Keeping motivated and my enhanced sense of smell (Day 10)

Exam results

Checking my weight, body fat, water and muscle percentages first thing in the morning is like turning up at school results week to find out my exam results. There’s a level of excitement and nervousness about it. After all the hard work I put into the workout the day before I wonder if I let myself down by eating too much, or not eating properly. Recording my progress on a daily basis has been a huge help in motivation and understanding how my body responds to certain foods and exercises. As well as body stats, recording how many reps I did a certain exercise; how long it took me to walk two laps around Valentines Park; and how long I did cardio on the cross trainer motivate me to push harder and beat previous records. By recording and trying to push myself further beyond previous personal records I can insure that I am progressing with my goals.

Coke

I have worked out in the past without recording what I have been doing each session and I have found my motivation during each session as well as the motivation to stick with it overall hit and miss. By recording what I achieve and how my body responds I am finding myself in a position to experiment and see what works best for me. We are all different with different body types. Some of us can eat crap; drink Coca Cola as though it were breast milk to a newborn baby, yet stay skinny, whilst some of us (me) can no longer fit in our jeans after two days of eating the same as the skinny person who is addicted to coke.

So far I have not found the food aspect of this detox hard. As long I have a variety of nutritious food in the flat at all times and don’t go out hungry I do fine walking past takeaway shops and curry houses no problem. If I go out hungry however, then it’s a different story! Within days of starting the detox, I noticed my sense of smell intensify. I can smell bad smells like body odour more intensely and I can smell people’s cologne a mile away. If they come close (within say 5 metres), their scent, good or bad can be overwhelming! If it’s really strong it hits me like a wave and nearly knocks me off my feet. So, naturally, this means walking past a place that’s selling delicious food whilst hungry can be very tempting.

Yeh you

Having a more enhanced sense of smell is actually quite an interesting experience. Normally I would just walk around in my own head or at most explore my surroundings visually. Now, on top of my visual perception, my sense of smell is far more pronounced. I am literally walking around the streets of East London experiencing them olfactorily. I’ll sit next to a homeless unbathed person on a bus and it would seem as though I am sat next to a rotting corpse. I’ll walk past a 12 year old Romanian gypsy bad boy with a silver earring and a silver chain and smell his Jean Paul Gaultier aftershave ten metres away. As he walks towards me and crosses me the scent grows into a pungent tsunami wave overwhelming me, making me cough as I inhale it through my mouth and nose into my lungs. I’ll cough to desperately gasp for air. I’ll be ten metres behind a chubby English girl in a tracksuit smoking a fag and her potential lung cancer feels contagious as I inadvertently take in her smoke. Though I am a smoker, who, prior to the detox was smoking a few everyday, whilst detoxing, the smell of cigarette smoke smells like an unattractive cancerous poison. I feel like the main character in the movie Perfume.

Speaking of lungs I’ve started to notice my chest feeling clogged up with some sort of liquid. At first I was a bit disappointed as I’m expecting to feel fantastic as a result of this detox. It’s day 10 and last time I did a detox I felt fantastic at day 10. That has not happened for me yet. After looking into the effects of detoxing I’ve discovered this symptom is a normal response to detoxification.

My weight stayed constant at 69.1kg. However my Body fat dropped 0.5% to 18%. My Body Water increased to 56.3% and my Body Muscle increased by 0.7% to 42.6%.

In the morning I went out and fetched some lemons. I was tempted by the aroma of Subway again and decided to buy a wholemeal salad sandwich. As I was running out of dairy products in the flat I said yes to the offer to put cheese in the sandwich. I ate the sandwich with a hot lemon juice drink when I returned home.

Chinese rice with Tofu and Almonds

Green lentil curry

For lunch my wife made delicious Chinese rice with brown rice, soy sauce, sesame seed oil, peas, sweet corn, carrots, tofu and almonds. The brown rice, almonds and tofu provided complimentary forms of protein. I felt hungry again a few hours later and ate the Chinese rice with a green lentil curry my wife made. I added almonds and a garnish of fresh lemon zest which made it taste even better!

I went out for my workout quite late again. I had a fantastic workout hitting 160 lat pull downs for my first set and beating my 2 lap record by 1 min 17 seconds by completing them in 57 min 2 sec. I also extended my cross trainer cardio to 30 minutes for the first time.

Bat

There are definitely bats in Valentines Park, Ilford. I was enjoying my cardio until 20 minutes into it a bat flew with a metre of my head! For a few minutes I was wondering if I had the wrong decision in wearing a red t-shirt. I wondered if bats are attracted to red the same as bulls are or because it’s the colour of blood! Despite the bats I continued training for the full 30 minutes.

Why did the rat cross the road?

The journey home was eventful. I was feeling good walking home until I came across a mouse about to cross my path, but then it turned 180 degrees and hid behind a bus stand I had to walk past. If that wasn’t bad enough to give me the creeps, about 5 metres further on I had an awkward moment with a rat. You know when you’re walking down the street, and then someone needs to cross your path and walk into, say, a shop to your left. Neither of you are sure who should go first. You both try to offer the way to the other, or, you both try to go through yourself while you make the other wait. Well this dilemma happened between me and this rat. I just dodged stepping on the mouse, and then this rat wanted to cross my path. In my mind I was like “Before you sir rat” and I waved him through. He was in two minds too as if he was giving me way. Then when he realised I was letting him go through he crossed the path into the park, where he joined who I assume were three of his pals waiting for him to cross the road to them. As I took a few more steps further another rat darted across the path in front of me. Bloody selfish rodent! He was nowhere near as considerate as the other fella! After playing hopscotch with the mouse and rats and without catching Weil’s disease, I made it safely back home.

At home I had a fresh vegetable juice (cucumber, beetroot, celery, carrot and ginger root) and protein shake. For my evening meal I had a corn on the cob and then green lentils with almonds and lemon zest.