Health and Wellness

Sleep

My sleep has been consistently good throughout the week, with 80+ sleep scores across the board. The only exception was Saturday night after attending an Arabic boat party on the Hudson River. I’ve noticed an interesting pattern: the timing of my last meal directly affects whether I wake up during the night to use the bathroom. If I eat after 6 PM, I almost always end up getting up in the middle of the night.

Diet

I’m still following the MacroFactor app precisely and seeing excellent progress. I hit a new bodyweight low of 179.9 lbs last Friday, which feels like a significant milestone. The only deviation was the late-night Korean BBQ I enjoyed after Saturday’s boat party—lots of calories but absolutely delicious, and I have zero regrets. I’m planning to reduce calories slightly next week to offset the excess.

Exercise

This marked the end of a 4-week training block, and I continue to make great progress in Muay Thai. My stamina has improved significantly, with Friday’s session being one of the most challenging I’ve ever experienced: warm-up, bag drills, 4 rounds of sparring, 3 rounds of pads, more bag work, and abs. My body was absolutely destroyed afterward, and it felt phenomenal.

For weightlifting, pull-ups felt particularly strong this week. I managed 3 sets of 8 reps with an additional 15 lbs. However, I started experiencing some elbow pain toward the end of the week, so I removed a few exercises. This is actually a good sign that my body needs a deload week, which is exactly what I’m doing now: 4 Muay Thai sessions and 2 light lifting sessions.

I also went for my first outdoor run in ages, and it felt amazing! I completed an easy 3-mile run to my local park and back, maintaining a heart rate between 120-140 BPM. It wasn’t particularly difficult, and I felt light and springy throughout. The weight loss and improved Muay Thai conditioning definitely helped here. I’m planning to incorporate more running into my next training block, so stay tuned for updates.

Learning and Building

I finished the Linear & Logistic Regression course in Andrew Ng’s ML specialization and started the second course on Neural Networks. However, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my overall productivity this week. I procrastinated and wasted considerable time on YouTube and other low-value media. Even during focused Pomodoro sessions, I often found myself browsing Reddit to research cheat meals or following other random thoughts that popped into my head. I also wasted time transitioning between tasks and allowed my attention to be hijacked too easily.

Here are a few strategies I want to implement:

  1. Create a solid to-do list the night before
  2. Limit the list to no more than 3-4 items
  3. Order tasks by priority
  4. Avoid checking my phone first thing in the morning

Personal

Not much to report on the personal front besides Saturday’s boat party. It was wonderful listening to Arabic music from my childhood with close friends—a nice nostalgic break from the usual routine.