I have discovered, ages ago, that I work better with rules that are hard and firm and sort of blankety than with, hm, softer variations or guidelines. That is one of the reasons I blog every weekday (holidays and so on excepted) - it's much easier for me to remember it's a workday, and I'm supposed to blog, than to remember doing it every week or every Wednesday or so. (Downside of it is that I have to blog every day, including periods where I have no ideas, not a lot of time, or both, which results in some short and boring posts and the occasional gratuitous cat or garden pic, as you well know.)
Anyway - those general rules do work for me better than squishy ones. So I do yoga in the morning, before I eat something. No yoga, no food. (I have the cat pic equivalent here, too: when there is little time, rolling out the mat and doing a few forward folds and a down dog or two totally counts. Don't you think I torment myself too much.) I do not buy garments made from or containing non-organic cotton. I do not have many of these rules, by the way.
But now I've made a new rule. Which I'm not fully sure about yet, as it can't be as blankety as the others, so I'm still in the fine-tuning phase. The rule is: No coffee without a pull-up or chin-up.
If that sounds weird, here's the reasoning behind it. Part one: I love coffee, and as there's such things as good de-caf coffee, getting too much caffeine is no reason to stop drinking it anymore. However, I love my coffee with milk, and if I go overboard on this... it is not good. I can stomach milk very well, but having five or six or so cups of coffee in a day will, sneakily, add up to quite a few extra calories. I actually managed to put on a little extra weight again, mostly due to milk-in-coffee consumption, which irked me no end and resulted in a short return to calorie reduction earlier this year. (I did not get above normal weight, though - I've been safely below that line since two years and a week ago. Hooray!) So. I want to keep on having coffee, and the option of getting my hydration partly, or mostly, through coffee if I feel like it, but it should also be kept in check somehow. A day of only coffee should be the exception, not the rule. This sort of begs to attach something to having a brew that makes it worth thinking twice, right?
Enter part two - I need more muscle. Or better intramuscular coordination. No matter what it might be (both, probably), there are regularly moves in bouldering where I just lack the sheer physical strength... and this sucks. It sucks even more because I'm rather small and often can't reach things, so it happens again and again that I'd be able to do a move if I could just pull myself up better with the arms. I've been complaining about this for long enough now, and yes, I do have a pullup bar installed (right here in my study door)... so I could, theoretically, do some training every day.
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The bar. Looks harmless, right?
Sadly, I can be a very lazy person, and progress is sloooow in this, and not very visible. So, as a result, I am lacking a good incentive, and haven't been doing much.
Which will change now. Because coffee! I can have as much coffee as I want, provided I do a pull-up or chin-up before each cup. They do not need to be complete, but it's either a full one or to exhaustion. Which means that I do think some more before I go and fix myself a cup, and that I'm especially wary on Wednesdays as we go bouldering in the evening, and I don't want to be all worn out before we start. I'm not sure yet on how to handle weekends and coffee away from home... but for now, when I'm here, the new rule is active. And in a few weeks, I'll see where this brings me!
