June, July and August were not great months for my habits. I saw a steady decline in my consistency across most of them. A puppy, being sick for the best part of 4 weeks, and school summer holidays (disruptive to routine) were to blame. Hey, sometimes life gets in the way!
September was my time to shine. I was still realistic though. I didn’t need to bounce back to green across the board but things needed to at least start shifting towards that direction.
Drum roll…
(Click here for the full journey)
More greens, and higher oranges. I’ll say that counts as shifting in the right direction!
A few points to note, that actually mean things are even better than they look on the surface:
- Since changing my goals from weight loss to muscle gain, I now only fast on non weight training days. This helps fuel my body for the training sessions. This naturally dented my consistency %. If I had only counted when I planned to fast, it would have been over 80%. For October, I will take that into account, so it becomes a true consistency measure of what I planned to do.
- Up until now, my steps have been a little sketchy for accuracy. There are two things that cause this. I often run when I do my zone 2 training. And also, Apple Health seems to track some of me riding a bike as steps. Both of these are technically not walking, which is ultimately how I want to measure my steps. This therefore creates an inflated step score. I only recently found out that I can manually remove steps from Apple Health. I started doing that for now-walking steps in September, and will continue that going forward. This means no more double counting. Essentially 10K steps now become harder to achieve. But, also the 73% under the new stricter criteria is actually pretty decent.
Overall I’m super pleased with September. My goal was to reverse the decline in consistency, and to start shifting things towards more greens. I did exactly that.
My goal for next month is to try and shift everything to green. I might struggle on sleep and steps, but I’ll be happy if I’m green on everything else and sleep and steps get closer to green. If anything outside of sleep and steps is orange, I won’t be happy!
I’m already 11 days into October and things are off to a good start!
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