Ælfric’s Diary

09/08/2020

Weight: 87.5 kg (+0.6 kg)
Bodyfat 26.5% (-0.2%).

I feel, physically, better, even if the numbers don't reflect this.

Food

Meal One: Peaches.

Meal Two: Chicken and vegetable pie..

Meal Three: Check, mushroom and vegetable stir fry, flavoured with ginger, tamari, and lime juice (one of my neighbour's neighbours has a huge lime tree, and there are plenty of windfalls at the moment).

Snack: Dried figs.

Meal Four: Banana and berry smoothie.

Exercise

Cycling

Headed north to Brighton, and over the bridge to Clontarf, and back to Moora Park at Shorncliffe for breakfast (tinned peaches as they're easy to carry on the bike). Normally from there I would come home via Nudgee and Virginia, but my legs were a bit leaden from the weights yesterday, and I was slogging into the wind since the turnaround, so I cut back down the main road through Boondall to Virginia. Even if it was cold and windy, the sun was shining, so it wasn't unpleasant. 42¼ km in 2:18.

Kettlebells
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 30 alternating swings; 12 kg × 30 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 20 alternating swings; 12 kg × 20 two handed swings
Merged the last set into the second set.

I spent a couple of hours in the afternoon potting plants in the garden, hauling bags of potting mix and pots full of mix and plants around the garden. There's a few pots I still need to get plants for, but I'm happy with what I got done today.
 
I feel, physically, better, even if the numbers don't reflect this.
& that's half the battle. If I feel better then I do better.
That sounds like a very productive day :)
 
I will have a rare disagreement with Cate on this one, I think feeling better is way more than half the battle! And you are feeling better because you are doing well, keep it up. The weight will come down in its own time, you are doing great!
 
10/08/2020

A thoroughly unproductive day, mainly because I locked myself out when I went to do the kettlebells in the morning. I don’t know if I mistakenly pulled the door shut behind me, or if I didn’t chock it open properly and the wind closed it. The person with whom I have a cached key wasn’t answering their phone, so I ended up being way out of pocket on a locksmith and hours late for work. 15 years ago, I’d have clambered onto the awning roof and pulled the back window open, but I’m not that agile any more. Got a little gardening done while waiting for the locksmith to show up

Food

Meal One: Fried (can you really call it fried when it’s a light spray of oil) eggs.

Meal Two: Mushroom soup, made by adding a mushroom to the vegetable stock.

Meal Three: Chicken and vegetable pie with capers.

Snack: Kippers.

Meal Four: Banana and berry smoothie.

Exercise

Kettlebells
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
Merged the last two sets, so now I’m down to just three sets. Much more efficient use of time.
 
a few years ago i was getting something out of my car's trunk and realized too late that the keys were on the floor of the trunk when i shut it. after that 3-day saga, i've adopted a system when i shut a door. even if i'm 110% sure they are in my pocket, i have to be looking at the keys in my hand before the door closes.
 
i've adopted a system when i shut a door. even if i'm 110% sure they are in my pocket, i have to be looking at the keys in my hand before the door closes.
If I'm going out, I do the same, but in this case I was just ducking down to the back yard for a few minutes, and it wasn't my intention to shut the door.
 
11/08/2020

Food

Meal One: Chicken breast and eggs.

Meal Two: Vegetable broth, into which I'd swirled an egg so there was strands of egg in the soup. Nice result, but it took too long for when you only have a half hour to prep and eat.

Meal Three: Turkey and vegetable pie with jalepenos.

Snack: [too many] cashews and almonds.

Meal Four: Banana and berry smoothie.

I need to eat more fish, and not snacks of kippers.

Exercise

Kettlebells
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
 
12/08/2020

Food

Meal One: Poached eggs.

Meal Two: Chicken, cashew nut, water chestnut, and bamboo shoot stir fry (soy sauce, lime juice, five spice, and Sichuan pepper sauce).

Meal Three: Chicken and vegetable curry.

Snack: Cashews and almonds. Far too many of these

Meal Four: Banana and berry smoothie.

Exercise

Kettlebells
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
 
13/08/2020

Food

Meal One: Water chestnut, bamboo shoot and corn soup.

Meal Two: Chicken and vegetable pie.

Meal Three: Salmon and coconut soup. One of those wonderfully simple meals that taste far better than the effort involved deserves: a 200 gram tin of salmon; about ⅔ of a 400 ml tin of coconut milk; a pinch of five spice powder; microwave for about 2 minutes, and eat.

Snack: Almonds. Again, too many of these. This is becoming an issue.

Meal Four: Banana and berry smoothie.

Exercise

Kettlebells
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
Yoga

40 minutes. A number of little crackles and pings from the mid-thoracic to the bottom of the lumbar spine during the twists. I hadn't realised my back was ever so slightly out of alignment. It wasn't "I'm in pain" misaligned, but it feels better than it did before the Yoga.
 
14/08/2020

Today, for the most part, was a cave day, as in the depression was bad and all I wanted to do was crawl into the cave and ignore the world in the hope it would go away.

Food

Meal One: Banana, almond, and cocoa egg smoothie made with almond milk. At about 11 a.m. when I finally managed to drag myself out of bed.

Snack: Some almonds.

Meal Two: Chicken and vegetable pie. At about 6 p.m.

Meal Three: A tin of salmon and a banana berry smoothie.

