The past few days I've been feeling a bit more down - maybe less positive is the better term. I targeted several possible factors outside of TTTS*: increased added sugar intake; horrible, awful, terrible sleep at night; and lack of strenuous exercise.
I feel off the wagon, albeit it slowly, in the last week regarding strictly limiting my added sugar intake. It made me very sluggish in the afternoons, tired in the evenings, and probably tired in the mornings. While my fall was no where near my pre-TTTS intake, it was still worse than it has been. Yesterday I was back on my goal of simply allowing myself added sugar in my morning tea and my morning protein shake (7g in that). I don't know if that made a big difference, but I feel much better this morning than I did yesterday morning. It seems the sugar impacts me more the day after consumption than the day of.
Next I targeted my crappy sleep. I'm not sure why, but I'm waking up at least 5-7 times per night. The other night it felt like I never actually went to sleep. I wake up at 11 pm thinking it must be 3 or 4 am. Then I'll wake at 2,3,4,5 etc. It's just awful because I never feel refreshed. Drugs to the rescue. I have severely cut back on the use of sleep aides after the worse of TTTS was through. The last thing I need is a dependency on sleep aides. However, given the consistently shitting nights of sleep and their impact on my mood, I felt justified. Last night I slept so much better. Not perfect, but certainly way better. As noted above, I feel much better.
Living at my mom's takes me away from my beloved and dreaded big hill. I'm a creature of habit, so taking the hill away has stalled my running. I'm still walking Abbie regularly, but in my mind that is no longer enough. The other problem is that I hate running in any sort of heat. I know princess-y. So I'm still working on a solution to this regression.
The good news is that I'm not being overly hard on myself about this. I'm confident that I can get back on my path. Before I was only confident that once the habit was broken, that was it and there was not getting back on the good habits so I might as well let the bad habits flourish. Now I know that it doesn't matter if I'm not going to run up a huge hill. Even if I'm running just for x minutes, it makes a difference. And I don't know what I'm going to feel up to 5 minutes from now, or 10 minutes.
*TTTS = The Thing That Sucks, i.e. the separation.
I the mountain can't come to Mohamed then Mohamed goes to the mountain. Drive to a nearby hill incline along with Abbey (there must be one fairly close by).
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