POPPY. What. Is That.
Haha, welp. It's an abstract version of my SNIKT! chart, where I track my sleep quantity and quality, weight, words, diet, and workouts. I mean, the actual chart has things written in bigger boxes. This is a zoomed-out version that just shows the color-coding.
The darker gray columns and rows are just table structure, the dark gray columns are sleep, weight, and words. I keep saying and someday will write about how I do sleep. I do, actually, track my weight, weigh myself every day in fact, as an exercise in teaching myself how unimportant weight is; if you want to know, I've been keeping this SNIKT! chart since February and in eight months my weight has gone from centering around 136 pounds to centering around 133 pounds. Which means in the beginning I might have weighed anywhere between 138 and 134 pounds and at the moment I might weigh anywhere between 135 and 131 pounds in a given week. Haha, how popular do you think an I LOST THREE POUNDS IN EIGHT MONTHS pin would be on Pinterest. And I'm not saying that eight months of pretty clean eating hasn't made big changes in my body, I will talk more about that in a little bit—just least of all my weight. Words are what I do for meditation, which is for stress relief. Just ...headspace. More about that later.
The green, yellow, red, and grey boxes are diet. Not trying to lose weight diet, what I eat diet. If you must know, I call it diet and not nutrition because diet matches workout—nevermind that, I like my words to match. ANYWAY. Green is protein and vegetables, which I have as much as I want; yellow is grains, beans, and potatoes, my starches, which I have once a day; red is alcohol, sugar, and flour i.e., processed starch, which I have one of each once a week, or trade them for each other; oh and, gray is when I didn't eat. I feel like I have definitely told you before that between charts I fall apart pretty spectacularly and have not been not giving you the impression that I'm smoothly traveling hand over hand up the rope. Here is what it more typically looks like: five weeks of an effortless, perfect diet, and then cooking practice interrupted for two weeks in a row, and I've told you, it's not that I have such great eating habits, it's about having a good cooking habit. I mean, for me. If you're not about to cook, it's not the end of the line; you just have to think about something else. Or well, you don't have to do anything, you are the arbiter of your own health etc.
Let's talk a bit about why my cooking habit fell apart: an uptick in how busy I am at work, an uptick in how busy I am as a trainer, keeping up a decently aggressive practice schedule. Which hasn't been like being crushed by a boulder, more like a lot of small stones placed one by one on your sternum and gradually you start to have a little trouble breathing. I think the first cooking practice I missed, I just needed the time to catch up on something else I'd fallen behind on, and the second practice I was minding my niece and nephew in the suburbs.
So anyway, you can see a pretty good pileup of red in the last week and a half there. I've actually been eating bread: buttered toast in bed, bagels for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch. And drinking Cokes. And here's the other datum, I feel pretty awful. Floaty, sort of. Actually I had some leftover pork lo mein for lunch the other day and I was like, dang it, I think I'm coming down with a cold, and then I realized it was something more akin to an allergic reaction, idk to what, maybe the processed starch, maybe the MSG, but I flushed it out with plenty of water and it went away. So that's interesting, or as Alanis Morrisette might say, ironic. Don't think about that too hard, it doesn't actually have anything to do with Alanis Morrisette.
So eight months of pretty clean eating, I can finally actually feel the difference between good, solid energy and the floaty, nervous energy that I'm getting right now from the past week and a half of caffeine, sugar, and starch. Mahhh, I feel yucky. Also sort of itchy. I'm looking forward to getting back to vegetables, do I know how to party or what. And here's where I mention that I'm only down three pounds, but I look noticeably leaner. And looking lean isn't even the most important thing to me, you know what I've really noticed about myself this summer, I can pick up my feet pretty good. Though I'm not gonna lie, I haven't not noticed that my belly is flat. Like maybe I take a minute to notice it in the mirror every day when I get out of bed, and march out to show the sweetie man, um, every day.
Have you ever read Remains of the Day? It's about this butler, his life is falling apart and all he can think is, he needs a new staff plan. I am that butler. I mean, my life isn't falling apart. My life is pretty okay. I'm just saying, I need a new food plan, it seems like the weather's finally turned and it's fall, so I can eat fall things now, TK.
Oh and, the orange, blue, and gray boxes in the second-to-last column are my evening workouts. I expanded this section to also include morning and afternoon activity, for some whole day perspective, in the extra-demented SNIKT! chart that I set up for fall.
