Life Reset/Reboot Check-In

Full disclosure: I'm writing this a full 2 weeks early.  I'm starting it in one of my Moleskine notebooks, and transferring to Blogger via a neat new tablet Bluetooth keyboard.  That detail is unimportant, but super neat to me.

Since the curling season is coming to an end, I thought it would be a good idea to score myself a number out of 4 in each applicable category.

Get Healthy - 2.3/4 (57.5% average score)

> Drink Less Beer - 3/4 (75%)

I've been fairly successful limiting my post-curling beer consumption to one night a week, with some exceptions.  I'm not drinking as much beer outside the weekend, either.  However, I've allowed a few too many exceptions, so I get a 3/4 on this one. 

> Better Sleep - 2/4 (50%) 

To be honest, I might be rounding this category up, a little bit based on a FitBit sleep report I just read.  As of the time of this writing, I've averaged 6 hours of sleep per night, per week, since Feb 1st.  But apparently this week I've increased my sleep time by 14 minutes.

> Be Mindful of Coffee Consumption - 2/4 (50%)

Okay for the most part - but just today I bought a large coffee.  Could be doing better.

I think I've done better than my average score shows.  In 10 weeks, I lost 3.6 pounds.  Since Jan 25, I lost almost 9 pounds.  My average score is 2.3, but I think my true score is 3.

Get Organized - 2.5/4 (62.5%)

I'm basing this on my Habit bull entry for updating my notebook daily.  Since I get a "check" every day that I use my notebook, this makes it easy to track. 

This number seems accurate, because I've had to do a reset within a reset.  At times I feel organized, and others, not so much.  2.5 is fair.

Get Creative - 4/4 (100%)

I've read some more, written some more, and released two podcasts on time.  I think this is the only category I feel good giving myself 100%. 

Overall: 2.4/4 (60%)

I'm doing well, but not great.  My goal for the 6-month mark was to be down 20 pounds; I've lost ~45% of that so far.  I'll consider the weight loss a success if I can drop another 2-3 pounds over the next two months. 

I just need tore consistency with daily habits and my score should come up.

Get Creative

This is going to be part of a series of three posts about what I'm doing as of February 1st to get back on track with various things.  I wrote about it last week if you'd like to read more. 

Get Creative. 

This is the last part of my so-called life reboot.  It's not as important as the first two (Get Healthy/Get Organized), but I think it fits in with the others.  This is a pretty wide-reaching goal, but I've narrowed it down to two things.

Read more.  

I used to read all the time.  Last year I barely got anything read.  I just didn't make the time for it.  Now, I'll make some time for reading every day, even if it's only a little bit.

Write more. 

It doesn't matter whether it's non-fiction or fiction, private or public, I just need to write more.  The goal is to write a little bit each day as well.

Other minor stuff that aren't as paramount to this...
- Keep updating my podcast (Alternative Airwaves)
- Actually, that's about it.

OK, so in 2 months...I'll have an update on everything and what I'm doing to accomplish each goal.  It'll be a lot more condensed so only one post, instead of 3.

Life Reboot #1: Get Healthy

This is going to be part of a series of three posts about what I'm doing as of February 1st to get back on track with various things.  I wrote about it last week if you'd like to read more.  

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_16_lift-off.jpg

I've done some thinking and brainstorming about my life reboot, initially thinking I'd focus on 7 things I want to fix or adjust.  I broke it all down to three major categories:

Get Healthy
Get Organized
Get Creative

I'm used to a pretty rigid reporting structure and having things fall under neat packages, so this structure is going to work well for me.  I have different priorities outlined for each of the categories, and a 6 month goal for everything.  I'll be checking in every two months on my progress.  

This week I'm just outlining what my goals are and what I plan on doing to achieve them.  Today, Get Healthy.  Wednesday will be about Get Organized, and Friday for Get Creative.  

Get Healthy

This is my number one priority.  This is a pretty broad goal to achieve, so I've decided that the measure of success here is dropping some weight.  My goal is to drop 20 pounds in 6 months, and to do that, I need to work on a few things.

