Consistency

I will gladly admit that I like change, spontaneity, chaos. I don't like doing the same things everyday or to know what I'm doing on any given day beforehand -- I live day by day, especially since I'm so busy and can't plan past tomorrow anyways. But I've realized that doesn't apply to all facets of my life. I do in fact want stability in certain aspects of my life, like health. I want to be consistently healthy.

But in order for that to happen, I have to eat consistently healthy. I eat very sporadicly. I'm on the two ends of the spectrum; sometimes, I will have a healthy and balanced meal, and other times I will eat instant noodles and chips for dinner. It's kind of a problem. So I'm going to try to fix that. I'm going to try to have three meals a day with lots of snacks. Breakfast is usually lighter for me than lunch and dinner.

This morning I had Nutella on a single piece of multigrain toast. For lunch, I will be having some braised tofu and a tiny bit of chicken with white rice and an Izze -- I made it this morning. I also have a wide range of snacks to get me through the day: fruit-gummy snacks and SunChips. For dinner, I'll probably have some form of soup and leftover tofu and rice. I haven't thought of what type of soup exactly though.

Braised Tofu and Chicken. This was my first time making it. It came out okay.

Sleep is another thing I need to work on. I want a high energy level, like when I was a kid. (When I was a kid I had a bountiful of energy; I was the type of kid who would hike ahead of my parents during a hike but then be too impatient to wait for them to hike up, so I would hike back down to meet them and repeat.) I know, it's ambitious. But why not? My energy is fairly low nowadays; I usually only exert energy when I need to. I'm also pretty lazy. But that's because I sleep an average of 5-6 hours a night. I also don't drink coffee or soda and the teas I drink are mostly decaffeinated. I'm not about to go and get my energy from caffeine though. I like that I don't have to rely on it. So I'm going to turn to the super underrated sleep. I feel, with a consistent number of hours of sleep, I can regain at least some of my childhood energy. And that would be more than I have now. This past weekend I started the process of sleeping well.

That's great and all that I had the ideal 7.5 hours of sleep last night and that I had breakfast and cooked a balanced meal, but really, that all means nothing if I don't eat or sleep well tonight. I need to be consistent. I know I will not get 7.5 hours of sleep every night. But I'm determined to make up the sleep I miss. The target daily amount of sleep is 7.5 hours. I've written a program to keep track of my sleep debt/credit. (It's currently written in MATLAB code, my native language. But I'll translate it to C++ code later for easier execution in the terminal later.) This program will help me keep track of how many hours I need to make up on the weekend. It can also help me not enter the slump of oversleeping -- it's a real thing -- by telling me how many extra hours I've slept. The goal is for the sleep debt/credit to be as close to 0 as possible. As for how to stay consistent with food. I think I can trust myself. Eating consistent for me is just to remember to eat and not be lazy. I generally buy healthy items. The key is to remember.