Wrestling With Rest

Today is my scheduled rest day.

I still walk to and from class but I don’t go to the gym and that can be hard for me.  I feel like I’m cheating, like I’m not doing my best, when in reality I know that I am actually doing my body good.  Our bodies need to rest and recuperate and if I was being honest with myself, I have been really sore lately.  I needed today.  While I realize this on a logical, cognitive level I still struggle with having a rest day.  I fight off thoughts of being “lazy” and such all day and I tend to see food differently on these days too because I know I won’t have those 300+ extra calories to eat.  Needless to say, I have a lot of mental work to do to be alright with rest days.  Good to report though that I did indeed rest.  I also iced my shins.  They were definitely crying out for it.  In terms of rest day food, this is what I munched on:

Breakfast was a chocolate protein breakfast cake topped with homemade sunbutter, maple, and chia seeds.

Lunch was a big bowl of four kinds of cereal (wheat puffs, Chocolate and Peanut Butter Puffins, chocolate crispy oats, and cinni-mini crunch) mixed with fat free plain yogurt that had chocolate PB2 incorporated.  There were also chia seeds in there too.

I snacked later on a mountain mix Mojo bar before Dysmorphology class.

Dinner consisted of some leftover eggplant coconut curry (great even the second time around) and a half fluffernutter. To the uninitiated, a fluffernutter is a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich.  I must say it’s much better with “real” peanut butter but I made it was PB2 and it wasn’t terrible.

Dessert was the happy combination of a peanut-scotch banana muffin and rocky road ice cream with some caramel on top.

In terms of classes and such, as you all well know, Thursday is my long day.  Foundations class was sad to say the least because it was a discussion of termination of pregnancy.  The big difference here that I feel the need to express to you all is that in the field of genetic counseling we are typically talking about terminations of WANTED pregnancies.  Typically these women have received the terrible news that their child has a lethal condition or some sort of abnormality.  This decision is never an easy one.  In situations like this, with the addition of the “wanted” factor, it can become so muddled for the patient.  They have been so invested in this pregnancy, they have worked for it perhaps in the case of IVF patients, and now something is so awfully wrong.  So, yea, it was a sad morning.

The next thing on the agenda was preclinic conference followed by journal club that centered around an article about counseling adolescent prenatal patients.  We had some great discussion but by the time we finished my poor behind was almost numb from sitting in the same chair for two hours!  Dysmorphology class was all about the abdomen and external genitalia.  Julie, a fellow first year, did a great job talking about all of the malformations but the pictures were all fairly yucky.  She really couldn’t have helped that though and I acknowledged this at the time.  Now we all just need to start studying for the midterm next week in this class.  God help us all.  The vocab list alone is terribly overwhelming.

Now that it’s fairly late in the evening I’m thinking that I have worked enough on my role play prep to watch some TV.  Can anyone say Disney channel??

Aladdin is calling me.  I’m about to bust out some spontaneous songs and then hit the sheets to get some good sleep before heading to clinic at 7:30am tomorrow morning. Sleep well my friends!

Questions: Do you take rest days?
If you do, does it change your perception of food on that day?