Day 330: Week 48 Plan

status

Week 47

My first week of quarantine! Even though being confined to a small, windowless room in complete isolation for days on end sounds absolutely terrible, it’s actually been quite enjoyable in some ways. I think I could pull off being a hikikomori. But then again, not talking to anyone for months or years sounds pretty awful so I’m just a poser.

  • Life

    • ❌ Be in bed by 9pm every night
    • ✅ Do yoga every morning
    • ✅ Meditate for 30+ minutes every morning

  • Browserflow

    • ❌ Get the Performance Test flow working in the cloud

      I didn’t reach this goal because it requires support for loops and other fancy things, but I did get a much more simple flow for filling out a form working in the cloud. Check it out!

Sleep

I didn’t hit the 9pm deadline I had set for myself, but having this aggressive goal meant that I went to bed by 10pm on most nights. Even though I could probably fall asleep then, “9pm” still feels too early to go to sleep so I end up staying up a bit more.

I’d forgotten just how good it feels to wake up early in the morning! Of course, this is completely psychological since there’s no window so I have no way of telling what time it actually is apart from what my devices say. I could be waking up at 2pm every day while thinking it’s 5am, and I’d be none the wiser.

Compare this to my sleep schedule just two weeks ago:

Pretty hilarious how after months of failing my weekly goal to go to bed before 12am just three nights out of the week, I’m able to get a perfect streak simply by significantly changing my environment. Hoping I can keep this new early-bird schedule rather than regressing back into a night zombie.

Exercise

I’ve had a much easier time sticking to my routines while in quarantine, which feels counterintuitive. You’d think that if you were all alone, you’d succumb to your worst impulses, but thankfully, that hasn’t been the case. I resurrected my old “Habit Log” spreadsheet and tracked some things I wanted to do every day:

I’m glad I took that 500-hour yoga teacher training course in India in 2018 because that foundation is coming in super handy now. I’ve also been incorporating whatever I could from my calisthenics routine so I could mix in some strength training. I miss having a pull-up bar!

In the past few days, it’s felt harder to keep the routine going, but I’ve been able to use little mental tricks here and there so that I at least do some sun salutations rather than nothing. It’s surprising how hard it can be to get yourself to do things that you know are good for you.

Food

Since I wasn’t sure if or how well my hotel would be able to prepare a vegan alternative to their meat-filled quarantine menu (and completely forgot that food delivery exists 😅), I packed 40,000 calories worth of Huel with me for quarantine:

For those unfamiliar, Huel is a meal replacement powder that’s like Soylent, except it has more protein (30g vs. 20g for a 400 calorie serving) and less sugar (1g vs. 16g). I also ordered some of their new “Hot & Savory” product which turns into a creamy?/soupy?/chunky? (I’m not good at describing food) mixture that you can prepare in 5 minutes with boiling water.

For foodies, eating this stuff every day probably sounds like a waking nightmare, but I’ve been enjoying it. I’m definitely getting better nutrition than I would ordering delivery because Huel packs in all the vitamins and minerals you could ask for. (Speaking of delivery, I celebrated finishing one week in quarantine by ordering in some Taiwanese food, and it was… okay. Maybe I was too excited or this place wasn’t that good, but it didn’t make me miss “real food” all that much.)

Since I’m treating quarantine as a time to try out a bunch of new habits, I’ve also been doing intermittent fasting mostly just for fun. I started off by using an 8-hour eating window (12p - 8pm) and fasting for 16 hours (8pm - 12pm), but I wanted to make sure I had some food in my body after working out so I changed my eating window to 6am - 2pm.

Stopping all my eating for the day at 2pm certain felt a bit weird at first, but in my magical cocoon, time is but a construct. And probably due to the high protein content in Huel, I actually don’t feel that hungry for the rest of the day.

That’s especially surprising given that I’m eating at a slight caloric deficit. I packed 40,000 calories assuming that I’d eat 2000 calories a day (or 5 Huel meals of 400 calories each) for 15 days and have about 25 meals left over, but I ended up going with only 4 meals a day, or 1600 calories. (I have some additional protein powder that I add to my first meal so it’s actually 1750 calories a day.)

This might sound low, but since I’m sitting at my desk all day, my total daily energy expenditure is only about 1900 calories. That means I only have a deficit of about 150 calories, which is not much at all.

The problem with me only eating 4 Huel meals a day is that by the end of quarantine, I’m going to have 16,000 calories worth of Huel remaining, or 40 meals. That’s a lot more food than I expected to have left over so I guess I’ll replace a meal a day with Huel for like a month and a half to work through it. Or maybe I should save it in case I go to Korea later next year and have to go through another 2 week quarantine?

In summary:

  • I’m going to sleep earlier than my grandpa would
  • I sit in silence before practicing some ancient Indian movements
  • I’m eating out of bags (but only before 2pm)

Basically living the dream!!!

Week 48

Second and final week of quarantine before I’m released into the big, wide world. For my remaining time here, I want to continue last week’s practices and get Browserflow Cloud working end-to-end.

  • Life

    • Be in bed by 9pm every night
    • Meditate for 30+ minutes every morning
    • Do yoga every morning

  • Browserflow Cloud

    • Allow saving files
    • Allow taking screenshots
    • Implement loops
    • Allowing scheduling flows