Sprint for Health Millstone

As I indicated in a prior post, The game of life, I planned to post updates to help my motivation.  I've learned that my projects go much better when I periodically look objectively at my results thus far and make a conscious decision how to proceed.

I had initially planned an update every 9 days since it just happened that I was 108 days out from my goal when I started and being a geek I couldn't help but see the evenly divided intervals.  But, alas, I have missed not only 99 days but also 90.  We now stand 86 days from my goal and this is my first update.

So from an eating perspective it's been easy, I've been able to avoid all but a very small taste of sweets and all but a very small amount of grains.

I think it was easy because before starting I made an effort to pay attention to how crappy I felt.  How I was tired and always lacking something trying to find it in sugary snacks or in caffeine laden beverages.

And—I think this was stronger motivation—I also made an effort to actually imagine two alternate futures.  One where I now took responsibility for my health and one where I continued to drift eating and acting based on whim or emotion.

The first was me in 20 years, strong and healthy working with my daughters on some sort of outdoor project, maybe helping them build a new garden or shed in one of their homes, but here I was a man of 55 (the same age as my father when he died) doing hard physical work with my shirt off and not inappropriately.  Feeling temporarily winded from a recent extreme exertion and resting for a moment, taking a deep breath and feeling the exhilaration of being alive and reshaping existence to my will and paying with my effort.  And I was just at that moment before I plunge back in and continue at a hard task that will still take another hour or so after which I will enjoy a restful afternoon with good food and surrounded by loved ones.

The second I don't like to think about, but I do anyway.  It was me in 20 years.  I can't really picture myself like I can in the first vision, but I am able "…to guess by hints, to see everything through the greater intensity of implication."¹ And in this case I am looking out.  I see myself in the sterile hospital environment.  I am uncomfortable, I've just woken up and have been laying this way for a long time, a few hours, a few weeks? I am just so tired and sore I can barely muster the energy to move.  I finally notice that here again I am surrounded by loved ones.  But this time the looks on their faces are masks of tragedy.  In this imagining I really pictured my daughters as young adults, they were beautiful if they weren't so sad.  I wanted to tell Allison that nothing could be so tragic as to put such a look on her face, and she tried to smile for me when she saw me awake, but the pity there was worse.  And Ashley never one to attempt to hide her emotions wouldn't even smile and was barely able to look at me.  I reached out for them with a tremendous effort and saw the tubes snaking around my arms.  And my arms were thin, flabby and pale.  Then I saw Michelle and it the suffering she was obviously trying to hide from me was more than I could bear.

I didn't bother to fill in details about what particular disease had put me in such a terrible condition.  But to concretize the threats to my future of living a lifestyle where I ignore what I've learned about nutrition has helped my motivation tremendously.

I've diverged a bit from my original intent of this article into that motivation that has made the choice on what to eat easy.  Now to sum up my update.  My two primary measures of the effectiveness of my health sprint are my weight and how I feel energy wise and general comfort level.

Over the past 18 days I've felt great.  I made a great effort to get plenty of sleep, and I can't remember being better rested.  My energy level has been excellent.  I seem to wake up ready to take on the day and keep a more or less constant energy level until the end of the day when I start to get tired and ready for bed.  My creativity level has been high, and my stress level has been low.  I take surprises and emergencies at work well and have been less defensive when criticized or when I perceived criticism.  Also I've been very productive at work and in my personal projects making great strides toward my goals.  Finally I feel stronger.  I've been doing pushups occasionally at work and they've certainly gotten easier to do.

As far as the scale, well that is the millstone, and the challenge or opportunity.  I've only dropped about 2 pounds per the chart software I use.  In the past when I've done this I've dropped weight more rapidly.

Based on this I am going to tweak my approach in an attempt to speed things up a bit. My plan is:

1. Cut out dairy (I got a milk frother for my birthday and have been enjoying tea lattes so for now that will pause)
2. Go to the gym more often, I am going to target 1 trip every 3 days.

Other than that it's no sugar, no grains as I stated at the outset.  I anticipate feeling great, stronger and being lighter.  I'll plan another update in a few days.

Maybe on 81 days to go.

---

1. Borrowing a short quote from my favorite book of all time The Fountainhead. ↩

Tomatoes for strength

Another change I've made recently to help with my overall health is to try using a scheduling infrastructure for my day. For about three weeks now I've been using the Pomodoro Technique to plan and track my activity throughout the day. It's improving my productivity and also helping me lose weight. This relates to my physical health in two ways, first if I spend my days full of anxiety about all the things I'm not doing I can never get physically well. Second it makes me do push-ups.

