Updated Day in the Life (everything from work, to food, to workouts…)

In November last year I wrote my first “life in a day” post (which are my absolute favourites to read/watch). Things have changed a little bit since then – my diet has changed (less sugar, less red meat, tons more water, fish and “lean meats”), my home workout has become a gym workout, work has gotten a little bit busier (November was more of a Christmas wind-down period) and I’ve become more consistent with my blogging which means I’ve started dedicating more time to my online ventures. Follow the jump to have a nose around my updated daily routine…

6.40 – 7.00 AM: Wake
How late I tend to wake up shifts throughout the week. On Monday, you’ll probably find me up at 6.40am on the dot, but by Friday, that snooze button could be have clicked so many times that I don’t manage to actually roll out of bed until 7.10am at the earliest. In my last day in the life I shared that typically upon wake up I’d do a short home workout, but my workouts have now shifted to the evening to allow myself a few more beautiful hours of sleep. I’ll be honest, usually when I wake up the first thing I do is check Instagram. Then I’ll probably scroll through Twitter as I’m brushing my teeth, perhaps a bit of Facebook as I take that first pee of the day, then post shower I just tend to catch up on new YouTube videos I may have missed whilst I’m getting ready; occasionally (just now and again), I’ll use the time to check through a blog post I may be hoping to publish that evening. By 7.45/7.50am or so I’m pretty much set and ready to go – I’ll just pack my gym bag, a protein shake and a cheeky Heck chicken sausage which I slap into my breakfast from the canteen for the road. I live ~15 minutes walk from the office, so I tend to walk to work every single day. I used to get the DLR on most days out of pure laziness, but once I got my Fitbit I became obsessed with hitting my 10k steps goal which made walking to work a necessity. Walking is actually such an easy way to get some light exercise in – you can burn up to 100 calories on a short 15 minute walk – it’s so effortless but so good for you.

8.00 – 8.10 AM: Hit the desk
When I first started working I’d get up between 6.30 – 6.40am quite sharply to make it in for 7.45am. Over time that schedule shifted, I became a bit lazier and before you know it that 7.45am had shifted into 8.30am at my desk at the earliest. Recently I’ve tried to meet the two points in the middle and get the work around the 8:00am mark, this was for a number of reasons, one of them being that I feel a bit more settled and organised in my mind when I get into work a little earlier. Now I won’t bore you with the mechanics of my job but what I will say is that the day starts either one of two ways: either i) I’m hella busy, I already know I’m hella busy, so as soon as I hit the desk my fingers hit the keyboard and I start getting on with work ASAP. I don’t even clear through my emails. Or ii) I’m reasonably busy, which gives me time in the morning to sift through my e-mails, write a nice cute little to do list and feel all relaxed and sh*t. It’s varies, but is usually the former.

Breakfast: I tend to eat breakfast pretty soon after arriving at work, so almost always before 9:00am. Food wise, I’ll eat 1 slice of toasted wholemeal bread + 2 poached eggs + 1 Heck chicken sausage that I cooked at home (my work only sells pork sausages and although these are pretty yummy, I try to lay off the red meat as much as possible). On the weekends, for breakfast I eat 2 protein Wheetabix biscuits + hazelnut milk + 1 tbsp of nutella. Simple – but tasty af.

12:00 PM: Lunchtime
What do I do at work? It varies. Some days we’re working on pitch books, some days we’re pitching through blasting out tons of emails, some days we may be on an investor roadshow, some days I may be working with other teams on other stuff. You can’t always predict how a day will end up. One thing that usually almost always occurs around the same time is lunchtime. I’ll watch that clock super closely and as soon as it becomes a “socially acceptable” lunch time (i.e. 12), I am OUT. Most days I tend to eat my food at the desk, not only because we’re busy a lot of the time but honestly, sometimes I find it a lot less effort just to eat lunch at my desk and just… get on with it. I have to be some sort of state of “chill” to be up to taking that 45 minutes ish break off the desk to grab a bite with my friends, but I’d say at least once every few weeks we do go ahead and do this and have a nice little catch up gossip sesh. For lunch I tend to hit up Itsu almost every day for sushi (I get their “super salmon light”) – I eat a lot of fish which is ironic because for almost my whole life I thought fish was disgusting. If I’m not at Itsu then I’ll take on the Keb; on Thursday’s Cally Munchy is out with some Afro fusion jollof rice based meals and on Friday I’m a sucker for some Vietnamese ka prow chicken with brown rice.

Snacks: My go-tos are yoghurt rice cakes, sweet chilli prawn snackers from Itsu, my chocolate smooth protein shake with hazelnut milk from Myprotein and finally some easy peeler mini oranges.

7:30 – 9:00 PM: Hometime
On a very good day I’ll be out of the office by 7:00pm, but typically I tend to leave between half 7 and 8:00pm and slightly later (call it 9:00pm) if it’s been a bit of a busier day (usually Mondays). That said, things can easily shift to the extreme end of the spectrum (and I mean, passing into a whole new day) if we’re working on a pitch, on a US deal (as New York is 5hrs behind), or something comes up last minute, but those days are a little bit more rare.

+20 minutes: Gym time
Guys, we’re coming up to my one year “health and fitness-aversary” and I can’t wait to do a full break down post on how the year has gone and what I’ve learned. I realised this recently because I got an invite to a summer work gala, the same gala 1 year ago that made me finally realise I needed a serious change in lifestyle. These days, I’m training 5 days a week split as follows:

• 2x days of legs & glutes (sometimes I split this into hamstrings/glutes or quads/glutes but typically I mix these all together including calves)
• 1x day of just HIIT (you’ll usually find me bouncing around a Reebok box doing plyometrics)
• 1x day of upper body (usually back and shoulders) + some ab workouts
• 1x day of HIIT + abs
• 2x rest days
• I start every workout with 10 minutes of HIIT doing either: sprints on the treadmill, an inclined walk on the treadmill, intervals on the stairmaster or intervals with a skipping rope

I usually spend any where from 1 hour to 1.5 hours at the gym. I try to limit it to 1.5 hours because I have the tendency to get carried away and, as much as I love it, there’s a lot more to life than the gym.

+1.5 hours: Hometime, again…
Dinner: For dinner I tend to eat reggae reggae chicken, rice and veggies; fish (usually mackerel), rice and vegges; turkey bolognese with wholemeal spaghetti; or a chicken and vegetable stir fry with soy sauce. I have one cheat meal a week which is usually with Levi on Friday after work – on Fridays I’m/we’re out of the office by around 6:00pm and we’ll either hit up Shake Shack, Byron, GBK or Thunderbirds in Canary Wharf, and this Friday just past we hit up KFC which I’m still salivating over. I once tried to keep my cheat meals to once every two weeks but actually felt like I was punishing myself – that one, guiltless, fatty and juicy meal a week is just necessary.

10:00/11:00 PM – 12:00 AM: Online work
Finally, in the evening, I try to get as much “online work” done as possible. I used to try and do the absolute most but then I realised I was just way to exhausted after work, the gym, cooking dinner and washing up and that it was best for me just to focus on one task a evening. This could be replying to e-mails, editing and/or publishing a new blog post, working on other general blog updates or working on other projects behind the scenes. Most of this work is usually done on the weekends – but a little bit a day can go a long way.

12:30 – 1:00 AM: Sweet, sweet sleep
According to my Fitbit, I tend to get around 5.5 hours of sleep a day, and on the weekends it’s around 7-8hrs.