IN WHICH SARAH BARR RETURNS WITH CAPITAL LETTERS

[Sarah Barr]

HELLO FRIENDS

 

After months of feeling like a binbag of old mashed potato perpetually falling down a grimy up-escalator in a dimly lit subway station, I am BACK and FANTASTIC and so very ready to completely obliterate the next six weeks. 

 

GOAL ONE: SWIM 

- Three hour-long swims a week

- As many laps full-speed as possible with good form

- Record that junk. 

- Bonus: go swim in the sea so that snorkelling gear I bought can be tested out

 

 

GOAL TWO: CREATE FRUIT SNOW LIKE SOME SORT OF TROPICAL ICE GOD

- Prepare lots of delicious, delicious kiwi, pineapple, mango, blah blah blah

- Freeze it in convenient bags

- Every day, put some in the juicer and watch as the magical blades of death turn it into fruit snow

- Eat the fruit snow

- Do not put rum in the fruit snow unless it's a Friday night. 

 

 

GOAL THREE: 1500KCAL A DAY

- YOU HAVE DONE THIS MANY TIMES BEFORE

- SHUT UP

- DO IT

- NO MORE

- NO LESS

- NOT RUM

- NO GUESSING

- WRITE IT DOWN

- WEIGH IT UP

- STOP WHINING

- AAAAAA

 

 

GOAL FOUR: STOP TALKING ABOUT GOING OUT TO DO MARINE SCIENCE, GET OFF YOUR BACKSIDE, AND GO DO SOME MARINE SCIENCE

- WHAT TIME IS IT

- I'M STILL AT WORK

- NOT RIGHT NOW

- BUT LATER

- Go to the sea, conduct a basic benthic quadrat survey by taking photos along a line transect, and calculate the diversity of the visible organisms along that transect. 

- I don't care if the data can't be used for anything

- I don't care if I can't actually identify the organisms perfectly

- The point is, it is really irritating listening to myself banging on and on about all the things I want to do, and then watching myself sitting down and knitting in front of the telly, watching Blue Planet and dreaming. Dreaming is for when you are asleep. Go DO SOMETHING.

 

 

 

AAAAAA.

 

 

 

Points Available:

 

1: +2 STA, +1 STR

2: +4 CON
3: +4 CON
4: +2 WIS, +2 CHA

 

 

Smart goals?

 

- Uncomplicated

- Quantifiable

- Achievable - nothing I haven't already shown I can do before. Just got to avoid getting lazy. 

 

 

Further motivation:

- Mama wants a drysuit

- Mama is too fat for a 5ft 3 drysuit

- Mama is too short for a fits-round-my-fat-bits drysuit

- Mama is not willing to pay for a custom drysuit

- Mama also wants a reasonably priced 7mm wetsuit. 

 

 

Monitoring:

- I found my gold star stickers

- Nothing beats a big paper chart with gold star stickers. 

 

 

 

 

THIS IS GOING TO BE FUN.

 

[deftona]

Great looking challenge, great goals. Here to cheer you on again. 

 

- NOT RUM

 

 

^ Is this really a smart goal? I mean, it's definitely SMART. But a life without rum? Unthinkable!

[ZalatwicZach]

SARAH(AAAAAAA)!! Welcome back.   I'll be following.

 

 

Here's a cute motivator:

 

[Sarah Barr]

Great looking challenge, great goals. Here to cheer you on again. 

 

 

^ Is this really a smart goal? I mean, it's definitely SMART. But a life without rum? Unthinkable!

Well, like, at least most of the calories should not be rum.

 

HI DEFTONA I HAVE MISSED YOU

 

Epsilon that is an adorable video!

 

 

PREPARATION:

- My freezer is full of prepared fruit

- My swimsuit is clean and I have many towels, but like an idiot I forgot you have to wait about 2 weeks after getting a tattoo before you go swimming, so I can start swimming on about the 5th. Walking till then! (It is a tiny basking shark, I love it, I have already sketched out the next four sharks that are to go alongside it, but I am forbidding myself from getting them until I have done a significant amount of swimming.)

