that’s also been a mental block for me lately.
- 9:00, 15–30 minutes on the rowing machine, likely closer to 20.
- 9:30, start work.
- 3:00, ≈1-hour break to do weights (3x/week) or cardio (3–4x/week; meaning the elliptical or walking).
- ≈4:00, back to work.
- 5:30, start dinner (unless it’s a more involved dish that requires more time, but hopefully I’ll plan those for weekends).
- 9:00, core exercises for ≈15 minutes.
- ≈10:00, prepare for bed.
- 10:30, be in bed.
That is highly structured and I expect things to float around, but it gives me 9 hours of sleep (or at least in bed), with roughly 90 minutes of exercise per day that is scattered throughout the day so as to keep the metabolism up, gives me time carved out for cooking, gives me time carved out for planning what I need to do, gives me time carved out for necessary housework, and also gives me up to about 10 hours of time for work if I really need it (9:30–3:00, 4:00–5:30, 7:00–9:00, 9:15–10:15 [stretched]), or 11.5 hours on days where dinner is left-overs.
There’s also no change for weekends (other than hopefully not working so much!, and shifting the morning stuff to later). But that means there’s no “free day” that I can use up as an excuse not to exercise, and then convince myself the next day that it’s okay to skip again, and then get to Tuesday and say the week’s ruined so I’ll just start again the next Sunday.
But, I also fully realize that something so regimented can’t survive without some give. For example, I have been going into the office on Fridays, so I don’t expect to do the rower on Friday mornings I go in. We’ve also been going grocery shopping after my morning in the office, so that 3:00 afternoon exercise might shift to an hour later if needed, then go right into making dinner. Or, if emergencies crop up, then clearly I’ll need to take care of things. Two trips to the ER this year with the bf at 5pm and 4am (different days) clearly were more pressing than getting a workout in. Or today when my main computer died and I spent an hour with tech support (no luck) and then combing through backups was more important than doing core exercises.
Another thing that might help, at least a bit, is that I got a new body measurement device. The MyoTape I’ve been using for nearly 15 years is dying – the spring is failing, so you have to force the tape back in. I got a new one that is digital and syncs via Bluetooth to my phone (or I could just record it in my spreadsheet). Why is this a help? So, I’ve dreaded taking measurements, afraid they’ll go back up. I also keep feeling the need to suck it in and then read off the measurement. Here’s the thing: I can tell the application what I’m measuring, take it, press the button on the device, and it records without me ever looking at it. And, the font is small enough that I’d really have to look to read it: When the phone is on my desk and I’m standing up, I can’t read it, it’s that small (and for the record, I can still read the small print on the pill bottles, thank you very much). So, that’s all in my head, but every tiny little bit that can help, does help.
Now, that all said, this has taken an interrupted hour. As in, I started to write this an hour ago though I’ve done a few other things so it’s not a solid hour writing. But it’s very stream-of-consciousness. And probably time for me to go to bed since it’s 12:20am. Past time for me to go to bed.
