Reflection - 30 days of Asian diet

If this activity simply revolved around sticking to an Asian diet for 30 days then I did really well. Alas that is not the case, and so I need to reflect on the things that didn't go so well.

The food

But let's start with the fun stuff - the food. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I still struggled with this a little, mainly the lack of bread and chocolate -not combined of course, although a nutella sandwich does sound good... but I digress.

I consumed very little red meat during this 30 days. There were dishes of beef and lamb, but they were few and far between. The one thing that I did finally manage to acquire a taste for was tofu. In the past this has never been something I've really enjoyed, but we had a number of tofu meals and it was a staple on the rice paper rolls.

We tried a lot of different recipes that we don't usually prepare, and there are quite a few of them that will now become part of the regular diet.

The change in diet did affect how I felt physically. I generally felt less bloated than I usually do, even when we had a few banquet type meals. But I felt that my diet had a lot more salt in it than usual. Derek and I don't eat a lot of processed food generally, and we don't use a lot of salt in cooking or to season after the fact. With the Asian diet I think it was all of the soy sauce and fish sauce I felt like I was consuming more salt than usual.

The meditation

Again, regular readers will know how this went, for other people the outcome was not good. I did pretty well in the first week but I just could not get into the swing of this. I started forgetting and then, if I'm truly honest, I would remember but just could not motivate myself to do anything about it.I do feel that this is partly because I don't like doing things that I don't do well, and there is just so much going on internally at the moment that I could not sit still for five minutes, let alone even attempt to focus on my breath and clear my mind. But that is an excuse, it does not mean that I shouldn't have persevered.

Fortunately, meditation is part of 30 days of slowing down, so I get to try this again. I will try to find some more guided meditation podcasts, they seemed to work a little better than trying it myself, and put a concerted effort into this.

The exercise

I'm afraid that this was another fail. I did take Lily for some extra walks, and I did go out at lunch a couple of times, but on the whole I didn't increase my physical activity that much, and for the last week I probably did less than usual.

To be honest, this does not surprise me. I'm not entirely sure what it is that has motivated me to be fit and active at other points in my life, but it certainly isn't here now. I will need to do something about this though, since we will hopefully start baling the house in the next couple of months and I will need to be a little fitter for that process.

And so generally...

This was definitely an interesting activity to do, I just don't feel that I really did it justice during the 30 days. I did feel quite good just from the dietary changes alone. I have also been regularly taking fish oil tablets again, which I think contributes to that overall wellbeing.Some of the dietary changes will remain, particularly less red meat, but it won't be as restrictive as it has been. Hopefully I can get into the meditation in the current activity and I know that the exercise has to improve, just need to find the motivator for that one.