30 Day Trial - Quick Update

Just a quick update on my progress here, I've been keeping up with all 3 of my trials, I haven't missed 1 thing since the beginning. Yesterday I managed to jog for 2 minutes then walk for 1 minute for a full 25 minutes, it was harder than before but not as hard as I thought it would be. This morning when I got up I felt really tired, I still haven't had an early night yet, I hardly ever go to bed before 23:00 these days. It's now the weekend so I'm even less likely to get to be early. Even though I've been really tired in the mornings, I've been feeling ok during the day so it's not that much of a problem at the moment.

My next post will be about procrastination, I wanted to write the post days ago but I've been procrastinating over it (that isn't a joke).

30 Day Trials - Day 7

Today is the last day of the first week of my trial, and so far it's been pretty easy, although trying to fit everything in can sometimes be a challenge, especially when Hailey's at work all day or away. Today is also Haileys last day at work for 2 weeks, so it should now be even easier to stick to a schedule.

Last night I went to bed at 22:30 which still wasn't early enough, considering how tired I was, but I was up and about at 05:30, 15 minutes early. I put my alarm on 15 minutes earlier because I had a lot to do to this morning and I needed a bit more time. I wrote some posts for my blogs this morning and did some promotional work, then got ready to take Natalie to Nursery.

This morning is the morning after my fast and the first time I had eaten for about 20 hours, I started off with some grapes and then a bowl of cereal. I don't think I feel any benefits from the fast, but to be honest I didn't really expect there to be, I think you need more than 1 day for there to be any benefit. The next time I do a fast I think I will try it for 3 days, I'm not sure when this will be yet.

After work I practised my guitar for 20 minutes before going for a jog, the next time I go for a jog I'm going to try and increase the length of the jogging intervals to 1 minute 30 seconds.

So that's it the first week over and the best thing about it? The extra time I have to work on my blogs and do other projects that I wouldn't normally have time to do because I would be in bed asleep. Hopefully I will start to see the benefits of exercising more as the weeks go by, I've already lost 3 pounds this week and the jogging is getting a bit easier.

30 Day Trials - Day 6

I didn't go to bed until 1:30 again last night so when I woke up at 05:45, I was shattered, I still go up straight away but it was hard. For some reason I find it very hard to go to bed early even when I'm feeling tired, especially at the weekend. After getting up I went downstairs to do some more work on my blogs and do some reading, I started to feel better straight away.

Today is the day that I experimented with fasting (see my previous post), so there is nothing to report food wise, I just drank plenty of water all day. I spent my day looking after Natalie as Hailey was away on a trip again, so I didn't get much else done.

After Natalie had gone to bed I spent 30 minutes on the guitar and then did an hours workout using Hailey's DVD. All in all not much to report today, its all been fairly plain sailing so far, the fasting was pretty easy, so I think I will try a longer fast at some point, I will write another post when I decide to do it.

Tomorrow will probably be my last daily post on the 30 day trials as there is very little different to report each day. I will switch to a weekly summary after tomorrow with the odd update here and there if anything out of the ordinary happens, instead I will be concentrating on writing posts about other personal development topics.

Fasting

Last night I was having a read of Steve Pavlinas's Forum and I found a number of threads on fasting and its health benefits. There appears to be a number of ways to fast, but the 2 I mostly read about were water only and juice fasting. Water only fasting, is just that you only drink water during the fast and nothing else, where as juice fasting is only drinking water and juiced fruit and vegetables, no solids. Apparently fasting allows the body to rid itself of toxins and heal itself, the theory is that because the body doesn't have to use energy digesting food it can use that energy to heal instead. Fasting is supposed to leave you feeling energised, invigorated and clear headed, this is probably because your not taking in any additives or sugar etc that can affect your physiology.

I decided to give fasting a try, just for 1 day to see how it goes, I settled on a water only fast as I thought it would be easier on short notice than buying loads of fruit and veg and juicing it up. I started today, the last food I had was about 22:00 last night, so at the time of writing this it's been just over 24 hours without food. To be honest today's been pretty easy, I've only felt hungry a couple of times and not for very long. The hardest thing about the fast is breaking the habit of eating, a few times even though I wasn't hungry I wanted to eat anyway.

As I write this I'm starting to feel hungry, I think I'll go to bed in a minute and I'll have something to eat tomorrow morning.

30 Day Trials - Day 5

At the beginning of this 30 day trial I planned to write a post for every day of the trial, but as most days are going to be very similar it may not be of any interest to write a post about every day. Instead I'm going to continue the daily updates until the end of the first week and then I will switch to a weekly update plus I will post if anything significant happens. This way I will free up some blogging time to write about other personal development topics, future posts will feature motivation, productivity, how to achieve my goals and anything else that I can discover along the way.

Like I said yesterday I seem to be going to bed later and later, last night I didn't get to sleep until about 01:30 in the morning. I was still up at the usual time, getting up when the alarm goes off still hasn't been a problem, but I did feel very tired this morning. I need to go to bed a bit earlier, just over 4 hours sleep last night wasn't enough.

After getting out of bed I went downstairs and started doing some work on the computer, I spent a couple of hours writing blog posts and promoting my blogs to get more traffic. Natalie didn't wake up until 08:45, so I had 3 hours uninterupted to do things I wanted to do, this is the big benefit of getting up early, I would never be able to get done what I did yesterday if I didn't have those extra 3 hours.

The rest of the day was spent with Hailey and Natalie, having family time, we also went to see my Mum and Stepdad for a few hours in the afternoon. At 19:00 I spent 20 minutes on the guitar before going for my 25 minute jog/walk.

I spent the evening with Hailey in front of the tv with a couple of Vodka and Diet Cokes, we like to have a few drinks on a Saturday, since we had Natalie we don't get to go out as much as we used to, so we have a drink at home instead.

That's it for another day, all 3 30 day trial items successfully completed again today. On the whole it's been quite easy so far to keep it up, I'm starting to feel a bit tired from the early mornings, but going to bed a bit earlier shold sort that out. See you tomorrow.

Goals

Something I should have done from the beginning of this journey into personal development was to define my goals, what I want to achieve from this. But in the absence of a time machine I will just have to do it now instead. Below is a list of goals that I would like to achieve, they are in no particular order. The list isn't complete, over the next few weeks I will add to and refine the list, I will also explain some of them in more detail in future posts, this will include how I plan to achieve them. As you will see some have time constraints and some don't and they are mostly short to medium term goals, at the moment I'm not sure what my long term goals are, but I will add these as I think of them.

• Finish my 30 day trials without missing a single day
• Get my driving license by the end of 2008
• Learn to play at least one song on my guitar all the way through by the end of 2008
• Pay off all my debts by the end of 2009
• Create more streams of passive income to earn at least $250 a month by end of 2008
• Learn C++
• Be able to jog non stop for 25 minutes
• Get down to 12 stone 7 pounds by beginning of May in time for my wedding
• Work from home more
• Improve my productivity at home and at work so I can get more done in a shorter period of time
• Run and manage my own project at work by the end of 2008

That's all I can think of at the moment, but I'm sure this list will continue to expand.