- Gold star chart: my mission for this evening. 

- I have loaded up on pretend chicken and pretend mince, off to a good start with that. Should buy more veggies though, and portion out all that couscous so I don't have to remember to weigh it out each time I cook with it. 

 

 

It shall be a good challenge!

[deftona]

Well, like, at least most of the calories should not be rum.

 

 

It shall be a good challenge!

 

I think 50% rum calories is reasonable, yes?

 

HI DEFTONA I HAVE MISSED YOU

 

YOU TOO! Now don't disappear again! at least not without adding me to Facebook or something...!

[kasey]

 

feeling like a binbag of old mashed potato perpetually falling down a grimy up-escalator in a dimly lit subway station

 

Nothing beats a big paper chart with gold star stickers.

 

And with these two sentences I found a new friend.

 

Good luck with all of your goals! I'll be cheering for you

[GingaNinja]

OH MY GOD SARAH I LOVE YOU AND YOU ARE THE BEST

[Sarah Barr]

Day 1:

 

- Good: Stuck to calorie limit

- Also good: ate fruit snow (peach, pineapple, kiwi, orange and lime)

- Also very good: Walked to work. And back from work. And it didn't even sap my strength that much, so keeping that up on a thrice-weekly basis seems perfectly reasonable. (And if I can work up to doing that every day then I won't need to top up my bus pass and might put that £50 a month towards something more fun, like swimming membership somewhere quiet)

 

- Bad: Can't find my gold stars

- Remedy: I DID find googly eyes. I think it is better this way. I am spurred on to achieve my goals so my challenge board slowly becomes more and more unsettling. 

 

Overall: 100% on target so far!

[Sarah Barr]

Days 2 and 3 went well, went over calorie limit yesterday by a couple of hundred so no googly eye for that goal that day, but everything else is good. Getting a little fed up of cleaning my juicer, so I'm counting eating all of the non-blended components of the fruit snow as a pass from now on. 

 

Science goal! I'm experimenting with building a swimming pliosaur out of a remote controlled car. Once I get the concept worked out I can justify spending more than £7 on a car that'll still work with extra weight on it (i.e. a little camera). Then I'll hopefully be able to use it to observe fish. 

This weekend, though, I'm going to go to beach with ID book and try and learn to identify on sight at least one crab species, because I am terrible at crustaceans. 

[deftona]

I love your googly eyes idea and the camera on the pliosaur is a fantastic idea too! I don't know why but I got images of Robot Wars...!

[Sarah Barr]

I miss Robot Wars so much; I have hope that in this era of remaking everything and its mother we might get a new version. Imagine it with drone tech. Sir Killalot NEEDS a flying, flamethrowing tag team buddy called Dr(AG)one.

 

That and Scrapheap Challenge. 

[GingaNinja]

Oh man googly eyes freak me out!

[Sarah Barr]

Have not been posting enough. Need to post at least every two days so I stay on track!

 

Calories: Not so well. Don't think I've hit 1500 since Day 5. Meals have been okay, I'm being careful with portions, it's the snacking that's getting me this time round. I have to remember that this is the one that is going to make a difference to my size, I need to commit to this one better. 

Fruit: Slightly better than calories but still not good. 

Exercise: Great, been walking a lot. Tattoo's still not quite ready for swimming, but it'll probably be good to go by end of week. 

Science: Also great! Managed to ID three things at the beach last weekend I haven't been able to ID before, including a wrack. Need to locate a beach with more diversity and fewer weird space invading children. (Thought that child was maybe coming over to ask "what is that book you are using to identify those things?" or something along those lines and I'd be all "yes child, this is a kind of kelp, behold how revolting it is, learn about the sea and become a biologist, yes", and one day they'd become a biologist and thank me in a prestigious award acceptance speech, but no, they just wanted to stand literally only 20cm away and shout unrelated things to their parent who was also far, far too close. THERE IS A WHOLE BEACH, please go shout over there and not in my ear.)

