Life // Improvement

The 7th of July 2024

It's another nice and sunny day today. Unfortunately we haven't been having consistently nice weather the past week, it's sunny one day and terribly wet the next so I don't think we've really captured the real summer spirit yet. However it's nothing to complain about because at least the occasional rain storm will cause a good nights sleep, the temperature will drop to a very comfortable level.

The good weather does make me want to change my diet for the better though. As a child I used to associate summer with curly fries and strawberry swirl candies, because that is what you would eat when you went to the outdoor pool! It's this very nostalgic connection. But back in those days for every summer holiday we'd visit Greece and overall the food we had there was quite healthy compared to our pool cuisine. We'd spend a lot of time moving as well, we were not really the type to stay on the beach all day. We had to go out and explore cities, towns, squares, strange valleys and archeological sites!

Now I am still quite active, on my free days I can easily hit 18k steps or above. But I think just like many people my diet has changed a lot. For sure my own diet contains too much salt and too much sugar, which is something I would really like to fix.

I'm not particularly interested in losing weight, not as much as I was when I was a teenager. I'm mostly interested in being healthy and actually feeling healthy. There are quite a lot of overly processed meals that I do enjoy a lot but I don't enjoy the feeling that I have afterwards. There is this feeling of overwhelming greasiness and heaviness in your stomach. Which is especially unpleasant in summer! I feel like a more hearty meal feels like winter.

In any case, I am not attempting to become a fitness guru or a diet influencer. I'm mostly just interested in improving my own health. That definitely includes trying to drink more water and applying some light improvements to my sleeping quality.

I did improve my water intake by buying a water bottle from a local convenience store. It's a simple little pink see through bottle, nothing fancy but it certainly works! I have it next to me during work and I appear to drink at least one bottle a day next to my usual tea intake so that's quite good. I'd like to up it to two bottles this year, small steps are good to arrange things into your daily routine.

My sleeping schedule used to be rather shit to say the least. In the past I worked late shifts at the office and wasn't off until eleven at night. I couldn't go to sleep straight away so I'd just stay up until four in the morning, woke up around eleven and repeated the whole thing by going to work at two thirty! But these days I work a more gentle schedule. Although I do work ten hours a day for four days the majority of the time I start between eight and nine thirty in the morning so I do go to bed around midnight.

But I do feel like improvements can be made to the hours I sleep. According to my fitbit I manage to sleep between six and seven hours which isn't bad but I'd like to extend it a little. The quality also isn't always great so I think I'll have to try and cutdown on screen time before sleep to improve the actual sleep I am getting.

Overall I am just interested in being a little more careful about how I treat my body because I've only got this one available. So for lunch I am interested in having a little bowl of rice with some steamed vegetables and any other lovely things I can find in my fridge.

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- I'm not sure how it related to this post, but doesn't this kitchen from Howls Moving Castle inspire healthy food? -