Listening to my Body

One of the things I struggle with is the idea of listening to my body. When it comes to diet you are supposed to simply eat when you are hungry, and stop when you’re not. When it comes to exercise, you are supposed to modify most workouts based on how you feel that day. Unfortunately I am a sciency type who really likes to have a plan and stick to it, so I can better measure my responses to diet and training. I find it quite motivating to see just how many calories I have burned in each exercise session and to measure just how balanced my diet is. So I find it very difficult to go off plan and just take another day of rest (unless I am truly ill), or to just eat whatever I feel like whenever I feel hungry. Being a Celiac has only made this worse, as I have to plan where I’m going to get gluten free food whenever I leave the house for more than a couple of hours.

I was still feeling quite tired and a bit sore yesterday, so I cut my back on my normal resistance workout. I still did a ten minute warm up but I only did one set of every exercise instead of two, and spent a good 20 minutes stretching to cool down. I was absolutely exhausted afterwards, and spent the rest of the day in a bit of a fog and feeling a bit down. Now maybe I’m fighting off my husband’s cold, but it’s also possible that I have been overtraining and need a bit of a break. Most serious training plans follow a ‘3 hard weeks followed by 1 easy week’ schedule. I had planned to start such a cycle when my training sessions got longer next month, but not yet as most of my workouts are still less than 30 minutes (plus warm up and cool down). I thought I was fit enough to handle short workouts 5 days a week, but maybe not!

The Score:

Calories:	Protein:	Carbs:	Fat:	Alcohol:	Fibre:
1910.65	118.12g	227.19g	60.44g	0	31.84g
	25%	47%	28%
Calories burned through exercise:		315

What I ate:

Time	Item	Amount
07:45	Vitamins - Centrum Advance A to Zinc, 400iu of Vitamin E, 1000iu Vitamin D3 and 500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 each
	Cold water	200mL
	Whole Scrambled egg with 2 egg whites	3 eggs
	Mesa Sunrise cereal	60g
	Alpro Soy milk	120mL
	Sainsbury's pure squeezed orange juice	100mL
08:45	Black tea	500mL
10:00	Workout - resistance training
	Tri-Berry Nuun electrolyte tablet in water	750mL
11:00	Total Greek yoghurt	125g
	Sainsbury's frozen mixed blueberries and strawberries	100g
	Sponser vanilla Recovery Shake	20g
	mixed with skim milk	150mL
14:15	King Prawn stir fry in Oyster sauce	307g
	Merchant Gourmet Red and White Quinoa	100g
14:45	Green Tea	250mL
17:45	Brazil nuts	6g
	Cashews	17g
	Blush pear	113g
19:45	Chicken fajita (mix of chicken and peppers without the tortilla)	210g
	Old El Paso Refried beans	100g
	Homemade guacamole	110g
20:15	Cook Lemon and lime pavlova	85g
22:00	Ellactiva Chocolate Calcium Chew	1 chew
	500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 pill

Plus 500 to 1500mL of cold water sipped from a water bottle throughout the day.