Tag Archives: tracking

Doing More Tracking (or Finding Out Some Data Is Just Too Emotional)

Posted on May 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Doing More Tracking (or Finding Out Some Data Is Just Too Emotional)

Last month, I had a goal to work on tracking a few things in my life. I knew that things were getting a bit out of control and tracking is a way to gain control again. All of the things I was planning on tracking were things I have tracked before so I figured it should be a relatively easy challenge. And of course, since I thought it would be easy it wasn’t.

It was easy for me to track my spending and income. This was a habit that I had been doing for a while and it was pretty easy to get back into it. There were a few moments where I forgot to track something or had to spend more time than I would have liked double checking things, but it’s been relatively easy. It helps that right now I have more money coming in than I’m used to so I’m not seeing everything in red. But I want to get this habit back to where it was so I’m ready when things aren’t as great.

I also wanted to do accurate tracking of my weight and food. And this is where I struggled last month. Tracking my weight wasn’t too horrible, but I’ve realized that it’s not something I want to keep up as regularly as I was. I have some big weight fluctuations due to hormones and even when I know that my weight gain isn’t real it feels that way. It’s not easy when the scale says you are up 10 pounds overnight and all your clothes don’t fit. I know that it’s due to swelling and water weight, but I still hate seeing that. I need to figure out a better way to track weight because I need to do it, but I can’t do it as often right now. I’m not sure if weekly would be right and mostly doesn’t seem often enough, so this is something I will have to play with.

And tracking my food was kind of a disaster. Food tracking is such an emotional thing for me and I thought doing tracking would help take that away a bit. But instead, it made it more emotional and I could sense my moods being affected if I had a good day or bad day. I know I do need to do some tracking, but I’m not sure how to do it without the emotional tug I was feeling. It may have just been harder for me this time because of where I am in my life and outside factors, but whatever it was I know I failed at tracking food last month.

And for this month, I have another tracking related challenge. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I am not sleeping enough. I have had several days of only getting 4 hours of sleep. Part of this problem is how well I have trained myself to get up at the same time every day. Even if I go to bed really late, I’m still up at 7. If I sleep in, it’s only until 7:30 or 8 and that’s not that late if I get to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning. It’s not always that I am out late, sometimes I am in bed at a reasonable time and I stay up reading. Before I know it, it’s 2am and I’m still awake.

I know in a perfect world I would be asleep by 11pm so that I will get at least 7 hours of sleep even if I wake up in the middle of the night. That’s not totally realistic since there are some times that I’m just getting home at 11. But I think setting a goal to be in bed by midnight on those late nights and by 11:30 on not late nights isn’t too hard. And I need to set a limit on my nighttime reading to make sure that my lights are being turned off by midnight. It probably sounds weird to have to limit how much I read at night, but sometimes I just get so into a book that I forget that I need to put it down.

I think working on having a set bedtime also relates to better time management in general. I don’t have to get everything done in the evenings that I make myself do. I can save some for the next day or if I was better with how I use my time I could probably get them done during the day. Procrastination is my enemy when trying to get better about when I go to sleep.

I know that some people have alarms to remind them to go to sleep, and I’m going to look into those options. I might just add something to my daily reminders to remind me that I need to start winding down. I already have my phone and computer set to reduce the blue light I see in the evening, but I don’t have that for my tv. I know that they have blue light blocking glasses so those might be a good investment for me (I just don’t know how they would work if I was also wearing my regular glasses if I took my contacts out). I also am going to look at what parts of my evening routine I can do earlier so that it’s not a lot of self-care work at the end of the day and I’m tired.

I’m ready to not feel as tired anymore. This has been a problem I’ve been dealing with for a while but it has gotten significantly worse in the past few months. I know that getting more sleep will benefit so many aspects of my life and I can’t wait to see those benefits. And hopefully it will have some benefits I’m not expecting and my life will be even better when I’m well-rested a majority of the time.

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Monthly Challenge Check-In (or Doing My Own Version Of An OTF Challenge This Month)

Posted on April 3, 2018 | 2 comments

It’s time for me to end one monthly challenge and start another one! I’ll admit that last month’s challenge didn’t go the way I expected it to go at all, but I’m really excited about this month’s challenge.