 

Things to do to stay on track:

- Writing things down

- Putting my frozen fruit in the fridge before work so it's blindingly obvious and more defrosted when I get home. 

- Buy easy breakfast foods. I should get cereal bars or porridge sachets, something where the calories are already counted and portioned out for me and I can take to work if I'm running late.

- MAKE YOUR PACKED LUNCH GO MAKE IT NOW MAKE YOUR PACKED LUNCH.

- Stop adding healthy snacks to my packed lunch box. I have no self control, I will eat that dried mango within an hour of getting in, and then I'll end up going to Starbucks in the afternoon. Better to pack frozen-quorn-and-dried-couscous, and holding off on eating that for as long as possible, so when I inevitably get hungry around 2pm I can eat a proper meal and not snack. 

 

A few challenges ago my life goal was to post something new I'd learned about the natural world every day, and that helped me keep updated more regularly, so I'm putting that into effect again; this time it has to be sea-specific. Here is a fact!

 

- The Portuguese Dogfish may or may not be the deepest-living resident shark in Britain.  

- Shark Week tells me that the Portuguese Dogfish is the deepest-living shark we know of to date (I take this with a pinch of salt).

- And the Shark Trust factsheet lists it as having a range in Britain, and a range of up to 3700m deep, which is far, far deeper than most other deepwater sharks with its range in British waters (usually around 2000m max),
- EXCEPT FOR the Great Lanternshark which has been recorded at 4,500m

- But that's "on the lower continent rise of the northeast Atlantic" and does not say if that includes Britain, and I'm damned if I'm going to spend any longer looking for the paper they cited, it's been 10 minutes already and it's half past five in the morning. 

- Here is a picture of the Portuguese Dogfish from the Canadian Shark Research Lab:

WHO. IS. A. BIG. BLOBBY. CUTIE. 

YES YOU ARE

YESYOUARE

Look at that blorpy Vogonic face. 

They're a bit less blobby when they're in water and presumably when they're at depth. And they only get to a max length of a metre or so, so I feel justified in calling it adorable.

 

That's another thing: it's half past five in the morning. I have been awake and buzzing about like a wasp since about 4:30. I keep finding myself drinking sugarfree energy drinks. While I'm sure my body's grateful for those added B vitamins, pretty sure it is messing with my sleep cycle. I managed to give up caffeine completely for a while, not so long ago, and got past the point where I felt like a zombie to feeling like a normal person again. Don't think I want to do that to myself again, but I can certainly wean myself off anything stronger than tea. 

 

Look at that flippy flappy taaail! 

Stop it.

Yes.

 

Morning everyone!

[Syren]

Are you a marine biologist in training too? Exciting!

I've been helping a friend with her research on a dogfish species in the Gulf of Mexico -- they are not quite as vogonic but kinda derpy

http://cdn2.arkive.org/media/84/84B40279-4527-4592-BE27-03987F769400/Presentation.Large/Shortspine-spurdog.jpg

[Sarah Barr]

I want to honk that dogfish's nose! :3

 

I did a BSc in pure ecology, kind of regret not figuring out I really wanted to do marine biology before using up my free tuition. Trying to wedge my foot in the door of anything even vaguely related to marine biology, now!

 

Things!

- Walked 

- Ate 500kcal too much

- Fruited

- scienced.

 

Fact!

- At least half of the "what on earth is this blob?" questions on the marine life group I follow on FB are assorted detached parts of Barrel Jellyfish. This has led to at least an entire hour of my life yesterday rifling through dichotomous keys of salps and sea gooseberries and friggin' worms going 

 

I hate barrel jellyfish.

