Balcony garden, lost 1.6kg of my extra 3kg so far, completed two weeks of C25K and had some self-discoveries about anxiety

• Looking after my endocrine system
• Reducing my weight back to normal after gaining 3kg
• Completing four weeks of C25K
• Creating a balcony garden

Well I haven’t been posting the last few days because I’ve had some other priorities come up, but now I can play catch up and share how I’m going with my 30 day goals. Its about half-way through my 30 days and I am starting to see some real progress. Lets start from the bottom:

Creating a balcony garden

Even though I have not put much into this in the last 30 days, the law of attraction kicked in and this weekend I am going to attend a workshop about growing food from a balcony garden. I just found out about it today – I can’t wait!

My bokashi bucket has finally filled up and I am ready to put in a second container in series with my wetpots system. I’m going to mix the bokashi with soil and put in an acid-loving plant like raspberry canes since it might take a couple of months for the bokashi to break down. Last year I had a couple of raspberry plants bear fruit all summer and it was wonderful because I normally baulk at the high prices you pay for fresh berries at the market.

The wetpots system is working – I can count about 30 little pea shoots popping up through the soil, including in the corner where it looked a little drier as it was further away from the ceramic pot. I hope the peas grow happily despite the windy weather we’ve been having lately.

Working on C25K

I completed week 2 of C25K, and additionally I have still been jogging to work and back which is 2.5 km each way. Some days when the weather is bad I just walk or catch the tram, but the majority of days I have been out jogging. In the C25K I have been doing intervals so I have been walking and running, whereas when I jog to work I try to keep up a slow jog for the entire 2.5km. Other than a few stiff muscles I feel great!

Reducing my body weight by 3kg

To be honest with my increased fitness body weight probably isn’t the best way to measure my body fat, but I don’t need to be too scientific. I am making progress with this goal finally after what felt like a slow start. I have been focusing on eating less calories than I expend, and I am using www.nutridiary.com to tell me how much difference in calories I should have each day in order to meet my goal. This is what it looks like so far:

calorie difference in the last couple of weeks

steady weight loss in the last couple of weeks

I haven’t been feeling hungry on the number of calories I eat because I eat so much of my calories from a large volume of nutrition rich, healthy greens, fruits and grains and almost no cooked or trans fat (although my overall fat consumption is about 12% of my daily calories – but it is healthy non-cholesterol producing raw plant-based fats). In fact, some days I have been feeling overfull with the amount of food I have been eating. With the addition of maca into my daily diet I have been consuming as much as 28.7mg of iron in a day (My RDI is 18mg per day) and as much as 63 grams of protein in a day (My RDI is 43 grams in a day) despite eating a 100% vegan diet. The difference between this and my ‘normal’ diet is only that I am watching my consumption of extra sweet and dried fruits such as dates and dried figs, as when I am not recording my calories I tend to overeat on these.

Looking after my endocrine system

Anxiety

This is where I have still been placing the majority of my attention as it is such a complicated system. Saturday I experienced a day of severe anxiety and even though I have been working on reducing my anxiety overall, I do occasionally have these meltdown days where I feel highly stressed and worried about everything. I do believe my adrenals took a beating over the weekend, because I was very anxious over a 24 hour period, even through the night I was sweating and having nightmares and it took much of Sunday to recover.

Yesterday afternoon I suddenly felt really exhausted corresponding with premenstrual hormone changes and so I think my adrenals are a little overworked. It hasn’t been helping that I have been feeling a progressing desire to change my career to something where I focus more on educating and helping people in a field that I care about. Currently I am a Java software engineer which is a more task-based detail-oriented career, with minimal people contact but frequent high stress emergency incidents.

One thing I observed was that a certain sequence of events took place before I had my very bad day on Saturday. On Friday I was feeling increasingly tense at work and as a result I called my husband on the way home from work and started complaining about my day. When I got home the conversation escalated as I shared all of my frustrations about work which transpired into a negative spiral about life the universe and everything. I went to bed feeling tense and woke up at 3am with extreme anxiety which got worse and worse as the day continued.

I wondered to myself, could it be that if I had not complained the night before, I would not have set myself up for anxiety the next day? The level of anxiety I experienced would have certainly affected my hormones and left me feeling so exhausted. When I think back to other times when I have experienced high levels of emotional stress, those times have usually been preceded by a large complaining session which starts off OK, but as it continues the listener gets annoyed and my observation of the change in response from the listener often triggers an anxiety attack.

The solution?

I have been thinking for a little while about starting the Complaint-Free World challenge, which challenges you to 21 days of consecutive days where not a single complaint has been uttered. The idea of the challenge is to first observe our behaviours, then to recognise them and then finally to change them. By changing what we say we will slowly affect how we think.

In order to keep yourself honest doing the Complaint-Free challenge, you wear a purple wrist band and each time you complain you move the bracelet from one wrist to the other. If you complain you start again at Day 1, no matter which day you are up to. If you can keep the bracelet on the same wrist for 21 days consecutively then you have achieved the challenge and can then take off the band! It typically takes people about 8 months to complete the challenge and so I had been unsure as to whether I could take on such a large challenge at this time, but I am thinking it would make a big difference if I could become complaint free.

I have ordered the bracelets and book from http://www.acomplaintfreeworld.org and for now I have started with a ‘make poverty history’ wristband I picked up from Oxfam. I hope it works well

Popularity: 4% [?]