Day Zero

I'm not going to bother with much of an introduction about me, because the chances are that if you've found my blog, you've found it via my posts on social media - which are currently set such that only people who know me can see them.

 The purpose of this blog is to serve partly as a journal and partly as a resource for anyone who'd like to try similar things to what I'm doing. My intention is to learn quite a lot about many aspects of being healthy, getting fit and becoming an elite level athlete, and I will share what I learn here.

A couple of things have prompted me to start writing about my experiences. One is that I now have time to do so, because this past Friday was my last day for the time being as a software engineer. Perhaps I'll talk more about that some other time, but in short, I was becoming increasingly unable to juggle working full-time, exercising, getting enough sleep, eating healthy (yeah right), doing my share of household upkeep, and spending time with my husband and kids. The second thing is that I've been inspired to improve my eating habits by a well-timed nutrition seminar at my local CrossFit gym, Crossfit Cedar Park. The coaches talked about 3 approaches to good nutrition aimed at improving health and therefore also athletic performance: counting macros, Paleo, and Zone. I'm going to be exploring the benefits of the Zone diet combined with increasing the quality and "cleanliness" of my foods. One of the recommendations in the seminar was to write down what you're eating and how you feel to help assess whether a particular diet is working for you or not. I'm not going to write the minutiae of my daily meals here, but I will talk about how it's going on occasion. 

Lastly, although I'm no longer employed as a software engineer, I still have the mindset of an engineer. So I'll be trying to take a more rigorous approach to fitness and nutrition. In the past, I've never devoted a lot of energy to planning out my eating, partially because I haven't felt I needed to lose a lot of weight and partially because I felt mostly okay and didn't think it was necessary to focus on nutrition. Now is a good time to focus on it, since I'm pretty much becoming an aspiring professional athlete. This means that I need to shed some weight (I'm 20 pounds up from my pre-kids weight), and optimize my recovery so that I can push my body to become stronger and avoid injury.