[Syren]

I raise you Stomolophus-- the cannonball jellyfish

 

I worked in a marine lab for a year where we did studies on gelatinous zooplankton -- all of the snotty blobs that wander the ocean.

 

Have you tried internships? You can get a lot of experience that way -- pay is not always great, but you can learn a lot.

 

Nothing wrong with ecology either -- my biology BS had a heavy focus in ecology so it helps to see big picture concepts

 

Worms are the worst to key out!

[Sarah Barr]

I should look into internships! Tricky trying to find something I can do around a full time job, but I'm sure there's something. Also made a crewbay profile along the lines of "I AM SCIENTIST GIVE ME BERTH ON SHIP THEN I DO SCIENCE. No, I don't have any boat experience. No, I don't have any of the safety certificates. No, I can't afford to pay my way. I do make a pretty good veggie chilli though." I have not had any replies. 

 

That is a very pretty jellyfish! 

 

Challenge has been going well, still struggling keeping the calories down in the evenings but I've managed to avoid adding grated cheese to everything and I'm maybe averaging 1700kcal. Not 1500kcal, and I doubt I'll see much weight loss, but it's much better than the 2300/2500 I was eating before. 

 

Still walking lots. Tattoo is very slowly thinking about being healed, but I'm not going to sign up for a swim membership until next payday, so I have emergency money if I miss the ferry going to/from Coll in a couple of weeks. I AM SO EXCITED. I am going to ID so many things. And maybe get enough sun to tan over the veins you can see in my arms. It's like a tube map. It is a tube map. Kind of. Tubes. 

 

Did not get out to beach last weekend, and I'm pretty sure "watching shark week recordings" can't count as actual science, but I've learned ID skills I didn't know before so I'm counting that as a pass. 

 

Fruit's been fine, but I need to accept that I am never going to prepare whole pineapples and buy the frozen stuff. 

 

Facts!

 

Not going to do facts. 

 

Maybe tomorrow though!

[deftona]

Excellent work, Sarah and Coll looks so beautiful. I am super jealous! 

[Sarah Barr]

Packed for camping! It will be nice having that week's meals all weighed out and prepped, and I'll have to hike for five miles to get to the nearest shop to eat any junk. I may be ready to scream at the sight of dried soya mince by the end of the week but that is what the pub is for.

 

This week is going well, actually finding this challenge alright. It is still a challenge reining in the food, but I'm beginning to get used to it. Plenty fruit, plenty walking. Been feeling quite perky the last couple of days, I've got lots of energy during the day and I think it's partly down to being that little bit more active.

 

Been a hell of a fast week though. Thought it was Tuesday today. It is not. I am happy.

[Sarah Barr]

Week three went alright! Faltered at the weekend though, I missed low tide so no science. Plenty fruit though. Plenty exercise. Calories weren't so great this weekend; I blame not getting out and being bored. 

 

Plotting ways to stay dry while camping, because forecast has been steadily getting wetter. 

 

Week Four shall be spot on. Yes.

[Sarah Barr]

I am extremely irritated, the only time the forecast predicts a change from the rain while I'm camping will be when it also thunders. THUNDERS.

 

Still going. Will hide in pub for thunderstorm.

 

Grumble.

 

My brother was over for Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday, and he bought two dozen doughnuts, and I have no self control, so Week Four diet is not spot on by any means.

Walking still okay.

Fruit not okay, I need fruit, I am feeling feeble. And cranky.

Science okay though, I'm watching Coursera lectures on animal behaviour which are doing my critical thinking skills some good. 

[Sarah Barr]

What year is it? What week of the challenge is it, five? 

 

Coll was fun but very wet, came home early because while I'm sure I could have sucked it up and endured the gales and the lashing rain and the midges, there wasn't much point in doing so since I wouldn't be able to do the science I was hoping to do anyway. Did see lots of people I knew when I was a small child though, so it was quite lovely anyway. Did not see basking sharks; did get a new book on basking sharks, and I tried to do what ID I could, so I'm counting my science goal as a pass. 

