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. ↩

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 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!

1. Eat no sugar, eat no grains, which means a diet primarily made up of meat and vegetables.
2. Play hard.

That’s really all I have in mind.

I have two other parts of it, but they aren’t primary they are just ways to keep the motivation level high when faced with a stressful day and some tasty sugary grass cake.

I plan to weigh in every day, as it’s something that worked well for me when I starved myself on the Hacker’s Diet.  It’s motivational it ties my high level get healthy goal to a concrete I see every day.  The other part is I plan to write about my progress here.  At a minimum I will write every 9 - 10 days.  So there will be at least 12 posts up here about this.  Probably more at first because I have other stuff to talk about regarding changing habits.  And I’m planning to write more by writing 150 - 400 words at a pop.

Lot’s more to explain including the book Changing for Good, what I mean by play hard, and why do I think grains and sugar will mess me up.

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?

**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 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 : > 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 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.

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.

Anyway what it comes down to is I think my shoes may have had it, (New Balance 475) that I got for Christmas last year. But they aren’t terribly worn so I hate to throw them away and get new ones. So here are my questions:

1. anyone have experience, recomendations of the various sole inserts, particularly for walking quite a bit? 2. anyone have a favorite brand of comfortable shoes that stand up to quite a bit of walking? 3. Any other suggestions for foot/shoe care?

Well, what the hell is the answer?! What is the cure? I know what it is. It is rather simple. A couple days ago I decided to cut back on not only the junk food but the excessive consumption of all food (except maybe pickles and carrots, and other nearly non-caloric stuff). On top of that I need to find my way back to the gym, and get back on a consistent Karate schedule. It is easy for me to say, well I have a new job with interesting problems to solve, a long commute, a new baby that needs daddy time, and many other things that I liked doing before all these changes came along. Something has to give! Right?

Of course something has to give, but it isn’t any of those things that is important to me. And it certainly is NOT my health, that is a lesson I have watched unfold a few times, and I will learn from it if it kills me. No, what has to go is laziness. Inefficiencies, and wasted time. I have organized myself before to do more than I originally thought was possible. I just need to keep my priorities in mind and in order at all times. So the answer is, I am going to try and adopt a system, schedule myself out a little bit, make sure my chores are done before I go out to play. But also making sure that going out to play is still one of the high priority chores. I have been hearing much about a book: Getting Things Done. Well I ended up seeing it after reading about Yak Shaving in the first issue of Make, apparently one of the authors of Life Hacks Merlin Mann is a Getting Things Done nut, and it has intrigued me. I may have to grab the book and see if it holds any value.

In the mean time I will be periodically reviewing what it is I am doing and trying to keep myself focused on some primary health goals. Get my weight to 200 lbs. Go to Karate three times a week. Go to the gym five days a week. I know this will actually give me more time, because it will give me more energy, and allow me to focus that energy more directly. And hopefully it will keep me healthy enough to get to that hammock one day and thoroughly enjoy the journey getting there.

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.

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.

… back to work.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Luckily, for me, I have been able to convince myself yet again that I should go. The deciding factor is usually something along the lines of, “Well I am already standing. If I just start putting on my gym clothes the momentum will get me there, and I can check off the little box on my weight tracking spreadsheet to say I went to the gym again.”

So far this tact has generally worked for me since November 17, 2001 … to the tune of about 85 pounds, and putting me in pretty good shape.

My doctor explained that these are clumps of the vitreous fluid which is one of the outer layers of the eye. Apparently this fluid changes in consistency over your lifetime. And these symptoms could sometimes could be associated with tears or detatchment of the retina, but that is usually accompanied by flashes of light, which I thankfully am not experiencing.

However, there is not much to be done about it so you mostly learn how to deal with it, but this was something that has bothered me for a while and here is one informative site: Spots Before Your Eyes, you can find more Googling for vitreous humor.