(I’m almost certain I’ve used this title fairly recently but whatever)
I’ll make this a fast one since it’s rather late at night. Just needed to get the fingers working a little before I turn in.
I bought that bathroom scale primarily because I needed to know my weight for a very specific purpose and I couldn’t for the life of me think of somewhere I could just get on a scale.
Secondarily, I really do need to drop some weight. Pandemic pounds and then some. I thought a couple of weeks ago that quantifying my steps these past many years has really helped. I try not to be a slave to the numbers, and often remind myself on days when I’m really not feeling it that it’s okay to cut short one of my walks. Yet the constant awareness of these numbers gives me something against which to measure myself. Like, if I find myself on consecutive days not feeling it, what’s going on in my body and mind?
Ideally, I think it’s best just to make the lifestyle change so that I’m not worried about numbers. I’m mostly there with swimming: I do it more for mental health than physical health and would keep doing it with no quantification. However, I do check my time in the water every time, just to see what I did. I can tell you how many buoys I swam on any given morning. And I still count strokes.
Not like I used to, when I was first getting back into swimming condition a long time ago. Now I count strokes when I’m swimming the Australian crawl (“freestyle”) because it helps me keep track of how tired I am against my own norms. And on mornings when I want to push myself, I can check my weariness against the number of strokes and set new goals. These things help if I want to get better and stronger, which I do.
I weighed myself last Tuesday, then didn’t step on the scale again all week. I wanted to have a normal week without thinking about my weight beyond however much I already do.
And yesterday morning I stepped on it again, seven days later, and I was down four pounds.
Progress, or just a standard ebb and flow based on my varying diet and exercise? Impossible to say with such a small sample size. So I’m going another week with the same approach.
I’m tired as heck lately. Sleep has been a huge problem these past several weeks, especially the nights before my days in the office. I’m dragging aaaaaalll the time these days, but especially office days. I’m getting slightly concerned.
And this week’s been especially rough. Seems I’ve got ten times my usual number of meetings. One of them was at 8:00 and was followed by another at 9:00. It was my beach morning, too, so I had to nix my morning swim, which of course gets the day off to a bad start.
It’s all bringing me down. I’m not having a good emotional health week, which is my main reason for typing these words this morning instead of trying to get some sleep. It helps. I’m feeling clearer-minded already, so I’m off to bed. Perchance to sleep.
Won’t be for long, anyway. I have a meeting at 9.