That probably needs an explanation. Pomodoro is a time-boxing technique that guides you to do 25 minutes of highly focused activity followed by a short 5 minute break. In the PDF the author suggests it should be a real break from any thinking about work. I found the transition from a hard thinking task to a state of mental relaxation to be very difficult to pull off, my mind–already warmed up to the topic–would wander back to the problem I was working on. So I decided to do a set of push-ups to help me relax.

So far I've gotten better at pushups, squats, and sit-ups. Oh, and I'm enjoying my productivity based primarily on the structure to my day. It helps me concretize the idea that I can only do so many things in a day and helps me at the hard task of prioritizing my time. It also helps me measure how long I take at certain tasks. Since I chronically underestimate I welcome the opportunity to improve my judgement.

I'll sleep when I'm dead

When sacrificing sleep to do important work or play I've often made the remark, "I'll have plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead."  But little did I realize that by not getting adequate sleep I was working to bring that day closer.

I was clued into this fact by the various Paleo resources I've studied over the past few years particularly Robb Wolf's, The Paleo Solution.  So I started paying attention to how I functioned on various levels of sleep.  I learned that I was able to think, act and feel much better when I was well rested.  I remember thinking, "Does anyone else know about this? It is actually possible to walk around with nearly super-human ability simply by consistently getting a full night of sleep!"

Now in my defense, I not only attended college but also have two young children and have worked primarily at technology start-ups throughout my career.  So sleep was scarce in my life and somehow I just had to find a way to get things done.

But it's not super-human, it's regular-human to sleep when tired, wake up well rested and feel alert and energetic during your days.  A good sign of trouble is you need chemicals to wake up and function at all and at bedtime you can't figure out how to fall asleep.

So I failed to mention in my initial post on my plan to win at the game of life that one other thing that is going to help me meet my health goals is to get plenty of glorious sleep. You too should get plenty of sleep tonight, you deserve it!

AC Sludge

With a renewed interest in blogging, I decided to try out MarsEdit and came across some Drafts I'd partially written but never published. So I've reformatted this one a bit and you get it now. This was originally started on July 1, 2010. Over the summer I happened upon a small pool of water around my Air conditioner in the basement which immediately began an hours long investigation and repair and left me feeling a bit glad but annoyed.  

I was glad that I was able to identify the cause of the problem and repair it, in only a few hours.  But I was annoyed that my plans for the evening were shot, and I had an ugly and distorted sense that I'm never able to do the things I really want to do, but must always spend my time responding to emergencies that are my duty.  

I know this view is wrong, but over the prior 9 months or so I'd taken on so much more stuff than I ever had before that I had been wavering between resentment against the world at large and anxiety about not being able to achieve my goals.

I think this experience and my response was a big step on my recovery from going crazy. I reminded myself that to accept those thoughts, about never achieving my goals, would bring about a self-fulfilling prophecy.  And I reminded myself to see how the choices I make even in response to the unexpected emergencies are serving the values I want to achieve and keep.

It was at this time that I also realized I'd gotten impatient. And couldn't remember having that problem since I was a wee tyke when I'd get pissed struggling to untie my shoes.

I think by repeatedly reinforcing a view that I should be getting more done than I was, and actually more than was possible was causing me to have an always present sense of impatience and frustration with myself and others.

I had decided that fulfilling my ambitions should be easy and when I couldn't do it I'd damn the universe for being impossible and myself for not succeeding anyway.

In the end I had to challenge the bad premises by comparing them with reality, and clear out those thoughts that had been gumming up my life.

Oh and if your interested about the AC. I took it apart cleaned a bunch of nasty sludge that had accumulated in the drip pan under the coil. And then using an old wire as a snake, dislodged sludge from the upper part of the pipe. Finally hooking up a shop vac to the end of the condensate line and sucked out anything that would come. It worked fine the rest of the summer. And if there is a next time. First thing I'll do is hook up the shop vac.

So, Anyone have recommendations for companies to clean and service HVAC units annually?

Friday Afternoon

Got in to work around 6, haven't eaten lunch. That means it's been 9 straight hours of work, and it's nice out. That also means it's time for a break and to collect on that 800 - 1000 calories I am owed today[*](#fn1). So I am [walking](http://tinyurl.com/8htam) to get a [sandwich](http://primohoagies.com/). I'll also probably pay the [idiot tax](http://powerball.com/) while I'm out. *: I had a small banana and 6 bread & butter pickle chips. I estimate that to be around 100 calories.

the incredible shrinking me

This is me, drawing a line in the sand. Starting today I begin my quest to drop about 45 pounds. Last I looked (a few days ago) I was about 230 lbs. I should be around 185, and that is my goal. How will I acheive such a lofty ideal, you ask? Well it won't be the first time that I [shrunk myself a bit](http://mcallister.ws/weightloss.html). So I plan to follow a similar tract.