Last month, I challenged myself to work on daily stretching. I knew I need to work on doing more stretching because my flexibility was getting worse lately. Also, I’m stuck sitting at a computer for so many hours a day and I need to make sure that doing that doesn’t start to affect my body. And there are so many different resources out there to help get more stretching into your life. So I figured this would be the perfect challenge for me.

Well, it really wasn’t. At least not in the way I really hoped it would. I had looked at several different guided stretching apps and picked out the one that seemed best for me and had the stretches I would want to work on. And I did that for the first few days of the month and it just wasn’t working for me. Some of the stretches were hurting me more than I thought and the flow of it just seemed off. There was nothing wrong with the app, it just wasn’t for me.

I tried looking at a few other apps and other guides online, but I never found anything else during the month that seemed to be what I needed or wanted. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t work on stretching all month. I did work on it, but I never found a good practice for me that I could keep going. I haven’t given up yet, but it’s something that I haven’t been able to successfully build into a habit that I have been able to do with so many other monthly challenges.

After having a not-so-great challenge last month, I wanted to do something that I was excited about this month. At Orangetheory, they are doing a marathon challenge for the month of April. The basic idea is to track your mileage during all your classes in the month and there are different distances you can try to get based on if you are a power walker, jogger, runner, biker, or strider.

I thought about doing this challenge officially through Orangetheory but realized that it probably wouldn’t be right for me. It should have been fine going to different studios since we are responsible for tracking our own mileage. But since I know that when I’m nauseous I don’t want to be walking on the treadmill I would be split between the power walker and bike marathon challenges and might not be able to accomplish either on its own. Also, I’m thinking about trying to do some minimal running again if my body feels up for it so I didn’t know how that would affect doing the power walker (13.1 miles) challenge.

So I’ve decided for my monthly challenge this month I will be doing my own marathon challenge and tracking. One of my blogger friends, David, does this every month on his blog so I’m kind of taking the idea from him too. I have no clue if I will get to 13.1 miles power walking and I’m pretty certain that I won’t be at 105 miles on the bike unless I only do the bike the entire month (which I am not planning on doing). But it will be interesting to see how many miles I do accomplish between the treadmill and bike this month.

I’ve set up my Ink+Volt monthly calendar for this month with tracking stickers. I put stickers for each day that I’m planning on working out so I can fill in what distance I get in class.

I’m going to be taking photos of the treadmill and bike during each class so I have it to fill in later. The only time I’m a little concerned is if we have a run/row day since I will need to remember to take a photo every time I switch over to the rower. But I think that should be easy enough to do and the worst case would be needing to ask the coach after class if I could look at the workout plan so I could see what distances I was supposed to do during the run/row to figure out how many rounds I did. But that’s not that bad of a worse case scenario.

I think this is going to be a fun challenge for me. I really don’t know how many miles I’ll get. I have an idea of what I can do based on past workouts and how many workouts I have this month, but I don’t know how many days will get up being bike days. And there are always other factors that come in to make my distances on the treadmill longer or shorter. No matter what, it will be interesting to see what the totals are at the end of the month.

While it would have been fun to do this officially at the studios I go to, I think doing it on my own is a good substitute considering my circumstances. And maybe this will help me stay more motivated when I’m on the bike because I will want to be getting as much distance as possible to make sure my total at the end of the month is impressive!

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Default ThumbnailMileage And Motivation (or Another New Challenge) Default ThumbnailNot Perfect This Month (or Challenged With The Monthly Challenge) Default ThumbnailFailing And Succeeding In One Monthly Challenge (or Another Repeat Challenge This Month) Default ThumbnailTaking A Month To Reset (or This Doesn’t Really Feel Like A Monthly Challenge) Default ThumbnailI Feel Like Every Monthly Challenge Is The Same (or Will This Be The Month I Get Back On Track?) Default ThumbnailGetting Back To Stretching (or My Body Is Telling Me What Monthly Challenge To Do)

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