8:26 PM
Today has been awesome. Last night I had 7 hours and 59 minutes of sleep, so just 1 minute away from 8 hours. Even though I had the most sleep ever since I got an Apple Watch on September 20th or so, I didn't feel refreshed after waking up. I feel very refreshed right now, because it's night time, and I've been awake for hours, but when I woke up this morning, I was pretty groggy.
I think it was due to the ZzzQuil. I just looked up side effects, and yes, daytime grogginess is a side effect of taking ZzzQuil. So I'm no longer going to be taking it.
I think I've pretty much always had around 6 hours of sleep for years, it was just that I didn't know until recently, when I started wearing my Apple Watch to bed and tracking how much sleep it says I got. I put it on sleep mode right before going to sleep, so it starts the sleep timer right then. When I wake up, I turn off sleep mode, and then it calculates how much time has passed, and records that as my sleep. So it's pretty accurate, and I think I have always had 6 hours or so sleep, for years, I just never noticed until recently.
So maybe there's nothing wrong with me and the amount of sleep I'm getting, because I still feel rested, and I still perform all of the same activities at pretty much the same level as everyone else. I want more sleep because of all the supposed benefits we get from sleeping 8+ hours a day. But there are genetic anomalies of people who can sleep for 4-6 hours like me, and still perform well. It's an anomaly, and really unlikely I have it, but I don't know any other explanation to me doing well in every day life, while getting 4-6 hours of sleep every night, while drinking absolutely no coffee or caffeine ever.
When I got on the scale this morning all groggy, my weight was 173.3 pounds. I lost weight throughout the day yesterday I guess, and more weight at night. Anyway, I look and feel pretty decent again. When you look good, you can tell. You can just take off your clothes in front of a mirror, and you'd be pretty happy with your appearance. If you're unhappy with something in your appearance, then that's something you want to change. You can either fix it, or accept it, both will make you satisfied with that part of your appearance. I chose to change, since I'm unhappy being overweight.
Last year in Peru, I could take my clothes off and just feel really good. I didn't have a big gut. I was pretty fit. My face looked decent, my hair was decent, overall body was decent. My profile picture is from last year in Peru, and women rated this photo extremely highly on a photo rating site. As a counterexample, I thought I looked pretty good yesterday, and I took a selfie. After putting it up on the site to be rated, they rated me a 3.3 or so for that selfie, out of 5 votes. I thought I looked decent, but women voted otherwise. Anyway, my profile photo got an 8.6 or so, out of 36 votes. My highest ever rated photo, pretty much every woman voted it as attractive or very attractive.
The thing is, you're not really rated in how attractive you are in general, but just how attractive you are in that photo specifically. I didn't care that I got rated a 3.3 out of 5 votes yesterday, because I took a selfie in the spur of the moment, and had a pretty plain white wall background, and I was wearing a terrible outfit, and lots of other imperfections. So yeah it's rated lowly. My profile photo takes place in a cool environment, and I look decent apparently, so it got rated very highly.
What's interesting is that a lot of my photos get rated in the 95th percentile for "trustworthiness", meaning I look extremely trustworthy in a lot of my photos. Even with a really high trustworthy rating though, I get rated often pretty low in the "attractiveness" part. For comparison, I've gotten permission to upload some of my friend's photos, and some of them uploaded photos on their own and we compared scores, we all differ in the scores, but no one has ever gotten higher than me in the "trustworthiness" category. There's only 3 categories to vote on per photo: Smart, Trustworthy, and Attractive. I have so many photos with 95th percentile on Trustworthy, that it's cool. I feel cool, but I get low on attractive on those same photos (maybe a 6.5 or so on average).
Anyway I'm getting very sleepy now. I got all of my dailies and exercises done in the morning. I did a max rep of each workout. I did 7 pull ups in a row, 7 chin ups in a row. These were the most I could do. Then I tried for push ups, and I got to 33 push ups. I think I could have pushed for more, but just stopped there. I was pretty close to my most though, so I count it as my max for now. For squats, I just did 16, could have done more, but didn't want to injure my back or my knees. For leg raises, I did 33 in a row too I think, like push ups. For planking, I planked for 1.5 minutes. I could have gone for much longer, but there's this new exercise concept I want to try out, and I don't want to start out too difficult.
