Here are the areas I have determined need improvement:
SleepAccording to my mother, I've always needed a lot of sleep. She says that when I was a small child, I never had to be ordered to take a nap - I'd just go get my blanket and go. The happiest and most alert I've ever been was when I was working as a construction site secretary - for that job, I went to be around 9 p.m. and got up at 4:30.
I know I don't want to go back to a schedule that runs as early as all that, mainly because no one else I know is awake then. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I can do just fine with my present wake-up time...I just need to go to bed a lot earlier. All too often, I stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. (and don't fall asleep until long after that) when I've got to get up at 7:30. It makes me feel crappy, and I don't want to do it anymore.
Solution: Go to bed by midnight.Factors which will make that difficult:
- My online friends are all still up and chatty and doing fun things at midnight, and will be for a couple more hours. What if I miss things?!
- There is always one more episode of Criminal Minds on Ion.
- There is always one more article on Cracked.
- I'm just not that tired yet.
How to overcome these factors:
- Sign out of chat at 11:00; direct IMs only. Turn off AIM at 11:30.
- Turn off the TV at 11
- Put the Funny Websites away at 11.
- Well, we seem to have something of a "winding down" strategy going on now. Maybe that will help with feeling tired. If it doesn't, we'll revisit this.
FoodI eat so much crap. So much crap. There are two reasons for this:
- Crap is delicious
- Crap is convenient
Here's how it goes: I go to work, I come home feeling tired, I don't feel like cooking, so I don't cook, and instead I eat snack food or fast food. I know it's terrible for me, so I feel guilty, so I bury myself in the escapism of television/online stuff/reading to avoid the food-related self-loathing, and then I stay up too late, then I wake up tired, then I go to work...lather, rinse, repeat.
I also don't eat nearly enough good stuff. Why?
- I don't like good stuff as much as I like crap.
- Making good stuff taste good requires a lot less effort than picking up some crap.
I know that these are problems. I know these food issues contribute to my body issues which contribute to my self-esteem issues which contribute to my mental health issues overall. I've got so many issues it's practically a subscription. Which comes to the question, "How do I change?"
Because first of all, I hate diets.
- A lot of them seem like voodoo. "If you never eat rice, you'll be skinny and beautiful!" "If you never eat meat, you'll be skinny and beautiful!" "If you eat only raw things, you'll be skinny and beautiful!" Look, I love Harry Potter, but I don't actually believe in magic, okay?
- A lot of them seem like a ridiculous amount of work. I don't feel like I should have to do a lot of math just to eat dinner.
- If I go on a diet, I promptly begin to
obsess about food. For instance, I tried the South Beach diet once. I could not think about ANYTHING but bread. By a week into it, I was ready to punch somebody in the face for a tortilla.
And second thing, I am a busy person. I have work and I have my new roller derby team and I have my online games and my friends and my boyfriend. The hours in a day are not limitless. And I'm too
tired so much of the time.
The best solution I can come up with here is that if I want to cook more, I need to get back to
enjoying cooking. Make it fun again, not just one more thing to do. Be creative, make things I feel good about, and put the pictures up so everybody has to look at how awesome it is. I also need to plan meals in advance - if I'm on a tight timetable, that's a good night for stir-fry instead of a roasted somethingorother.
Which brings us, of course, to another question: If you're cooking, what are you going to cook?
There are a lot of food philosophies out there, and I find most of them incredibly irritating. I find this one pretty irritating too (it has some truly obnoxious fans), but it's less irritating than most: Michael Pollan's
Food Rules. The short version of the rules: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. For more extensive explanation, hit that link. You can just scroll down to the "Beyond Nutritionism" section, if you like. That's how I'm going to try to live life.
The exceptions:
- I love baked goods, and I will continue to make them. That's going to be another rule, though: if I want sweets, they have to be homemade.
- Going out is fun. Once a week, I'm allowed to, and I will order whatever I want.
ExerciseI have spent most of the last year sitting on my ass. Oh sure, I have my occasional hiking and climbing trips, but on a day to day basis? There is a whole lot of sitting. I sit all day at work, and then I go home and sit some more. For a couple months there, I got good at going to the gym after work. Then I had a bad week, skipped a few days, and it all fell apart. It was also making it even harder for me to make proper food instead of just snacking on carb-y things all the time.
So first thing: I have a roller derby team again. That's 3 nights a week with 2 hours of good hard exercise. Monday, Thursday, and Friday. I'd like to add another two days with a couple solid hours of exercise in there. Wednesday is band practice day, so that's pretty much out. Tuesday would be a good one for traditional gym-going - hit the elliptical and the weights right after work, before I get home and settle in. Sunday, I'm thinking, would be good for some outdoor activity - I can convince Zach (the boyfriend) to go hiking once a week or so. I'll need to come up with a substitute once the weather gets cold again, but I can cross that bridge when I come to it.
StressA list of things that stress me out:
My family, whom I love; work, because I procrastinate; work, because I don't fit in; my body; my weight; my eyebrows; what i eat; what i don't eat; my crappy car; procrastination in general; my relationships with my friends; whether people like me or not; whether my friends like each other more than they like me; my hair; my brother's drama; money, money, money...
And I'm sure there's more stuff, if I sat down and worked on this for more than a minute. The thing is, some of that stuff is dumb to stress over. I can't change it, or it's tiny, or something. I've never been good at letting go of stress. So, at least for this initial period, we're just going to try to sleep more, stop eating crap, exercise more, and hit people on rollerskates a couple times a week and see how it goes.