**Goal**: weigh 185 pounds by February 1, 2006.

Why set a time limit? Well that is a good question, last time I didn't set a time limit and I did okay, but when I got what I considered to be *thin enough* I sort of lost interest in not eating as much as I wanted. Of course then I didn't really have a weight goal either. But there are two good reasons, one I think it will help keep me focused, also let me know the end is in sight. Another is that if my [BMI](http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/calc-bmi.htm) is reasonable by about Febryary 15th, I will save money on my life insurance. In this case reasonable means *Normal* and normal means 24.9 or lower. Which means somewhere between 194 and 189 gets me there, depending on how tall I am that day. There is of course a drawback, if I don't hit it by that date, it could be discouraging. But I think it will work well with a target date.

**Hard Numbers**

The dates give me:

* 131 days * 11,318,400 seconds * 188,640 minutes * 3,144 hours * 18 weeks (rounded down)

It's this last one we can grab onto and think about. That means exactly 2.5 pounds per week for 18 weeks. According to [The Hacker's Diet](http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) : > A pound of fat is equivalent to about 3500 calories. If you eat 3500 calories more in a month than you burn, you'll gain a pound that month. If you burn 3500 calories more than you eat, you'll lose a pound. All the weight you gain or lose is the consequence of these simple numbers.

Therefore I must burn 8750 more calories than I consume in a week. So the question is how many calories do I burn in a day? Luckily there is a good estimate which is enough to get me started. According to [this](http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/subsection1_2_2_0_2.html#MaleCalBurn) I burn between 2319 - 2899 calories per day. Okay so for the sake of argument lets assume 2800 per day, which is the higher than the average but based on my experience before this is still conservative estimate, I think when I was working out daily I would burn about 3500 - 4000 calories a day. As I monitor my weight and know my intake, I will know exactly how many calories I am burning in a day. So armed with this data, I can calculate what my daily intake should be. 2800*7 gives the amount burned in a week, so if I wanted to stay the same weight, I would just consume this amount weekly, But instead I subtract the 8750 I need to lose 2.5 lbs/week, and that gives me my weekly calorie target. Simply divide by 7 and I get my daily target: **1550**.

When I lost weight before I targeted 1300 calories daily. And I lost 80 lbs in 6 months. Which works out to just over 3 lbs./week. So this lets me know an important and heartening fact. My goal is reasonable, not only in theory, but specific to my previous experience.

So now to make it happen. Today I am going to prime myself, by eating under my goal. There is a long discussion in the Hacker's Diet about why this may help. I did it before so I will do it again. I am going to target 800 - 1000 calories today and tomorrow, to quickly overcome the initial headaches that happen when you begin to slowly starve yourself. Then I will begin on a meal plan similar to what I was eating before. And I will make an effort to go to work out daily, which has been a bit of a struggle lately.

Pushing the outer limits

I walk! And it is good for listening, relaxing and exercising. But I find I always have to push the limit on my range. Today I am going to walk to the Barnes & Noble in Willow Grove, which [looks to be](http://tinyurl.com/9ccy4) just over 2 miles one way. I'll try and find a book for around $16 (this will make it virtually free, with coupons, discounts and store credit). I'll get some food somewhere along the way, and walk back. Earlier this week it took me 22 minutes to walk to the mall, So I expect about 1 hour 15 minutes walking time.

Eye Relief

If you are like me you're 6 foot 2 and your name is Kevin. Also you spend most of your day staring at a monitor of some type. I have some advice, I don't know how well they will work for you, and I don't know if there is anything to back up my reasoning behind these actions, but they seem to work for me.

1. If you can afford it get some kind of non-CRT monitor, like the ones on laptops or those nice LCD (or whatever technology it is) displays. They are more crisp. My work provides one for me. 2. Turn down the brightness. Turn it down all the way until it reaches a point just below where it is comfortable, then turn it back up 1 or 2 clicks. You still want it to be comfortable, but why stare into a 1000 watt light bulb if you can stare into a 30 watt bulb instead. 3. Turn down the contrast too. This one I remember hearing that it is easier on the eyes if the contrast is not very high. 4. Go outside a few times a day and look at stuff far away, and under natural light. Especially if you are locked in a room with fluorescent bulbs. 5. Blink. If you notice that when you are staring at a screen you don't blink, you probably should figure out a way to make yourself do that.

