Exhaustion

I'm doing pretty fantastic keeping up with my new year's goals, but my 'new lifestyle' is keeping me busy and too tired to blog in the evenings so far. I am hoping that I will get used to the schedule change soon so that I can avoid falling asleep at 9-10PM every night!

I had the most productive week I've had in a long time on the PhD front. I finished drafts of 2 different manuscripts. One is in the early stages (so, still some work to do), but the other is basically ready to submit for publication this week, and I can't wait until that is done because it's been sitting on my desk unfinished for far too long. I also got some good news about some analysis I have been trying to do in the lab that just wasn't working. Turns out that one of our reagents had gone bad/gotten contaminated, and that was screwing everything up. I can't get back the two weeks I spent trying to figure that mess out, but at least I know what the problem is now.

I am just shy of 2 weeks with no/minimal processed foods right now. To be honest, I haven't found it too difficult to avoid most processed food so far, but I have spent A LOT of time prepping food, and I've been too scared to try eating out as of yet. I am trying to keep my diet varied by trying new recipes, which has been fun and tasty. In the last couple of weeks, I've made a pasta dish with sardines (for Omega-3s), broccoli salad with dried cherries and walnuts, Tom Yum soup, and a lentil/walnut spread with watercress salad on rye crisps.

I bought a brand new swanky yoga mat last weekend, but I had to take this week off of yoga because I pulled something in my right hip (the good one!) doing yoga P90X yoga on Saturday or at my Sunday morning class, not really sure which one. I really love yoga, but I am not sold on P90X at all, especially the yoga. I find that the P90X guy (Tony??) tries to make yoga into a workout and doesn't give accurate instructions about how to do some of the poses. He makes it seem like it's okay to do more advanced versions of poses, even when you are clearly not doing them correctly because you are not at that point in your practice. And it kind of annoys the crap out of me!

I started swimming last week to see if it would be realistic for me to train for an Olympic distance triathlon this year. In lieu of endurance running, I thought it might be fun to take up a new sport (swimming) while doing shorter distances of two sports I already like (biking and running). But, I have to be able to swim for 40 minutes before I can even think about starting a training schedule. The swimming is going surprisingly well, but it has necessitated changing my sleep schedule a bit. The pool is only open early mornings and at lunch, and it's much easier for me to do the morning session. So I have to be in the pool at 7AM, which means I have to wake up at 6AM. Since I was already getting up at 6:30AM, I decided to just start waking up at 6AM every day. Hence my exhaustion in the evenings. It's only a half hour, but it really makes a difference to me. The change in schedule wrecked me so badly this week that I basically went to sleep Friday evening and didn't really wake up until this morning! (Although I think that I was probably fighting off a bug too, because my head was pretty congested.)

I try not to fixate on weight, but I was happy to find that I have already lost the 1.5 lbs that I gained over Xmas and New Years. It's definitely nice to see my efforts at living a healthy lifestyle pay off in some tangible way.

I feel like 2012 is off to a great start, and I'm excited to keep up the good work!