I feel it in my fingers
I feel it in my toes
...
And so the feeling grows
It's written on the wind
It's everywhere I go, oh yes, it is

-Troggs / Wet Wet Wet

I sat up and wondered what was better for me: sleep or movement. Mesmerized by the silence, my automatic snooze alarm at 2:40 nudged me. I sat longer, contemplating the meaning of it all, when I found my watch had ANOTHER 10-minute alarm. "Fine, fine. I'll go."

I pulled on a pair of spats then grabbed my combat shorts—Heads Will Roll, right?

I wish I could regale in a tale of how I shoved iron to-and-fro like some crazed 105-lb Crossfitter. One thing I can say: I slowly and steadily pushed the weights forward like a Man on a Mission.

I cut out the Arnold press—can you blame me? I had a session of popcorn scraping yesterday with another scheduled soon. More importantly, I just feasted on a 4.4 oz filet of salmon, a first for me to eat between benchpress sets! Who wants to dig deep with a belly full of fish?

I pulled over the ol' green LED headlamp. How that thing has carved out my daily footsteps! Then I slapped on the new sandals—gotta break 'em in.

The walk wasn't much. All totaled, it was a mere 2 ¾ miles, rather paltry compared to the last walk on February 25, 8.3 miles, another day when I outlasted my tech.

It was slow, purposely so. While I'm not 100% back, my thinking was more just to enjoy being alive. Enjoy music. Do some smiling.

I kept peeking at my Garmin's pace and regretting I had. Sustaining a practice of moving is a couple of orders of magnitude more important than what pace.

(Who cares about pace? I'm wearing sandals!)

I would spy puddles from last night's rainfall. When I wore shoes in the past, they were my bane. One step and you've got a waterlogged souvenir for the morning and likely a funky foot!

But today?

I actively sought them. Life is just different with sandals. No, I suppose splashing in puddles is not the proper, 45-going-on-46 way. Gotta invest that tuppence in Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.

No, I suppose I'm more Into the Wild than The Wolf of Wall Street.

(And I died in my Alaska as well.)

This body isn't back, yet. But, Garmin tells me my daily stress average this past week is dropping: 89, 80, 74, 67, 57, 50. And that new crazy itch on my quad from that old poison ivy tells me I'm doing fine, that "Hey, I, oh, I'm still alive."

As for me, I feel the earth in my toes.

Today is the start of a new kind of week, a shift away from the known into the foreign forests of the unknown. I again take up the struggle in absorbing a mindset of looking back over the panoply of my life and gladly embracing and encouraging change and growth.

A passive life is no life to live. Sometimes we hide away on a beach with a trembling pitcher of mojito, don't we? Sometimes we endure to just check the day off the Franklin Planner—just survive the day as the wave swells from a furious tempest on the horizon. That's not the way I want to live my life. What am I waiting for? That beach now becomes my beachhead.

We have to keep moving.

I pour over my mindmap for the year. I feel good about hitting NYR24's marks—well, moonshots aside! I don't even know if it's physically reasonable to pick up the 31" jeans!

I'm curious as to where this 200+/75/~0 HFC and two-day/week Fat Focus approach will take me; where will it just stop? This train is so consistent at weightloss—the idea of a plateau is laughable! Since 2018, I've hacked my body to crack the code on weightloss.

It is so easy: of the 3 macros, DON'T EAT SUGAR! Eat enough protein, but once attuned, pay attention to comfortable satiety. In the beginning, be like a new vampire in Twilight: go after all the meats voraciously; your body needs the nutrition!

The critical mental shift: fat is fuel.

Plants just don't have bioavailable nutrition like meat and they are all jam-packed with sugar:

Sure, I'll have a serving of green beans—the half tablespoon of sugar, please. Oh, what the H E double hockey sticks: throw in a serving of broccoli and make it a WHOLE tablespoon of sugar. Ooh, what do I see, that double tablespooner over there looking at me—how 'bout them apples?!

Something I just kicked off again the past couple of days is intermittent fasting eating. (I hate that name. While it provides a context, it irritates my past fasting sensibilities.) I try to cap my iced butter coffee at noon to give my body to detoxify it (lately, I trip over at achieving this), but I've been hitting my food consumption in a 4-hour window.

For example, yesterday: I ate bacon (2.4 oz), ground beef (3.2 oz), and my weekly beef liver (3.3 oz) in the same breakfast hour. That gives my body plenty of time to digest things and hopefully free up some energy for extra repairs at night.

In doing this, yesterday, I had no energy dropoff and performed vigorous yard work in the afternoon. In My Carb Life past, I'd have to follow up that yardwork with some sugar reload—use the work as an excuse to stuff myself with tacos, drink a 2L of Coke, and a hoard of ice cream.

I will be lifting this week on a MWF schedule of a 5-set regimen I had planned to implement, but got sick before I could:

• Incline Rows: 15×
• DB Bench Press: 15×
• Arnold Press: 15×
• Corkscrews: 10↔
• Upper Circle Crunches: 10↔

(Some sort of walking/running build-up afterward?)

What I don't know is how I want to shape Tuesdays and Thursdays.