I have found that my eyes are less strained feeling the more I pay attention to this kind of stuff. Maybe you will too.

pre solstice concerns

Maybe an air conditioner is in order. It's not even summer yet, and the house is very warm at the end of the day, It was still in the high 80s in there around 9PM.

The biggest drawback to a a window unit is the layout of my house. I have a window in the rear of the house, that would blow into the dining room and subsequently the living area, however that side of the house is southerly facing, and there is virtually no way for me to shade that window. Plus that unit would then be responsible for cooling about 500 square feet. My bedroom however is much smaller, and the window which would hold a unit is well shaded by a large tree. However, this would then confine Michelle to the bedroom on the hottest of days. Her solution, of course, is to get two ac window units. Which I may end up doing, however, I don't have to like it. I guess I will also have to research the portable units, but between venting and emptying the water which collects, these look like a real pain.

New Gym

LA Fitness opened a new club in Fort Washington which turns out to be 1.7 mi. from my house. Which seems to take about 3 minutes to travel to and from at 5 AM and 6:15 AM respectively. This makes me happy.

I believe it opened yesterday, it is nice, it's one that has the upper level for the aerobic stuff, which is cool to be able to look out over the club while you are running, however it is a bad design because of the fact that hot air ends up where the people are in the most need of cool air. Plus now-a-days the heater tends to be on, and that is where the ducts are blowing on you. But it's only a mild discomfort, much better than running in the torrential rain that was going on this morning.

Anyway I was the only one working out there from about 5:01 AM - until about 5:25 when another guy showed up. That was great. I left about 6:15 and am now quite excited to be able to get back into my old 5AM routine.

Weight, the Continuing Saga ...

227.0 lbs. Hit the gym again, just ran again was running late. 20+5 minutes 2.65 mi. somehow I injured my right rib in the past 3 days. I don't remember getting hit at all at karate, maybe I strained a muscle somehow? But it is quite sensitive to touch.

... back to work.

Day 3 = Day off??

this morning 227.5, woohoo! Time to celebrate with a half-gallon of ice cream and a day off from the gym. Alright well I won't eat the ice-cream but I have skipped the gym. Mostly because karate ran late, then I couldn't get to sleep until around 11:45, (mainly because I was researching how to pre-compile JSP files for my work.) And I learned in the past that going to the gym really tired too often impacts my general ability to function. So I slept in, until 6 AM. But the day is not a total loss, I have karate again tonight. I just have to try really hard to get to sleep as soon as possible after class so I can make the gym tomorrow.

So far so good, but I am currently pretty hungry.

Day two

Already feeling the effects. 5 AM comes really early. There just needs to be something inside that makes you want to get up when it is pitch dark and cold. But I got up. Still weiging in at 228.5, so illogically that is discouraging, especially because I feel 2 pounds hungrier. But it is the knowledge that there are many factors that can attribute to your instantaneous weight and that it has only really been one day that makes you continue. It would truly be discouraging if it were still the same number on December 1. Anyway here is the breakdown: Alarm goes of at 5 AM (my clock is about 18 minutes fast purposely, I don't like to see the clock saying 4 something when it is dark and cold). I start my car (remote starter is on point), and weigh in. Dispense with a large glass of water and head for the gym. Unfortunately I forgot my towel but I decided since I have karate and probably ATP tonight I will only run and stretch, so the towel is not entirely necessary.

5:08 AM: arrive at LA Fitness. Run for 20 minutes at 7.1 MPH go through automated cooldown for 5 minutes. The automated cooldown drops to 4.5 MPH and then drops .5 MPH every minute. In the first 20 minutes I went 2.37 miles. And this treadmill tracks the distance for the cooldown as well, so overall I went 2.65 miles. Then a little stretching and back home to eat, make lunch and shower. In work by 7:12 AM.

Anyway, I am hungry, and my left foot hurts a little from the running two days in a row. But I am also full of energy, and accomplishment, and luckily it is just about lunch time.