Exercise

Just before 5 p.m. I managed to convince myself to go outside and do some exercise. The 'bells were interspersed with some weight training.

Kettlebells & Weights
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • Zercher Squats. I've done these in the past as they're more friendly to my back issues than normal squats, but only yesterday remembered that they were specifically designed to be safe to do without a power rack. Getting the bar from the ground into position is interesting (read awkward), but is doable (deadlift the bar with an underhand grip, squat and rest the bar on your thighs while you scoot your arms under the bar and stand up so with the bar cradled at the elbows, something like this demo on YouTube):
    • warm ups: 30 kg × 5; 40 kg × 5
    • work set: 45 kg × 20
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • Parallel Grip Deadlifts:
    • warm ups: 42½ kg × 5; 52½ kg × 5; 62½ kg × 5
    • work sets: 5 × 72½ kg × 5.
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
At this point the sun was about to set, so I stopped the workout.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day and I'll get the upper body exercises done.
 
I hope tomorrow is a better day for you. Depression sucks. Good for you pushing through it yesterday & getting out of your cave. Walking really helps me.
 
15/08/2020

A better day.

Food

Meal One: Poached eggs and salad.

Meal Two: Chicken and vegetable pie.

Meal Three: Chicken, water chestnut and bamboo shoot stir fry.

Meal Four: Banana and strawberry smoothie.

Exercise

Kettlebells & Weights
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • Overhead press
    • warm ups: 15 kg × 5; 17½ kg × 5; 20 kg × 5
    • work sets: 5 × 22½ kg × 5
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • Barbell Rows:
    • warm ups: 20 kg × 5; 25 kg × 5; 30 kg × 5
    • work sets: 5 × 32½ kg × 5.
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 12 kg × 50 two handed swings
Took about two hours elapsed time to get this done as I'd get a set or three done every time there was a break in the rain.

Yoga

40 minutes.


Got to the nursery and found a kaffir lime tree, a mulberry tree, a white lavender (a French lavender with white flowers), some seeds for golden nugget pumpkin (a small fruiting pumpkin), and a few other plants. I need one more herb to finish the herb garden (assuming I can convince the possums that the parsley is off limits), I need to plant a piece of ginger, and something for the "problem pot". There's a pot sitting on a tree stump in the middle of the back yard, which has something very dead not growing in it. I'm thinking of a hibiscus: H. heterophyllus (a.k.a. Native Rosella) is native to the east coast, grows fast, has lots of flowers, and is a magnet for native birds and insects.
 
Food sounds very nice today! The gardening plans sound good, too. We used to have a mulberry tree: messy but tasty.
 
15/08/2020

After entering my diary last night my body started screaming for protein, so I snacked on a tin of salmon.

16/08/2020

Results after two weeks: my weight hasn't really changed this week (OK, I lost 200g of what I gained last week), but my waist has done an amazing disappearing trick, about 2 cm has vanished in 7 days. That's measured at the navel, at the natural waist, and at the iliac crest. I seem to have replaced about half a kilo of body fat with the same weight of muscle—roughly a 1% change in body fat since I started, mos tof it this week.

I'll take that.

Food

Meal One: Pineapple. Easy to carry on the bike.

Meal Two: Egg and peanut butter smoothie. I thought I had almond meal in the house, but apparently not. There was a couple of teaspoons of peanut butter in left in the jar, so I used that.

Meal Three: The last of the pie.

Snack: A tin of kippers.

Meal Four: Berry smoothie.

Exercise

Cycling

56¼ km in just under 3 hours of cycling. Still slow. Part of that was the wind (I learnt my lesson from last week, and headed south west into the wind on the outbound leg). Part was that breakfast wasn't until nearly two hours into the ride, so by then I'd long since depleted my glycogen stores and so was limited by how (in-)efficiently I can metabolize stored fat as the primary fuel source.

Three hours out in the sunshine was good.

Kettlebells & Weights
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
Bumped the weight on the two handed swings as they were getting to be too easy.
 
17/08/2020

Food

Meal One: Poached eggs and salad.

Meal Two: Salmon and coconut soup.

Meal Three: Roasted pumpkin soup. The plan was to have the last of the vegetable stock as soup, but when I was out shopping the fruit shop had butternut squash at a good price, so I got some, then I found Kent pumpkin at the supermarket for $1 a kilo, so I got some of that too. The stock went into this. The "cream" for the soup was coconut cream. Flavoured with ginger and nutmeg.

Meal Four: Banana and mango smoothie.

Snack: I'd made some chicken stock in the slow cooker, and picked over the bones for the bits of cooked meat attached to the carcasses.

Exercise

Kettlebells
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
 
18/08/2020

Food

Meal One: Eggs over hard.

Meal Two: Chicken broth.

Meal Three: Chicken curry with mushroom, aubergine, spinach and tomato gravy.

Meal Four: Banana and mango smoothie.

Exercise

Kettlebells
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
 
19/08/2020

Food

Meal One: Pumpkin soup with grilled chicken tenderloins.

Meal Two: Chicken curry.

Meal Three: Chicken and vegetables in black bean sauce. Not quite to plan as the sauce has some sugar in it, but I really, really wanted something salty to eat.

Meal Four: Banana and berry smoothie.

Exercise

Kettlebells
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
  • 8 kg × 50 alternating swings; 16 kg × 50 two handed swings
 
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