Basically, every Saturday, I will perform a max set of reps for each of the workouts. This is the amount I have to do per day, until the next Saturday. So because I did 33 push ups today, I have to do 33 push ups tomorrow, and so on, until Saturday. Let's say this Saturday I have a new max of 37 push ups, then I do 37 push ups every day until the next week. Doing this overtime, should eventually get me to a really high level. I'm also going to try and get all reps in one set, but if I'm not able to, then I can split it up.
Anyway, so I did that this morning, and I did some brain training, and vegan activism.
Then it was time to celebrate Eric's Birthday since it's his birthday today. I took him to Bori Vegan, which is a vegan restaurant here. It was pretty close to closing time by the time we arrived at around 2:30 PM, and It was cool, all the parking spot slots were filled. So we had to go around to the nearby neighborhood and park there. This is a common occurrence here in Puerto Rico, there's no giant dedicated parking lots like a Wal-Mart or even most restaurants would have, like in the U.S. Since space here is much more limited, each place basically gets a handful of parking spots. Bori Vegan has I think 9-10 parking spots in front of it, and they were all taken, which is awesome.
We ate there, getting the meal for the day, which is Sancocho, which I think is a vegan corned beef or something like that, with avocado and other Puerto Rican foods. AJN and Chan were there. Chan, pseudonym just like everyone else in all my journals, he is Chinese, is the guy who owns the charity that I got invited to a week or two ago. He is vegan too. They randomly came in and greeted me and we caught up briefly, and they ate there too. Small world. I don't think I introduced them to Eric, but Eric introduced himself, and they introduced themselves.
After a while, Guy came in with a guitar, and played and sung a happy birthday song in Spanish for Eric. And we caught up again too.
We went back to the hostel, and hung out there for a bit. We went through the skate park, first time I've been there, and tried to do some activism. However the waves were too strong, and I was wearing sneakers. It wasn't possible to cross this one area without my shoes getting wet, because the waves reached all the way to the tip of the shore to the rocks, so we decided to just turn around and go back. I told them we could just meet up at the gym later, and that's what we agreed to. Guy is different from Gus by the way, two different people, just with similar pseudonyms. Gus was at work and I wouldn't see him until later.
Instead of going home right away, I got a car wash, and refilled my car's gas. Then I went back home. I was starting to get all settled in, watching an anime, which I know is a waste of time but I was so out of it. This was already after 6 PM by the way. Then I got a call from Guy saying they were on the way to the gym. I was like, ugh, okay, and then as I finished the episode, Gus called and said they're already there, I told them to just start without me, and I went to the gym too.
Working out was pretty fun. The gym was empty, and it was just me, Eric, and Gus (Guy wasn't allowed in because he only wore sandals) all having fun there, being not loud and obnoxious with our jokes and laughter. but since the gym was basically dead silent, no music was playing like there was usually, our voices and laughter kind of permeated throughout the place. There were other people working out, but they were all working out individually, and no one was talking to each other except for us.
After that, we went to Marshalls and bought a bunch of vegan foods. There's so many vegan products at the Marshalls here, it's crazy. They said it was like heaven, because pretty much, so much stuff there was vegan, and cheap. Cheaper than anywhere else. 4 No Cow bars are $5 at Marshall's, they're like $3 individually elsewhere. Everything in PR is more expensive in general, so it might be like $2 in the States, but $3 here, but at Marshall's here, they were $1.25 each.
Anyway we had so much fun at Marshall's were our little vegan gang of 4 guys, buying different vegan products. Pretty awesome. We had a pull up competition in the gym to see who could do the most, I did 6 pull ups, and Eric did 22, and Gus did 23. So yeah, none of these guys are weak. Pretty strong dudes. Gus doesn't even own a car, he just bicycles everywhere, very long distances, sometimes of 2 hours of cycling one way, and then another 2 hours back. All the time.
Anyway, I'm home now and very sleepy. I'm going to try sleeping early tonight. We'll see what happens.
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