Not an exciting title. But! Things have been quite exciting for me of late; just take a look at the weekend I have planned:
clean room, Chinese vocab, Chinese homework, Chinese flashcards, 15 essays (grade), make book stacks (recent arrivals for the prospectus!), return library books, gym, microficheing, groceries, ballet, scrub down shower, lesson plans…
It’s a lot. And yet I spent today going to ballet class, napping, and playing video games. I did get the room cleaned, though, and I composed my grocery list. So hopefully tonight I can do 5 essays, write up my flashcards, and that should be enough for the time being. Tomorrow and Sunday are going to be nuts.
This week I have also been eating quite differently, so I do anticipate having enough energy to get through all of this. I have cut down bread, rice and pasta to amounts that I had never before imagined possible (about a cup of cooked rice a day, and no bread or pasta whatsoever), and also limited my meat intake (4 sardines, a little roasted chicken, about 5 slices of bacon this week).
I upped my intake of fruit–grapes, mango, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries–and vegetables–a TON of spinach, onions, garbanzo beans, bok choy, you cai, enoki, tomatoes, mustard greens. Mostly organic stuff. The surprising thing is, I’m eating a lot of food; I mean, I am even eating chocolate and the occasional cup of juice (I don’t drink juice, normally), and I have amazing amounts of energy. Normally, I have to sip at a frappuccino all day to get through my 7AM-7PM on campus Thursdays, but this Thursday I didn’t need it. I even managed to stay awake in Chinese. Shocking! I cut down on rice etc. because I sometimes do this when I start feeling sluggish. I’ve never done it to this degree before, and the results are really amazing. I don’t even want to eat bread or pasta anymore. And I LOVE noodles…this is really saying something. I don’t even crave it. I’m not ravishingly hungry at all.
I just feel light! Nice and light and able to focus. I have been eating about 1900 calories a day, and with this change in diet, I think I’m still landing somewhere in this range. I suppose I may go back to a higher proportion of carbs in my diet, particularly when I start doing ballet more intensively this summer. I’m taking an intermediate-advanced class that meets 4 days a week for 3 hours a day. That’s 12 hours of ballet a week from late June through the end of July! At that point, I may need to up the bread and pasta again. But for the time being, I feel really happy without them. I even think my skin is looking better…
I will say that to keep up the massive veggie intake, I have been going to the grocery store essentially every other day. So that is a bit of a drain on my time. But the results are worth it.
So…I’m feeling happy, if not as productive as I’d like to be. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I’ll be able to better judge where I stand for the last week (and the following finals week) of quarter.
