6:33 PM
My definition of a perfect day has changed and will continue to change. A few months ago, a perfect day probably just meant getting all the work that I needed to get done done, plus going to the gym, plus socializing for a bit, and being overall satisfied with all my decisions made that day. Today, a perfect day means meeting my workout quota, plus getting work done, and checking off all my other dailies. It's sort of the same, but with the addition of the workout quota.
My workout quota right now is 200 push ups, 300 leg raises, 100 squats, 20 pull ups, 20 chin ups, 5 minutes of planking, and 30 minutes of walking, per day. I changed the 30 minutes of walking to 10,000 steps a day today, and I took 12k steps today. I also did all of the other workouts before 12 PM, and then I went out and jogged. Today was extremely satisfactory because of being able to complete the workouts and reach the quota.
Something that surprised me today was that I did 2 minutes of planking unintentionally, because I wasn't looking at my watch and the timer. My dad was getting ready to head out for work, and I was in front of the door around all the shoes. I basically just planked there as he put on his shoes and headed out the door, and without even realizing it, the timer on my watch was at over 2 minutes.
Later in the day, I decided to intentionally attempt planking for 3 minutes. It hurt and it was challenging right from the first second. Somehow I was able to survive and made it to a full three minutes planking. This was all at around 9 AM, so I got my planking quota done very early in the day.
The rest of the workouts felt like they took forever. Doing 300 leg raises is challenging because of the sheer number. Even doing 30 leg raises barely scratches the quota, so it was tough. Still got everything done before 12 PM somehow though. I guess I was rushing to complete everything. Then I jogged outside.
After jogging, I resumed working. I was working throughout the day, but was taking breaks every now and then to do the exercises. I still got a decent amount of work done, an amount I was satisfied with.
I did most of my brain training in the morning, but after work I finished the rest, and then I did some vegan activism postings too.
This morning I didn't weigh 178.5 pounds or even around that as I predicted I would yesterday. I weighed 180.6 pounds or around that this morning. Extremely disappointing. Because of that, I ate under 2000 calories today. I feel pretty amazing, but I feel really tired too.
Along with the 10k steps per day, and all the other workouts, I also added under 2000 calories per day as one of my daily habits to Strides. It's just the best habit app for the Apple Watch that I've used, there is no alternative right now.
Last night after writing my journal entry, I shopped around for alternative habit tracking apps for the Apple Watch. I wanted to see if there were any that were better and were cheaper than Strides. Strides is really expensive at $4.99 per month, or $29.99 per year, or $80 for a lifetime. It basically tracks habits but is more numerically focused than other habit tracking apps.
Habitica, although it's awesome, doesn't do the trick, because if I wanted to track 200 push ups, I would have to press the + button on the habit 200 times. I'm not doing that. It tracks 1 time increments without a way to do multiple at once, that I'm aware of. If it could do that, plus have an awesome Apple Watch app to go with it, I'd use only that, but again, I tested a lot last night and wasn't able to find anything close.
I pretty much just went on a download spree downloading several different habit tracking apps and playing around with them. The closest one was called Habits. Habits is pretty similar, but has more features, and because of that it's also more convoluted, and prone to so many more bugs and issues. I liked Habits, the lifetime premium for Habits only cost $4.99, so it's an amazing deal. It has the same exact features as Strides, you can track the same things, and even has better stats and reports on Habits than Strides.
The problem with Habits was the glitchiness of it. There were so many issues. For one thing, on Strides I've updated my push up counter from 30 a day initially, a week ago, to 200 a day, and it did this with no problem. It even tracked the changes and updated my goal count per day moving forward, while keeping all the past count having completed the old quota.
With Habits, I set the push up quota on October 6th to 30, and then changed it to 100 a few days later, corresponding to what happened on Strides, and it just universally updated the quota to 100 for all the past and future days too. So even though it was set to 30 on October 6th, and I did 30 on October 6th, it marked it as incomplete because it didn't fit the new 100 quota I added days later. So yeah, this was an issue. This doesn't happen on Strides, it updates the new count moving forward, while keeping the completion status and count of the past days.
Another issue with Habits is that it worked terribly with the Apple Watch. For some reason there was this major green "Complete" button, and there was also a "Reset" button. Why? I just want to add a count for how many push ups I did, but I would often accidentally hit either the "Complete" button, automatically marking it as 200, or the reset button, automatically marking it as 0. This was so annoying. On Strides, if you tap on an item, it just lets you type in a number, and then save or cancel. No weird "Complete" or "Reset" button, who would ever use that?
Anyway, that was the best habit tracker app that I tested last night, out of many. They were all cheaper than Strides, and even though some might have more features, they still weren't better. So I'm just sticking with Strides for now. I might even get the lifetime version because of how much it has helped me in just the past week alone.
Anyway, today was a perfect day, but needless to say, I'm extremely tired now as I write this. I'm probably going to sleep soon.
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