Month: December 2020

Weight

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A week or so ago I had trouble sleeping one night. After going to bed about 10PM, I was still awake at about midnight feeling REALLY uncomfortably hungry. Like, extremely. I’ve felt like this before when I was anaemic. I don’t think I’m anaemic again. I shouldn’t be. Anyway, it turns out I’ve lost a couple of kilograms over the past few months, so I’m probably just not eating enough.

I started tracking my weight closely in June 2019 when I got my Garmin watch. I was very underweight back then and even got referred to a nutritionist who advised me to eat more (lol). It stayed pretty much flat from June until October when suddenly it started going up, probably because that’s when I left my previous job.

So a little while ago I noticed it was still creeping up and I thought to myself that maybe I don’t really need to eat chocolate buttons every day.

Over the Christmas break I am doing better at not being hungry. I get up, eat a small amount of breakfast, then I go for a run and when I get back I have a bowl of microwaved porridge and a banana. Second breakfast.

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I have now finished work for Christmas, which is nice. This year, because of the timings, the company has decided to just close entirely for two full weeks. This company always closes between Christmas and new year. Obviously that comes out of my holiday allowance, but my holiday allowance is higher than it was at my previous company, so it feels like a pretty good deal to me.

I finished the first release of my exciting new wellbeing app. Unfortunately I hadn’t realised that Google’s app review process has slowed down and so far it’s sitting in a review state, so I can’t actually launch it properly yet. I pushed back some ideas for version 2 just to get it out there, but it looks like I might have v2 ready before v1 goes live. We’ll see. I had an idea that it’d be interesting to add custom metrics to mood logging. So instead of just saying “I feel happy/sad/somewhere in between”, you would say “I’m interested in emotions X, Y and Z (e.g. anxiety, frustration, depression, excitement, happiness, optimism, etc) and when logging how you feel you’d rate those emotions. Then you can see how those particular emotions trend over time.

In other news my hip seems to have improved a lot just recently. I’ve found squats really help it. When it starts to feel tight, a deep squat loosens it up, and now I’m running longer distances again without it really bothering me. Today I ran 16km (10 miles) for the first time in months and only needed a 30 second squat break somewhere around 12km. I’m pleased about that. I’m currently on about 2440km for the year. Last year my total was 2492! Can I break 2500 this year? I think so…

Wellbeing

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After I had that interview a few weeks ago for a company that develop healthcare apps, I got a little idea in my head that I could make a wellbeing app. It solves a few of my problems, i.e. firstly that I should be paying more attention to my wellbeing, secondly that it gives me something non-trivial to do with a modern JavaScript framework, which will help my medium term career, and thirdly it might even make me some money in the future. So I have been working on this for the past few weeks and it’s getting close to a first release. Another week or so, I think. Maybe a bit more.

I think the biggest success I’ve had with this is understanding myself well enough to plan things in such a way that I’ll actually finish it. I wanted to get the data being backed up to Google Drive, so it made sense to start with that since it was kind of the deepest thing and then work outwards. But that sort of thing is incredibly tedious. You need to spend time reading other people’s documentation and understanding how other people’s systems work. That’s dull. I knew if I started with this I’d risk getting bored before I really had anything. So I actually put that off til the end instead and started on things that gave me something I could see. Now the boring bits are still boring, but they’re easier to motivate myself to do, because I’ve already got most of it together and this is just the last little bit to tie it all together.