one month to go

I've been doing stairs, jogging, lifting weights, doing core work, and walking. I've also been doing 72-hour fasts every Monday through Wednesday, and all of this work definitely seems to be affecting my resting heart rate, which is down, once again, to the high 60s. I wasn't given a new record book at my last hospital visit, so I haven't bothered keeping records up to now, but I have enough room in my old record book to record numbers for a single month, so I'm starting that again today, and I'll probably start reporting numbers on the blog starting sometime next week. As always, it's frustrating when some health markers seem to show improvement while others, like weight, don't seem to be moving anywhere. 

I'm beginning to think the problem is the cheat days. I try to restrict myself to two a month, and I usually go nuts on such days, but it occurs to me that a 3000-plus-calorie binge is probably undoing weeks' worth of work. I saw one piece of advice, months ago: don't do cheat days, but instead do cheat meals. I normally cheat the entire day, filling my gullet with junk food. I think of this as a way to keep sane, but some of the YouTube experts I watch note that the problem with cheat days is that they keep you from learning the true discipline you need to improve all your numbers. It's psychological as well as physiological. And the fact is that I'm probably keeping myself from becoming fat adapted by cheating every two weeks.

So something has to change. I'm probably going to have to switch the cheat-day paradigm from "twice a month" to "once every two months" or something. Or maybe I will try the cheat-meal thing, although if I do, it'll be tempting to do cheat meals fairly frequently (say, three times a month) since they won't be cheat days. With a month to go before my next doctor's appointment, I need to make some important decisions.