Drink less beer.  

I think this is the number one thing on the list holding me back from losing weight.  I curl three times a week, and I end up having at least 1-2 beers each game.  I need to limit this to one night.

Better sleep.  

I haven't bothered to look into all the research, but I've heard that getting proper sleep is important to keeping healthy.  There are two things I want to do with this: 1) Stop hitting the snooze button; and 2) Go to sleep at a more consistent time.  

Be mindful of coffee consumption.  

I wouldn't say that this is a problem, or is contributing to my lack of progress, but a recent discussion with a friend reminded me that restaurant portion sizes for coffee are, to put it mildly, out of whack.  The solution here is that I'm not going to drink a cup size larger than what my Keurig machine can brew (which is about 10 ounces; by contrast, a McDonald's large coffee is ~19 ounces).  

Notably missing from this list is the usual "exercise more" option.  I purposefully left it out, because I feel like I already get enough exercise.  The issues I'm having are more in the diet and lifestyle areas, rather than exercising.  I'm too quick to be lazy and grab a fast food dinner rather than taking the time to prepare something at home on the weekend.  It's easy to grab 6 new beers to try from the LCBO.  

For exercising, I frequently choose walks at lunch time instead of reading.  I've conditioned myself to a point where I want to go out walking, even in winter.  I curl three nights a week.  I play lead, which means a ton of sweeping (especially on night we only play with three - I do a LOT of sweeping).  Generally I try to stay active, so that's not the problem I'm having.  

Get Organized is coming up Wednesday.  

The Reset Button

Original photo by flickr user Lucky Larry, 2010

One thing a lot of people do around the start of a new year is set resolutions.  Occasionally, I will opt to pick something arbitrarily that I want to change (such as last year's goal of texting less and calling more; this did not stick).  Other years - like this one - I don't really stress about it so much.  However, I'm at a point right now where I feel very disorganized.  I recently moved, and there are papers and boxes everywhere that I haven't found places for yet.

Add to this that I've been closely following Wil Wheaton's Life Reboot posts, which began sometime in...November I want to say.  Wil set some realistic goals (SMART goals, you might say), and is keeping tabs on his progress.  I think this is the key element missing from most run-of-the-mill resolutions: follow-up.

February 1st, I'm going to push that reset button, and give myself a little Life Reboot.  I'm going against my own "rules" by not starting right away, but I want to take some time and figure out what I want to work on.  I have some basic ideas, but I want to hit the ground running - and I'd like to have some kind of a plan in place.

Next Monday, I'll have an update and a plan in place.  I think I'm going to try to narrow it down to 7 things, ala Wil Wheaton.  Also, based on the recommendation of my good friend Sarah, I will give the app HabitBull a try.  Stay tuned.

Hodgepodge

I haven't had a lot of things itching to get out of my mind lately, but I've been wanting to write something - so I thought I would throw something together.  A hodgepodge, if you will.  I figure a paragraph on everything will do.

- I was introduced to reddit a few weeks back; I had heard of the website before, but never really made use of it.  It looked like a jumbled mess to me, and when occasionally I'd find reddit in search results, I didn't know how to navigate it.  I'm still no pro at it, but I get it now and it has given me new things to read about.

- This week I've been dropping pounds like crazy.  It hasn't been due to any extra exercise (that was last week...I put in some extra time due to some external pressure that ended up being unfounded).  The main difference this week has been smaller dinners by using portion plates.  Oh, the best part?  I'm down 14.17% body fat - or, 39.3 lbs since November 2013.  Crazy!

- 2048 is a simple yet addictive game.  In short, the object is to move numbered tiles around a grid and combine them to ultimately create the number 2048.  I've gotten has high as 1024, but that's about it.  I'm close...I can feel it!

