V Day

Nope, not Victory or Valentine's, but Vegetarian. For the next month I'll not be eating meat or fish, see how it goes. I don't think I'll give up meat and fish after this, but I just thought it would be good to do this from time to time (for three months over the course of 101/1001). Kind of a detox, kind of encourages me to do something different.

I'm also hoping to eat my "five-a-day" every day for a month. I struggle with this quite a lot most of the time, not because I don't like fruit and veg (although I'm not that keen on most fruits if I'm honest), but because it just feels like there is only so much you can eat sometimes!

I'll be keeping a record of what I eat and the impact that this has on my health/weight as well. Another resolution for this month is to do at least a kilometre every day on my cross trainer (I should be able to do much more than that, but at the very least if I do that I will feel like I've done something). Am hoping that a combination of eating healthier and definitely doing more exercise will result in the start of weight loss and trimming down.

AND if all that wasn't enough, I'm going to start keeping a written diary as well (Thing 2). I used to keep a journal some years ago, and eventually fell out of the habit; I would write every morning and evening as I got the train over to uni. I now fill that time reading, and I like reading during that time, so I'm going to have to find time to keep my journal. Edited highlights will appear here over the coming months.

So, many beginnings today... Here's hoping that I see these things through to their conclusions!

February

I have a few plans for February to try and get a few longer term things underway. The first of these is to have February be one of my vegetarian months: I'm hoping that this will also help with my goal of getting my weight down a bit. I'd quite like to get down to fifteen stone by the time I'm 30. I don't know how reasonable that is, but I'm going to go for it. When I set that goal I was actually lighter than I am now; I put a bit of weight on over last summer and in the autumn, and haven't been able to shift it yet, despite stepping up the amount of exercise that I've been taking and trying to reduce my calorie intake.

Hopefully being vegetarian for a month will help with that, step up the amount of fruit and veg that I'm taking in. I'll keep a food diary as I go, and if I can I want to try and make February my month of getting my five-a-day as well. This is all to try and get me in a set of good habits for my life. I will go back to eating meat eventually, I don't have a problem with eating meat or fish (what else are the canine teeth for?) but I don't think there's anything wrong with switching your diet to try and get a health benefit either.

If I can get my weight to sixteen stone by the time I go to America I will be very happy. Ramp up the exercise over the coming months if I can, cut back on meat, increase the amount of veg that I get... See what happens. Maybe try and cut back on the amount of carbohydate that I take in as bread. I love bread of all shapes and slices, but it might be good to see how things are without it.

The other one of my 101 thing that I'm going to start in February is thing number 2: to regularly keep a diary for at least six months. I think that this will take several notebooks. A few years ago when I started keeping a diary - actually, thinking back that would be five and a half years ago now, when I started my Masters - I kept writing regularly for about two years, resulting in about twenty A5 notebooks. It was an important part of my life at the time, and if I am honest I'm not entirely sure why I stopped when I did.

I guess I just felt that I had reached a point where I didn't need the diary to help me figure out what I was doing any more. By the time that I stopped recording things (I would write every morning and evening on the train to university, and also sometimes of an evening I was feeling particularly pensive) I was at a good place in my life, started uni again for my PhD, felt like I had a bit of direction. Maybe back in April last year when I set my goals I knew that in the coming months/years I might have need of this coping strategy again, a need of somewhere that I could create an expression of my self that would be of use for my self-study.

Maybe it was just one more thing to include in a list of 101 things to do before I turned 30, who knows?

Anyway, between now and the start of February I'll read another book or two (more on that in a future post, I have an interesting little thing for my reading that could be quite handy, especially when it comes to reading some classic literature), I'll get another few haiku pulled together from the random words and thoughts that permeate my mind, and I'm trying to get another piece of flash fiction out. I've gone dry on ideas at the moment, but in sorting my laptop out I'm running across old files containing notes on stories and ideas, first paragraphs etc. It may be that some of them have something which will help.

Take it easy people, more to come soon.