We're pretty opinionated, if you hadn't realised already, and sometimes we get the urge to stray from the content calendar and go a little rogue. So here's a little unfiltered look into what's on our radar this week.

Fuelling Your Morning Workouts

If you're a morning gym person (it's so good to front load your day — we'll get into that next week) then what you eat the night before and the moment you wake up matters a lot. That dead on your ass feeling hitting by Wednesday? That's under-fuelling and it will mess with your results, your energy levels and your happiness.

Keep it simple the night before especially if you head to bed early, a light meal of protein and carbs. Salmon and sweet potato is an easy one, a good sandwich works as well. This isn't carb loading for a marathon, you're just making sure your body has something to actually work with come 5:30am. In the morning when you wake up, have something like two dates or half a banana, these are fast releasing carbs that won't do nasty things to your blood sugar or overall health. The Haribo and pre workout that you see all over Instagram is not it. You just need enough to wake your system up without it sitting in your stomach through every squat. Getting fuelling right is the difference between a productive week of training and running on empty by Wednesday.

The On-Again Off-Again Relationship

Any dry skin sufferer knows that tretinoin is a complicated relationship. Tight skin, a peeling nose and results that weren't living up to the hype. Were we using too much, too often? Probably.

But we've seen so much the last few weeks, the sandwich method, the frequency. So we're trying again. We're starting at 0.025%, the lowest percentage available, and using only once a week to start, a pea sized amount and the sandwich technique. For anyone who doesn't know, this is moisturiser first, then tret, then moisturiser again on top. The idea is that the layers of moisture reduce how much the tret directly contacts the skin, which means far less irritation without compromising on the results. We're just starting out but so far, so much more manageable. We'll report back once we've been on it enough weeks to say something useful.

AI and Creative Work

It's been a WEEK in AI and everyone and his dog has had something to say about it - so here are ours, because we are opinionated.

We love where AI has got to. The potential it has to support what we do is real and we use it every day, only to about 1/100th of its potential so far. But support is the word that's important for us when we are deciding how to approach it. We truly believe you need to know what good looks like before you hand anything over and that's particularly true for anything creative. You need to be able to train it, direct it, push back on it when it gets something wrong, and if you don't know how to do the thing yourself, at a high level, you won't know when AI is doing it badly. And it will do it badly at first.

This is especially true for writing. AI cannot write about feelings or lived experiences. It didn't hold the product, feel the weight of it, or notice how the bottle catches the light. It doesn't have taste and in a world of beige, taste is everything. So don't stop learning, don't stop developing your eye, don't stop understanding what luxury or beauty or great writing actually is. That's the thing AI cannot replicate, and right now, it's the only thing that separates great work from content that looks like everyone else's.

Growing Your Own Herbs

There is a wholesome feeling about walking to your garden, balcony or window box to cut fresh herbs for the meal you're making. Freshly cut herbs give you that satisfaction that packet herbs just can't. The easiest to start with are basil, mint and rosemary. One or another is used in almost every dish and they are all easy ones to grow with minimal space needed. Growing your own anything teaches patience and gets us back to our roots, even if we are forty stories up.

And a bonus for anyone who's been down a hair growth rabbit hole recently, is making your own rosemary water. Simmer a few sprigs in water, let it cool, decant it into a spray bottle and use it on your scalp a few times a week. The research on rosemary for hair growth is solid, it's been compared favourably to minoxidil in studies, and making your own means you know exactly what's in it.

The Confidence Of Men

A woman we know told us a story this week. During a meeting, a man, whose job it is to know the answer, spent the entire time asking her questions he wanted her to answer for him. Totally brazen and without any flicker of embarrassment, which quite understandably we all thought was wild.

This isn't a knock-men piece because lord knows there are enough of those already. But that moment is worth giving some thought as a woman, because the confidence required to not know something quite openly in a room full of people and not be wanting to hide under a rock or apologise, we can learn from that.

Not the not knowing part, we're not suggesting you walk into rooms unprepared and make yourself look like an idiot, but the confidence despite being less than perfect. The act of speaking up anyway and taking the opportunity regardless. Women tend to wait until we're 150% ready, over qualified and completely certain. Men tend to just go for it and figure it out on the way and this is often why they get promoted faster than we do despite not always being the most ready or qualified. So this week and going forward, we're going to speak up a little sooner, believe in ourselves a little bit more and walk in rooms with full confidence.

Hopefully that gave you something to go into the weekend with. Have fun, and if you can't be good, be safe. 😉

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