Fat Anniversary

About 2 years ago on this date I started doing something about being fat. I had realized a few months earlier that I was way overweight, approximately 300 lbs, and I signed up for LA Fitness, but didn't go very frequently and didn't alter my caloric intake at all. Then I happened across The Hacker's Diet and everything that John Walker had written in there made a whole lot of sense to me, I read the entire thing in a few hours, printed it out and stuck it in a binder in case the web version ever went away. I started on the 18th, going to the gym, weighing myself daily and eating only 1200 - 1500 calories a day. By May I was down to 218 lbs. I have done generally well since then, primarily because I hit the gym frequently and I am very comitted to my karate study. (I just got Green with a Brown Stripe.) I realized recently that I had let my eating habits deteriorate again. And I find myself at 228.5 lbs. Which is not too bad, however given the significance of this date, I have decided to give it another go of low intake and very consistent gym appearances. So starting today, I am focusing on 1500 - 1800 calories a day of intake. My goal is 198.5, which will be the first time I have been under 200 since I was a Junior in High School when I had done all that Bally's work over the summer for Football, with my friends Frank and Joe.

I am going to try and keep my progress documented on here. Just in case anyone wants to follow along at home. But I hit the gym this morning. And have stuck to my planned calorie intake so far. Had about 300 for breakfast and 500 for lunch leaving plenty of room for a snack and some dinner. Luckily my illness last week caused me not too each much so I think the worst of the initial hunger headaches are already past me, just have to use my brain every time I think I want to eat something.

Toof Extwacted

Well I just got my upper right wisdom tooth extracted. It wasn't bad at all, aparently novocaine is a fairly good thing for body part removal. Anyway, I guess I should make sure my remaining teeth don't get to such a level of decay as to warrant removal.

Tooth issues

I went to the Dentist for the first time in about 4 or 5 years the other day. I was prompted to go because my upper right wisdom tooth sort of crumbled when I threw a quarters worth of chicle tabs in my mouth after lunch. I had been planning a trip to the dentist for a year or so, and just never got around to it. This event helped me re-arranged my priorities. The first trip I went to my regular dentist from when I was a child. He looked at it took and X-ray and suggested it be extracted. Said it was fairly well decayed. So today I will have #1 extracted, hopefully that isn't too bad. But I decided in the mean time I should have a checkup and a cleaning. Mike had previously told me about Doctor Mel Burchman, and his hi-tech dentistry, no drills, etc... So I decided to check it out. Well all I can say about my experience with Dr. Burchman is that it was phenomenal. I am used to the 1 - 2 hour appointment for x-ray, cleaning, poking and scaling of the teeth. Where you spend 95% of the time with a dental technician and the dentist pokes his head in to sign off on their work. Well the trip to see Dr. High Tech was quite different. I was there for no longer than 40 minutes. The X-ray was done at a single shot, rather than sticking a bunch of film in your mouth and then pointing that X-Ray gun at your head. They had this device that just spun around your head, and put your full mouth X-Ray on a single piece of film, and it was placed where you could see it. Then about 30 minutes were spent with the Doctor examining the X-Ray, finding all the cavities, I have 10 :-( And showing you pictures of the decaying teeth up on the rooms TV. Then there was the best part, the cleaning. He used this high powered sandblaster, basically just a strong water pick, and cleaned all my teeth in about 3 minutes, with no scraping and minimal gum poking, then I was finished.

I went back yesterday to have some of the cavities filled, again it was about 30 minutes with the Doctor, where he used an even stronger sandblaster to removed the decayed material from my teeth, and then patched up the three newly formed holes with some type of natural colored filling and a laser. No novicaine, and only a couple short periods of slight discomfort. When he was sandblasting the tooth, I felt a hot sensation when he was lasering the tooth, and finally the buffer/polisher he used to clean up the patch jobs a little was slightly uncomfortable. But the entire visit took exactly 35 minutes. I need to go back twice more to finish the job, but I can see myself going to this dentist twice a year for my cleanings, because it is so quick and hassle-free. That should prevent these marathons of cavity filling.

More Weight Loss

Well it begins again. I decided to allocate April, May and possibly June to achieving my second round of weight loss goals. So I need to string together a bunch of days at the gym and be really particular about the food I eat.

Starting November 17, 2001 I decided to lose weight, I was about 300 lbs on that day. Sometime in mid-May 2002 I got down to 218.5. I have been between 215.0 and 225.0 since then. With my wedding coming up (July 12), I decided to peel the rest of my now not so massive gut off, so my goal is 195.0 - 199.0. Today I am 220.5, and headed to the gym.

To see a comparison of pictures go to weight-loss. I have a bunch more pictures that may show it more clearly, and I will eventually get around to putting them up there, but you can definitely see it in my face there. And if you want to loose weight, try The Hacker's Diet, following the ideas discussed in there worked for me. Although my exercise routine was a bit of a departure from his, but it was still the same general idea.