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February

January was a very productive workout month! I worked out five days and took two days to rest a week. I also made my own full body routine that consists of 15 minutes of abs, 8 minutes of arms, and 7 minutes of booty workouts. Between this and riding the bike workouts felt productive and hard.

To treat myself for this I decided to buy some new activewear! I think it’s really important to acknowledge the work I put in this month and set the standard for how I want this year to go when it comes to working out and staying healthy.

I want to keep pushing myself to eat healthy. This month consisted of a bit more drinking and snacking. For February I want to focus on less snacking and eating bigger meals to fill me up. I’m still keeping with a WFPB diet and food prepping to help me stick with it.

I’m super pumped to look back on the progress I made in January and can’t wait to push myself even harder in February. Who knows, maybe my 30 min workout will get bumped up to a 40 minute one!

Week 5

January 25th- 30 min full body workout

Tonight I focused on doing a little bit of everything: 15 min core, 8 min arms, and 7 min booty. It felt like a super productive workout!

January 26th- 15 min abs 15 min bike ride

January 27th- 30 min full body workout

January 28th- Rest

January 29th- Rest

January 30th- 30 min arms and abs workout

January 31st- 35 min bike ride

Week 3

January 11th- 30 min fully body workout

January 12th- 30 min full body workout

January 13th- 15 min abs

January 14th- 30 min bike ride

I bought an indoor exercise bike. I had been debating on buying one for the past few months and finally decided to go ahead and order it. I’ve ridden it once (we got it last night) and am glad to have some sort of cardio back in my life. I think this will be a great addition to my at home workout routines!

January 15th- Rest

January 16th- Rest

January 17th- 25 min full body workout

Coping With the Holidays

Eating a whole food plant based diet during this time of year just got that much harder.

The holidays are a hard time of year to stick to a plant based diet, or any diet for that matter. The temptation to make exceptions is so easy, especially when everyone else at the table is eating all the things you’re trying not to. My 10% rule: eating a plant based 90% of the time and making exceptions for the foods I can’t give up 10% of the time, definitely turned into more of a 30% to 70% ratio.

While I was aware the foods I was consuming were not even close to a whole food plant based diet, I couldn’t help myself but sample a bit of each type food I wouldn’t typically eat. Don’t get me wrong, there were still plenty of veggies on my plate come dinner time, but I also splurged a bit and went for the foods I typically don’t eat like meat, cheese, and things with other types of dairy. These foods did not disappoint. They tasted just as good as I remembered!

At first I didn’t notice a change in the way I felt or looked, but after a few days of splurging I started to crave processed foods. I no longer went straight for the banana on the counter. Instead I thought about the huge box of cookies and chocolates sitting next to the bananas and went back and forth on which I should eat. I eventually chose the banana, but I was surprised how my way of thinking about food had been altered based on what I had been eating over the holidays.

I thought it was really interesting how quick this change in thinking took. Over a few weekends of eating family meals, it was harder to get back to the whole food plant based diet. But it actually turned into something I craved. I wanted to see the diversity of veggies, grains, and fruit on my plate. I wanted to nourish my body with unprocessed foods and not feel heavy or gross when I worked out.

It made me appreciate the change I made in my diet back in June. It almost reinforced why I made the change in the first place. I don’t feel tired after meals, my stomach doesn’t hurt, and I am way more motivated to workout and keep my body healthy and strong. It gave me the motivation I needed to start 2021 off on the right foot: being motivated to workout and to eat healthy meals.

Week 2

January 4th- 27 min full body workout

I tired a new full body workout on FitOn tonight. Really liking this app! They have various fitness trainers with endless options for working out. Tonight I tried a new full body toner workout. It worked very part of me: arms, abs, legs, and booty! A great way to end my Monday!

January 5th- 10 min yoga, 10 min core workouts

January 6th- 15 min arm workout

January 7th- Rest

January 8th- 25 min fully body HIIT

January 9th- Rest

January 10th- 30 min full body workout

January

Another year in the books – goodbye 2020 and bring on 2021! With another year over, and just having finished publishing my 2020 review I have a lot on my mind that I want to focus on this January. I was super pumped to find out I had way less rest days this year than I did in 2019 (when I first started tracking my fitness journey). I want to keep this up and have even less than 9 weeks where I have more rest days than active days in a given week. I really do think this is possible and I want to use this as my motivation going into January 2021.