 

Walked so many miles. At least ten in two and a half days, pretty proud of that. Definitely counting exercise as accomplished.

 

Looking forward to getting paid tomorrow so I can buy some fruit; haven't had any fresh stuff in about a week so I really can't count that goal as met. 

 

Calories are odd - I'd budgeted my allowance for holiday fine, but didn't bank on a) completely forgetting to eat one day, and b ) being invited for dinner by my old teacher the next, so maybe it's all balanced out and I've been watching portions since coming back. Honestly, though, I'm sure I'm not coming anywhere near under my target. I find it much easier when I can just buy a pot of instant porridge, a tub of soup, a bottle of smoothie, and it's all counted out for me, but that's a pretty expensive long term solution and I can never afford that at the end of the month. Payday tomorrow though; going to knuckle down and cook a stack of calorie-counted freezer meals when I next get the chance this week. 

 

Ah, it's week six now. Final push! It's been a pretty mediocre challenge, and I've mostly just scraped passes where I've passed in the second half, but you know what? I've made it to week six without catastrophe, and that is much better than I've been doing the past few months. Happy with that. 

[Sarah Barr]

Challenge wrap up:

 

- Pretty mediocre challenge indeed; but mediocre is not failure!

- Exercise: Plenty walking done and tattoo is healed enough to handle swimming as soon as I find the money for membership. I award myself an A, because I have spent more time exercising than I set out to do. 

- Calories: Did fail this one. Not surprised. I sometimes wonder if I'm ever going to find a food reduction concept that will ever form a habit for me. Not sure what to do next challenge. F. 

- Fruit: Sterling effort for first two weeks, I ate about two pieces of fruit the last two weeks. Awarding self a D. 

- Science: Have done some every week as planned. A. 

 

Average: What's that, about a C? My quantifying method was about as successful as my calorie counting method there. 

Aw, come on Sarah, you didn't even lay out your potential points! So what would that be...

- Maximums of +4/4 Sta for walking,

- and +2/2 Wis for science,

- then +0/5 Con for calories

- and +1/4 Con for Fruit intake.

 

Ok! And going up a level. Just. 

 

Next challenge:

 

RIGHT, SALLY, MON YERSEL'. 

 

- Join an accountability group. I miss my Doodlies! And I have done absolutely nothing on the forums except suggest a crock pot recipe this entire challenge. 

 

- Food goal for next challenge was going to be getting into the habit of writing everything down but honestly, I think I want to give Intermittent Fasting another try. One big meal after work. Plentiful cold water at other times.

 

- Exercise: Need to build on the walking, because the walking feels like nothing now, I don't even walk home for exercise any more, I do it because why would I pay bus fare for a 45 minute walk? I'm never going to remember to commit to a weekly hike. Walking to work as well is the logical next step. 

 

- Nutrition: If I get any more sluggish I will sprout eye stalks and a saddle and I'm blaming the absence of fruit from my face in the past couple of weeks for that. The One Big Meal must have five portions of freggies in it, and large quantities of egregiously micronutrient-deficient carbohydrates need not apply. 

 

- Life goal: Sundays will be Get Ready For Another Week Day, with a checklist for cooking and housework. What joy. But I need to make sure I have meals prepped so I don't graze on things. I'm in the middle of an Insular art style basking shark painting which may turn out to be the most complicated thing I've ever tried to paint, and am therefore liable to just faff about fiddling with knotwork in all my spare time. Need to make sure I designate some No Painting time so if I do faff about six nights a week, I'm still all organised for the next week.

 

- Other prep: In order to avoid temptation while getting used to IF, I think it would be best if I have my partner hide my debit card from me and only return it to me for the Sunday food shop. Oh, and I should turn all my grazeable foods into nut roast or something.

 

 

 

Okay, bring on next challenge!