Great Sleep, Better Food, And Decent Fitness
This is part of my 2024 personal goals review. By splitting the review into smaller blogs, I make it easier for readers to skim the main blog and easier for me to reference specific section directly from any focus area.
In descending order, my fitness priorities are:
Good sleep
Good food
Good exercise
✅ Good Sleep
In 2024, I improved my sleep quality by working with a sleep therapist. He helped me identify triggers, such as late-night work and unresolved thoughts from meetings. To address these, I adopted strategies like journaling and setting reminders for unfinished tasks before bed. I also adjusted my bedroom’s temperature and optimized my water intake (minimal water after 2pm) to reduce night wakings.
Samsung Galaxy Wearable Data in 2024:
Bedtime: 10:31 pm
Sleep duration: 6 hours 31 minutes
Wake-up time: 5:08 am
Sleep score: 77
While my sleep score improved, my duration slightly decreased compared to last year. In 2025, I aim to go to bed earlier to enhance both my score and duration.
✅ Disciplined Dining
Breaking my dining goals into weekday and weekend habits allowed me to focus on specific challenges.
Weekdays: On weekdays, I consistently maintained clean eating, achieving this habit 221 days (96% success rate). Meal prep helped simplify this 10x.
Weekends: Weekends were more challenging, but breaking down “Disciplined Dining” into 5 components helped track and adhere to it better. So, now I can be a Feasting Foodie without making the Fitness Fanatic guilty. Progress on those goals:
Ordered one large dish per adult: 95% success – Small plates made this easier to achieve.
Pre-planned restaurants or occasions: 90% success.
Tasted, not feasted, on dessert: 89% success. Easy to mark this success once i stopped eating desserts. Been 6 months 0 desserts.
Declined extra servings from social pressure: 88% success.
Ate slowly: 82% success – This remains my most challenging area.
🌓 Build Muscle Injury-Free
This year, I exercised or stretched on 339 out of 366 days.
In March, an injury due to over-training disrupted my exercise routine for 4+ months. Later, I traveled for 5 weeks for work, spent 3 weeks in India, and couldn’t work out on days my wife had work travels/events. These trips made it challenging for me to exercise. Some days, I prioritized sleep over exercise, as I value paying off sleep debt more than working out. I have an exercise routine for my India trips and work-trip hotel stays, but I prioritized sleep.
I counted any of the following activities as a workout day:
Weight training
Cardio (running, HIIT, or rowing machine)
Dance classes using Steezy
Long stretches or walking (on rest days or during injuries)
Habit statistics:
Warm-ups and stretching: 92% success rate
Workouts: 85% success rate
PFE and neck stretches: 93% success rate
I did not improve on my metrics of weight or volume of compound movements.
I also slided back on some counter metrics:
I kept within my BMI target of 24.
However, my waist measurement reached 74 cm, slightly above my target of 73 cm.
My stomach line target was 79 cm or below, but I ended up at 80 cm.
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