Workouts & vegan eats: week 1

I am starting this new series to keep track of my new experiment.

Note that this week I was jet lagged 90% of the time, yet when I am not feeling extremely sleepy/dizzy, I was energetic and feeling great.

Monday: 6 miles easy run. The weather was very cool, 21C when I started and it felt super nice. 20 min upper body.

Tuesday: 8 miles, slow and easy. Again good weather, clear, windy, cool. So rare in Jakarta. 20 min lower body and 10 min abs (with Sofia).

Wednesday: run workout (3 miles easy, 5 sets of 90/60/30 seconds moderate with 1 min easy in between intervals and 2 min in between sets, 3 miles cool down). It was harder than it should have been because instead of 3 miles warm up, I had 5.5 miles because I forgot to start the workout in Garmin. It also felt harder because it was hotter than previous two days and I woke up 2:30am that day. 10 min stretch.

Thursday: 7 miles. The accumulated fatigue from jet lag took a toll on me plus the workout the day before. Felt tired on this run. 16 min runners’ strength workout.

Friday: 45 min vinyasa flow.

Saturday: 14 miles (5 miles easy, 5 miles at 7/8 effort, 5 miles easy). I was feeling good until mile 11 or so. Felt I could’t breath well, stopped, checked air quality and it has worsened, so I ran home and finish the run on the TM. 10 min stretching

Sunday: rest as we will be flying out at 4am.

Simple vegan meals:

breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. Oatmeal with flax, cacao powder and organic protein powder (making sure I get 30g of protein per meal), topped with frozen berries.

Super easy combo: air fried tofu, boiled broccoli, pumpkin, sweet potato fries

I made red lentil crepes and baked ratatouille, super yum! Also had some of family’s bamboo mushroom winter melon soup.

using up all leftovers: lentil crepe, ratatouille, canned chickpea and tofu

typical dinner: veg and tofu, boiled pumpkin as dessert.

Blood sugar observations:

• jet lag makes BS spike higher and averaged higher
• as I recover from jet lag, my BS response to meals is milder and goes back to baseline faster (usually within 1.5 hrs)
• after a hard run, BS spikes higher with the same meal
• Lentils and pumpkin don’t cause large BS swing while sweet potato does
• Fruits (papaya tried this week) cause fast BS increase but comes down quickly (within the hour)
• With jet lag, my BS stayed higher than normal during the first half of the sleep, only coming down past midnight. Without jet lag, there was no non-food related increase while I was sleeping.

Other observations:

• I feel satisfied with my meals, full but not stuffed.
• Digestion has been great with no bloating
• My fiber consumption is up to 50s.
• Putting together meals is actually easy as long as I have staples food that I like (broccoli, tofu, pumpkin).