Hello!

This has been week 9 of my 52 week-long attempt to document my progress, in order to be more conscientious with how I’m living my year.

The good:

• This week I've really dialed in my diet. I've never had a huge problem with eating well, but I've often been to lazy to cook properly and ended up ordering more takeout because of it. Instead of having a cheat day, I've also ended up eating unhealthy foods from the grocery store a little bit over the course of a week just because I have it at home. Now 1. I actually cook and eat proper meals 2. only buy healthy things to snack on. I do still get sugar cravings, but I have nothing to satisfy it with home anymore and so it always passes. It's not that you can't or shouldn't eat what you want sometimes, I but I feel like I have more stable energy levels now that I cut out sugar. It's worth the trade-off for me personally.
• I don't know if it's just luck, but I feel like my skin has improved. I have been following my skin routine pretty religiously for a few weeks now, and I noticed my acne has slowed down and my complexion looks a bit better.
• This week I completed my first fashion stint. Aka I threw out a lot of things from my wardrobe that I never wear (the majority lol) and bought things I actually feel comfortable in. I'm sure I'm still going to feel a bit weird when I go back home and people notice I'm suddenly putting in some kind of effort now, but I guess it's par for the course. It got quite pricey, but I justified the purchases with the fact that most people continuously buy new apparel over time, and I'm just now catching up after a near-decade of not spending anything on clothes and shoes haha.
• I kept up with my one-minute minimum plank workout every day, and can already feel it getting a bit easier. Most days I pushed myself to exceed one minute, so next week I will try to do a minimum of two minutes every day. All in addition to my regular workouts, of course.
• Speaking of exercise, I am starting to see a small but noticeable difference in my physique. I was trying on t-shirts in the mirror, and I noticed that my arms looked bigger and more defined. I've noticed it in my abdominal region as well; it's more defined and I could actually see the lines of my upper abs. It's really not a big change, but it's more than I expected in such a short time. I'm also female which I think means slower progress in general.

The bad:

• I didn't lift very much this week. Because I've been catching up on sleep, I focused on just going out for a run in the morning to get the minimum required exercise (and some much-needed sunlight).
• I procrastinated studying for the first three days of the week. I eventually did end up studying for the rest of the week, but not as much as I wanted and I'm still very much behind.
• I haven't been as structured as with my day/time as I'd like to be, and that has lead to things like being disorganized around my apartment, less time for reading in the evening, more time wasted on social media, etc. But I know it's not too difficult to fix.
• I didn't use my super ultra mega nerdy Excel tracking sheet this week because of perfectionism. Boo!

Conclusion:

Overall, this week has been a tentative step in the right direction. I finally got over my immense resistance to start studying again and feeling like it was futile. I hate the feeling of wanting to give up because I don't feel like I'm intelligent or capable enough to grasp a subject, and I'm fed up dealing with it. From now on I've decided that I don't care whether or not I feel capable; I'll just do it anyway. A quote from a show I was watching this week said "whether I do it or not, it hurts all the same" which is so true for me. If I try my best, it hurts—but if I procrastinate, it also hurts. So I might as well choose the more productive pain.

That also goes for my creative projects. I keep daydreaming, but actually doing the work and being in the trenches of something that's out of my comfort zone is tough. It's so tough. But again, it hurts to just keep thinking about it. I want to keep my deadline of uploading my first video before April's end, and I think it's possible. Some of it is Parkinson's law, and so there's even less reason to give myself more time.

Next week will be my tenth week of attempting this challenge. It feels crazy that a near-fifth of this challenge is almost over. Time has flown by, but has also gone by slowly. In some ways I wish I was doing a lot better, but I've also never been this consistent in my life. At least I think not giving up on your New Year's resolutions for almost ten weeks should count for something.

And I'm going to keep going: twenty, thirty, forty—all fifty-two of them will be completed. I don't care if I have to crawl there.

On to the next week. Until then!