What are y'all working on lately?
@mauve Being a better person. Not selling out. The usual.
@roknrol What's your current strat for the bettering part? Aiming for a concrete goal? I'm working on talking to strangers outside of my usual go-tos more.
@mauve I have a lot of 'trained' ableism that's still hanging on...that's the big one. Trying to be a bit more introspective, I guess.
No solid goal for right now...just...be a better person. The kind of person that people want to be around. (Which is silly, because I don't really like being around other people. Perhaps I should work on that too?)
I'm anticipating going back to University in the next year, so kind of girding my loins and trying not to overwhelm myself before I even get started. Being kind(er) to myself. I'm told that's important.
@mauve Oh, and I've also been trying to work on my health but that's a whole different thing.
@roknrol Nice. "better person" is a good goal. I had a similar approach like a decade and a bit ago and it's been nice to reflect on the progress since then. I found a lot of books helped me sort out how to put it into practice. It'll be neat to check in on it in a year or two and see what worked best for you.
Whatcha gonna do for Uni? I've been wanting to go for bioengineering but sadly I gotta keep the family fed with my full time job.
What sort of health? I (mostly) quit soda pop recently 😅
@mauve My plan for University is something in Engineering. I know that's a really broad field, but...well...all of them are pretty broad, and a lot of the time the "side quests" are more fun or interesting than the end game. So, I'm leaving my options open for that...just hoping like hell I can manage the maths.
Right now I'm trying to get my weight under control (I'm close to my goal), and then I'll be trying to quit smoking and get a bit more exercise. I do get *some* exercise, but I need to be doing more.
I have heart disease, so all of that is tied together. The smoking thing is kicking my ass, but the rest of it should be achievable. My diet isn't *great*, but it's better than it used to be, and incremental change is better than no change.
Gratz on quitting soda...since I don't drink coffee or tea, it's been my biggest crutch aside from the cigarettes.
@roknrol Engineering sounds generally useful. Hope it's fun and scifi!
OMG yeah smoking is a rough one. What's your strat for it? gum or cold turkey?
Agreed re small changes. My mantra has been "something is better than nothing" for years and it helps get through the big daunting tasks. 🫂
I hear running regularly can help with habit dropping too? Hard to make a schedule sometimes though. I just take the stairs (~10 floors) and it's already helped a ton.
@mauve Smoking is awful for me. Right now I'm just trying to "cut back", with limited success.
My main problem is that by day two I usually get hit with severe bouts of depression on top of the anxiety. I've used Chantix in the past, which helped a lot, but unfortunately the only thing that my doctor in France will offer me are patches, which don't really seem to help at all (I've tried them before).
I can't do gum because I have bad teeth, and I absolutely cannot "park" the gum. My nervous habits make that a near impossibility.
So, cold turkey is probably what I'm going to have to keep trying, which sucks, but...well, I need to keep trying.
Exercise is a whole different problem that I know that I'll have to tackle in the near future, but I haven't started getting exercise again. I usually try to just stay busy with housework or yard work and hope that that's "enough". I have a really hard time motivating myself to do something that doesn't have a proper "end goal" in mind, you know? Like, if I have to walk to the next village for groceries or something (about 12 kilometers) I won't think twice about it, but if you tell me to go run for a mile "for fun", it just won't happen.
The small changes are the only way that I've been able to accomplish anything anymore. Backsliding happens fast and furious if I try to do anything more than incremental.
My house is three floors, so I do get quite a bit of stair work in just trying to keep the place clean, but it doesn't exactly raise my heart rate much.
I have a bicycle, but haven't been arsed to use it much. I really need to change my mind-set, I think, before any of those changes can even be started.
So...for right now it's the weight loss and the cigarettes. That feels like "enough", for right now. Once I've kicked the cigs I should be a little more amenable to the exercise, assuming my heart doesn't give out lol
@roknrol Yeah agreed cold turkey could be viable. Do you think you could pair it with being out in nature or something to reduce your access to cigs and just get out of the routine? I found changing my environment such that the vice became more inaccessible has helped in the past.
Also agreed re: running in place. It's so much easier to incorporate it in a routine if it has a function outside of "exercise". I gotta figure out how to integrate weight training still. Maybe weighted cuffs?
@mauve I have been trying to get outside more, but the heat is starting to ramp up in France again, so...probably not as much as I'd like. I've been really busy trying to get my house in order (I've been doing three month trips to France for the last couple of years, but this year scored an 11 month visa). I have a lot of work to do on the house for both summer and winter, so that pretty much occupies the bulk of my time right now.
Technically it probably counts as productive exercise.
If I'm having a *good* day, I can keep my smoking to about 4 a day. A bad day as much as 10. If I can consistently do 4, that'll be a really good starting point for a major push.
I've been noticing that, even though my weight is getting really close to my goal, I still have the middle-aged "fat apron" and I hate it. I will almost certainly need to start doing proper exercise sometime soon.
I have an acre of property a kilometer or so from my house that I have not yet seen. I intend to find that and visit it...if I did that a few times a week it would satisfy the walking plus the nature, and it'll feel a bit more productive. Eventually, of course, I'll have to do some weight training type stuff, which, in the past I've been satisfied with the results from just using my body weight - push ups, sit ups, step ups, that type of thing.
Because I'm still trying to get settled, it's been really hard to find a routine. That's kind of my current focus right now.