Like many others I’m kicking off my Year of Growth (known as YOG) with a refreshed focus on health and fitness. I’ve had the fitness/exercise part of the equation more or less nailed down since November 2014 which is when I limped into my local gym and threw myself at the mercy of my lovely PT and asked for help.  2014 saw me being both too sedentary during the week and trying to garden like a woman possessed at the weekends on the allotment and I ended up with major back and knee issues.

The PT fixed me in short order and got me a lot fitter – but there’ve been some injuries this year which have hampered my cardio training and the portion control has slipped a bit. So the plan with the PT this year is to get me back to having a regular Friday boxing session ASAP and work on getting back to being fit to run.  It’s good to have goals (even if working around plantar fasciitis in the left foot and a weird thing with my right hand at the moment which makes one of my fingers feel like it’s locking/dislocating.  For once google has been my friend in diagnosing what’s happened here)!

In the interests of accountability I’ve been weighing and logging food all week, watching my portions and making sure I hit those 13,500 steps per day. So this is what my stats look like.

Top graph (calories consumed – blue) vs calories available (yellow) and bottom graph calories earned through exercise (bue) compared to minutes spent exercising (red).

Most of the exercise has been gentle walking – the spike on Saturday was due to a boxing session in the morning. If I can keep this up for the rest of the month I’ll be off to a good start. On the plus side these stats are pretty good:

• Steps walked: 96,000
• Miles walked: just over 44
• Calories burned: 21,713

I’ve not been quite as successful in improving my sleep patterns. Though I’ve averaged 6 hours and 22 minutes this week it’s only because I slept a ridiculous 10 hours Thursday night/Friday morning.  Still haven’t quite cracked the winding down and getting to bed before midnight element of good sleep patterns!