#oneaday Day 373: Saturday

Remember when the original Phantasy Star Online wouldn't allow you to type the word "Saturday" because it had "turd" in the middle of it? Well, that pretty much sums up how today started. I woke up late, in a terrible mood, not really feeling I could cope like anything even vaguely strenuous to my mental wellbeing.

Thankfully, not long after I awoke, it was time to record a new episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, and that cheered me up considerably. I always have a wonderful time talking about games with my good buddy and podcasting partner Chris Caskie, so I'm forever thankful to him for keeping me sane on a pretty regular basis. I hope I occasionally do the same for him.

The rest of the day consisted of playing some Horizon Chase Turbo (which we'll be talking about at length on the podcast) and finishing off Pokémon Sword and Shield's postgame story (which we'll also be talking about at length on the podcast) followed by reading a bit of the How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? manga, which released this week and arrived on my doorstep yesterday. (Literally, the Amazon delivery person didn't bother to put it through the letterbox or leave a calling card; I only happened to find it because I'd received a notification that it had been "handed to resident" when in fact it had just been left behind a flower pot. But oh well.)

So far the Dumbbell manga appears to be remarkably close to the anime… or I guess technically it's the other way around, since despite the English manga coming out now, it preceded the anime in its original Japanese incarnation. Even a lot of the weird stylistic stuff the anime did, such as randomly switching to what I tend to think of as "exaggerated shounen style" during moments of particularly exaggerated reactions to something, are present in the manga — though Machio doesn't appear to be quite as ridiculously huge on paper as he was on screen.

I've been up and down a bit on this new keto diet. It's definitely working — I've lost a decent amount of weight already, and we haven't been doing it long — but I'm feeling days when I'm a bit lacking in energy. We picked up some vitamin and mineral supplements this week which will hopefully help alleviate those issues in the short term, then apparently over the longer period your body just "adjusts" naturally to all this, so it gets easier. Which is good.

One positive thing I've noticed about it so far is that my appetite is considerably decreased from what it has been in the past — and that appetite, combined with a tendency to "stress eat" or "comfort eat" during periods of anxiety and depression (which are quite frequent) is one of the main contributing factors to the mess my body is in. Not long after starting this diet, however, I found that having a chia seed pudding (not as disgusting as it sounds) in the morning followed by some sausage and eggs at work keeps me pretty topped up until mid-to-late afternoon in terms of food, and even then I'm not super-hungry for the most part. I don't find myself desperate for dinner or anything — I am, to be honest, happy with a nice pack of almonds or something until a little later in the evening.

So that's all going well. I look forward to seeing the appropriate numbers continue to go down, particularly once I manage to get myself back to the gym. I meant to do it this week, but I was feeling a little too exhausted both emotionally and physically, so I figured it best to continue adjusting to this new diet and how my body processes it. I'm definitely going to give it a go on Monday, though, and I'm hoping the combination of Dumbbell and Plus-Sized Elf, both of which are health-conscious manga with helpful advice within, will provide me with some much-needed motivation. I also bought myself some noise-cancelling headphones so hopefully I can blot out the obnoxious music the gym pipes in at all times and listen to something actually enjoyable while doing whatever I do!

As you might have surmised, I didn't quite feel up to vlogging today, but I'll make some time to do it tomorrow, probably before I get cracking on editing the new podcast episode.

Hope you're having a good weekend! Take care out there.