My goals for January are as follows:

  • Workout ATLEAST 5 days a week – I don’t mind switching up when I take rest days, but I want to limit myself to two a week. I have a feeling these will typically fall on Friday’s and Saturday’s. There’s something so rewarding about working out Sunday night before starting my week that I don’t think I can give up!
  • Start working out longer – I work out for about 25 minutes a night when doing a full body workout or abs. I want to continue to prolong my workout routines and start getting more in-depth workouts in. This will help me fully workout my entire body.
  • Start writing / creating my own workout routines – I use a lot of YouTube videos when working out. This is a great way to learn new exercises and follow along. This month I want to sit down (when I have some free time) and write out a few different 30 – 40 minute routines. This will help me target areas I don’t typically workout as well as keep me motivated to keep finding new exercises to try.

I’m really excited at what 2020 brought and can’t wait to see what changes and goals I can reach in 2021! Stay tuned to follow along with my 2021 journey.

2020 Workout Review

I think we can all agree 2020 didn’t turn out the way we thought it would. The past nine months of 2020 were spent in quarantine, events cancelled or pushed until 2021, and restaurants, bars, shops and barbershops were all closed through most of the summer. We spent a lot more time at home. More time cooking meals. We even tried to get outside as much as possible to get a change of scenery from our at home offices. Camping became the new vacation plans for the year and it seemed like everyone else had the same idea.

While our lives were turned upside down by Covid, it did bring the opportunity to focus on eating healthier and working out after a long day at work. Cutting out the commute time from home to the office and back to just going between the bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen made a huge difference. I spent more time making healthy plant based meals and our evenings were spent setting aside 20 – 30 minutes a night working out. These two changes in my routine drastically changed the way I felt, the way I looked, and the confidence I have built because of it. Alex and I made a conscious choice to push each other to work out and not gain weight from being at home 24/7 and the snacking that came along with it. Excuses as to why we weren’t going to workout on a specific night became harder to make.

I haven’t ran the data yet (planning on doing this later today before posting), but I do have a feeling I worked out more this year than I did when I had a gym available last year. I don’t think I ran as much, but I learned how to make at-home workouts my main priority. Focusing on the whole body – arms, legs, booty, abs, and even my heart through HIIT and cardio workouts.

This year I learned that excuses won’t give me the results I want to see. Instead, I realized pushing myself and motivating myself on the days you don’t want to workout will.

Here are some of my general goals for 2021:

I made some time to crunch my data from 2020. I looked at my active vs rest days of 2020 for the whole year first. Second, I broke 2020 down into weeks and compared how many days per week I either worked out or rested.

I also wanted to compare my active vs rest days to my data from 2019. The orange and gray chart on the right shows my active and rest days of 2019 and the teal and gray chart on the left shows the same info, but for 2020.

  • 2019 Active vs Rest Days
  • 2020 Active vs Rest Days
2019 vs 2020 Data on Active vs Rest Day per Year

Above you can see in 2019 I worked out about 51% of the time and rested about 49% of the days in 2019. In 2020 I worked out about 64% of the time and rested about 36% of the year. Active days are those where I ran or did some sort of full body workout. I am really proud of the progress I made by cutting down my rest days this past year and finding a routine to fit not only my schedule, but also the goals I put forward for myself each month.

There are a few factors I believe aided in this increase of active days from 2019 to 2020. The first is working instead of being in college. In college my schedule was always changing and it made it hard to be consistent with working out. Whereas with a job I am able to maintain a routine of working out at 8pm every night and not worrying about finishing up homework for the next day.

Another factor I think played into my increase in active days is working remotely from home. It makes a huge difference not having to drive to and from the office everyday. With this extra time I’m able to take that 30 min drive time and workout instead. Although these changes have aided in my increased active days during 2020, I do also think I was more motivated to workout and keep my body in good shape. Coupling working out and eating healthy, it has given me a new type of motivation to stay in shape and build muscle.

The second graph I created breaks down active and rest days by each week of 2020. It’s ordered from the weeks where I worked out the most all the way to the days where I rested more days than I worked out. The active days are the bars in teal and the rest days are in gray. From a quick glance it appears I had more active days than rest days per week for most of 2020.

Number of Active vs Rest Days by Week per Year of 2020

There were about 9 weeks of 2020 where I had more rest days than active ones in a given week. Most of these weeks were early on in the year when I was still in college. I also took a week and a half off when I had my wisdom teeth removed. These are not excuses as to why I didn’t workout, but I also think it’s important to look and understand what was going on during those weeks and make a change for 2021 to turn some of the rest weeks into active ones.

I want to continue increasing my active to rest day ratio in 2021 and push myself for an even higher percentage of active vs rest days. Overall I am really proud of the all I accomplished in 2020 and am so excited to see what 2021 will bring! I bought 10 pound dumbbells and can’t wait to throw these into the mix of workouts in 2021.