After Saturday's 'day off', today has been a nice, relaxing day filled with reading and learning. Yesterday was really nice, not really watching what I ate or drank, although force of habit means that I actually did to an extent, so that I don't go and have crap all the way through the day. It really gives me something to look forward to and, because I am watching what I eat all the way through the week, my stomach and my conscience won't let me eat or drink too much.
So today, as I said, was about relaxing and reading and learning. A healthy lifestyle means that I want to keep my mental health 'healthy' too and reading and learning are great ways of doing that. At the moment I am enrolled on 3 courses on Future Learn, as well as completing two cognitive science courses and just finished a leadership course today, created by Sam Strickland and on Seneca Learning. I am also reading a book called 'The Matthew Effect' by Daniel Rigney, about how advantage begets further advantage so that I can narrow the gap between the haves and the have nots once we go back to school. This is helping to keep my mind active during the lockdown.
I am also reading a lot. I have lost count of the number of books I have read over the course of the lockdown because, for once in 17 years, I don't really have any marking to do at night. The book I am reading at the moment is called 'Gargantis', and it is the sequel to a book called 'Malamander'. Both are children's novels, but I don't really care as I love reading children's fiction - the storylines are pure imagination and I also love happy endings and exciting adventures, which they give to me in abundance. I suppose that I, like every other teacher, am just a big kid at heart.
I have stayed within my calories, even with an absolutely lovely roast dinner. It is hard, sometimes, trying to find the right amount of calories on the app. For instance, when you type in roast potatoes you have portion sizes ranging from '1 cup', '1 gram', '100 grams', 1 potato' etc and this makes it very confusing as to which one is the right one. This, I believe, is one of the reasons I only lost 1 pound last week and three this one. This week I have always gone with the higher calorie choice so that I am not going over the limit accidentally. And the 3 pound loss showed that this was probably the right thing to do.
Tomorrow I start back again with my exercises and I am going to find a harder one to do for the next two weeks, as the one I was doing my body was getting used to and so therefore I have to make sure that I am not plateauing. I am sticking with 'Team Body Project' and their free videos on YouTube (I'm not paying £19.99 a month for videos when I can find stuff to do for free online) and I have found one that is 45 minutes of workout rather than the 25 I normally do. I expect that it will be 35 minutes of exercises, 5 minutes of warm up/cool down and 5 minutes of talking. I don't mind the talking as the host's voice doesn't grate on me as Joe Wicks did.
So I intend to finish off the day today by climbing into my dressing gown, making a cup of tea and settling down to finish the last few pages (well, the last 102 pages) of my book and start another before I go to bed. I can then go to bed and look forward to another week of work (of which I am in school on Tuesday) before weighing in again. The only disappointment I have today is that I didn't reach 14,000 steps - I only managed 10,500. But I will make up for that tomorrow.
And talking of tomorrow, until then, stay strong and stay safe.
Thanks for reading.
Sean.
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