As mentioned in my bad habits vlog, I am horribly unhealthy. I’ve stopped regularly working out at the end of 2009 and have not gotten back on the horse. I rarely eat vegetables, hardly touch fruits, and don’t sleep enough ever. So when I was lucky to secure one of fifty spots in the Habit Course Beta Version, I just knew I wanted the habit to be health related.
The goal of the Habit Course is to develop one good habit by doing it for 30 days straight. I decided that my habit should be eating vegetables with the daily trigger being lunch time. I chose lunch time because on weekdays, it’s just a matter of packing my lunch with vegetables. I pack my lunch anyway. This takes out the hemming and hawing of deciding what vegetables to eat. An additional benefit is if I somehow miss eating vegetables at lunch, I have one more meal time to achieve the daily goal.
So I’m keeping a diary of my experience anyway, why not publish it on my blog?
photo credit
Day 0:
Bought a bag of spinach and 5 Roma tomatoes to pack as side salads for lunches at work.
Day 1:
Goal completed. French dressing is good. Inadvertently overdressed my salad.
Day 2:
Goal completed. Feeling motivated.
Day 3:
Went home from work early because sick. Stuck spinach and tomatoes in my Korean ramen. Went to the grocery store to buy some oranges, bananas, and OJ to help battle my cold. Had a banana snack and drank some OJ.
Day 4:
Breakfasted on a banana. Back at work. Ate salad dutifully. Snacked on half an orange.
Day 5:
Feeling empowered. Cannot remember if ever I had 5 days straight of vegetables as an adult.
Day 6:
First weekend. Uh oh. Weekends are going to be hard. Today, I had Madam Mams with friends from Houston. My favorite entree at Madam Mams is the Pad Kee Mao which has some basil leaves and that’s the extent of the vegetables. Decided that these sparse basil leaves cannot count as a serving. Vince didn’t eat the stems to his Chinese Broccoli in his stir-fry so I nibbled on those. Decided that the broccoli stems count as a half serving.
Still had dinner to get the second half of the portion to vegetables and I was babysitting. Babysat at a carnival where they only had candy, burgers, and fries available for consumption. Loaded up on some lettuce and tomatoes on the burger. Reluctantly decided goal has been accomplished.
Day 7:
Stayed over at Alan’s last night and stayed up til 4 am. Had a 1:20 pm matinee today with some girlfriends. Set alarm for 11:00 to give me time to go home and make a salad with lunch before going to movies. After assembling the salad, realized left dressing at work. Contemplated scrapping the salad all together but grudgingly made a trip to the store to grab dressing. Whew. Still in it!
7:00 pm Worked out for the first time in a long long time. Stayed at the gym for over an hour.
Day 8:
Last of spinach in the bag. BFF suggested I experiment with other veggies. Snacked on an orange. My arms, shoulders, back, abs, and legs are sore from yesterday’s work out.
8 pm Tried out the Jillian Michaels DVD with Naz. Noticing a ripple effect. Eating veggies has caused a small ripple in eating fruits and working out.
Day 9:
Finished my bag of spinach so experimenting with new bagged greens, mixed lettuce. Romaine, Butter-head, and Sweet Leaf. Was under the impression that lettuce carried no nutritional value, but I was wrong.
Did another session of Jillian Michaels. Ow. When was the last time I worked out three days in a row?
Day 10:
Ate my salad of mixed lettuce and cucumber. Came to the conclusion that I do not like cucumber unless in a sandwich or pickled. Or infused into water.
Notes
So that concludes the first 10 days. I’ll give you another peek at the vegetable diary in ten days. I noticed something neat in all my thirty day endeavors (VEDA, NaBloPoMo, etc); striving towards doing something every day is a lot easier than doing it just a few times a week. My success rate in completing every day tasks is a lot higher than striving to do something 1-3 times a week.