It's been a good two weeks. The main challenges I've been hoping to address are energy and stress, and I don't have any major solutions, but I like the place that my mind is in.
Food has been a friend. Basically standard strict primal fare: lots of pastured meats, fresh produce. I've started making jerky for an afternoon snack: that has been going well. I have little bites of things like a piece of Alex's Laurabar or whathaveyou, but I prefer this to the 100% I'm-not-going-to-eat-anything-outside-of-meals strategy. Once thing I think I could improve on is finding balance between extreme strictness and habitual snacking or a desire to shovel food in my mouth at dinner, but I think I have been pretty good about that in the past week or so. I want to be mindful, and not eat the ENTIRE head of cauliflower because it's there.. you know?
Alex and I also decided that we want to incorporate seafood into our diet on a more regular basis. The five types we are mutually enthusiastic about are oysters, muscles, salmon, tuna, and scallops. So we started this weekend with oysters from the farmer's market - yum!
Exercise has been good. Last week, the gym had crappy hours, so we decided to just go hiking at Inspiration Point twice instead. It was a nice change of scenery, and coming back to the gym this morning felt really good.
Oh, and Lululemon didn't have their free yoga class this Sunday (which I discovered after walking over there in the rain, thanks) so I did my first full-on personal yoga session. It was great. I spent an hour and divided it into sections: 5 min cat/cow mobility stuff, 15 min sun salutations, 15 min warrior 2-type poses, 15 minutes of random hand stands and things, 5 minutes bridge/plow/abs, and 5 min savasana. I set a timer for each segment, but I found it to be very natural timing. It wasn't crazy intense or anything like that, but very similar to the average class at Lululemon: challenging while in the pose but no buckets of sweat and relaxing and energizing. I furiously cleaned my kitchen afterwards.
Digestion has been not great but not terrible.
Energy was REALLY low when I was being super strict AND sparse with my diet. As I added the jerky snack and relaxed a little, things MAY have gotten a littler better. I'm still testing things out. I heard an interesting concept on Abel James' podcast with the Perfect Health Diet guy as a guest. He suggested that when we are missing some kind of nutrient in our diet, our body often responds with general hunger, but that it can take weeks for a nutrient deficiency to arise and manifest itself in hunger. So a typical situation for someone starting some kind of intense and restrictive diet is that things go well for a few weeks and then this mechanism kicks in and the person gets hungrier and hungrier and eventually decides that the diet isn't working for them and then often switch to a different extreme diet that may result in different deficiencies, so once again they initially feel better but after a few weeks or months stall out. So a diet in which you meet all of your nutrient requirements is obviously healthy for you, but it will also make you feel less hungry because you aren't deficient in nutrients. So I think that's a good attitude to bring to diet: try to eat a variety of things you believe to be healthy and cover your bases, and from there, if you want to loose some weight, it should be relatively easy to eat a little less without resulting in intense hunger.
Stress. I have it. I need to figure out how to deal with it. I am apparently still grinding my teeth during the night. But, I will say that I've been feeling pretty good, despite having my proposal exam and annual review looming ahead. Maybe a little too relaxed - I need to get shit done! But I have a couple really great weekends where for whatever reason I was motivated to come into work on Saturday and get some shit done. And then Sunday I really just devoted to chores and enjoying myself and it felt really good. Yay.
April 2013