- A while back I watched Thor: The Dark World.  It's not a perfect movie, but I found it really enjoyable - which is great for a character I've hardly related to in the past.  I've never been a big Thor fan, so it's great that the movies can make the character relevant to me.  Good comedic moments balanced with action set pieces.

- The Blue Jays are on a roll.  Sort of.  They had a spectacular month of May, which has set them up great considering the mediocre performance they've put forth in June & July.  They've picked it up since the All-Star Break, but they have a long way to go if they want to do anything in the post-season.  Sounds like Jays fans are excited again though, which is good...it's been too long.

- Recently read The Giver; I really liked this novel.  It's really short, so it's an easy read.  I gave it five stars on Goodreads, though thinking back to the book, it's not spectacular.  Don't get me wrong - I'd still rate it five stars; but a book like Brave New World or 1984 are more up my alley than this was.  Have you seen the trailer for the movie coming out soon?  It looks terrible!

A Toe-riffic Challenge

I've never broken a bone before in my life; that's a 30-year streak, which is pretty impressive!  I've had my fair share of massive bruises, but I guess I'm just big-boned.  Hopefully, that streak has not ended as a result of dumb luck.

This past Monday afternoon, I somehow managed to stub my toe on one of the pipes that stick out in the basement while carrying a basket of laundry to the laundry machines.  At the time, I simply thought it was a run-of-the-mill toe stub: no visible marks to my toe, it seemed to be pointing in the right direction.  It was just sore - which to me seems normal for a stubbed toe.

I went on to play some softball Monday night, which required wearing cleats - they were a little tight against my toe, and I played with a pretty bad limp.  After the game when I took my cleats off, my toe was pretty much black and blue all over.  Not a good sign!  (For those who haven't researched broken toes on the Internet, this is pretty much the number one indication that it is broken.)

Since then, the bruising has gone down a LOT, and I'm just experiencing some minor pain (I'd qualify the toe as "tender").  I went to see the doctor, and he was able to move my toe around quite a bit.  Without doing an x-ray, his best assessment was that it's probably not broken - and either way, the treatment would be the same: ice it, keep it elevated, and don't wear tight-fitting shoes.

Which brings us to the challenge - I have some fitness goals to meet, but I'm not supposed to wear shoes, essentially.  It's great that it's the summer time and I can wear sandals, but it's also softball season.  I'm not 100% sure what to do here - maybe it would be best to not play for a week?  And, there should be plenty of exercise that can be done that doesn't require wearing proper shoes - I just can't go to the gym.

The whole point of this rambling is just to say that I'll have to find a way to stay active despite this really tiny limitation (seriously...it's my pinky toe).  This really shouldn't be a huge problem - I've hurt my feet in different ways before; this one just could have been, and potentially could still be, much worse.  All because of a stupid pipe in the basement.

Goal Update

Whoops - I meant to write something up as a follow-up to the Mini-Goal I set for March 28th.  My apologies for missing that mark; I was also supposed to set a new stretch goal for May 4th.

Mini-Goal Results

As of March 12, I weighed 258.4 pounds and my goal was to reach 245.5 pounds by March 28 (5% body weight loss).  This was close to the original number I wanted to reach by March 5th.
Actual Weight March 28th: 250.8
Difference: 7.6 lbs (3%)

Holy cow, I missed my goal by 2%!  I could write a book about The Extra 2%...oh, wait a minute...

Updated Goal: May 4th

I never truly set a weight loss goal on Monday March 31st, which was what I was supposed to do.  Let's set one retro-actively - I think that's still fair, considering my current progress (more on that in a bit).
Weight as of end of day March 31: 251.9 lbs
Goal weight, end of day May 4th: 219.6 lbs
Weight Loss Goal: 12.8% (32.2 lbs)

What I did to get that number, actually, was to take my weight on March 12 (258.4) and reduce it by 15% (which is the 219.6 number).  So in total, I'd like to have lost 38.8 pounds.

The reason why I think it's fair to set this goal retro-actively is because my progress of late has not been great.  As of Sunday, I finished the week at 249.2 pounds - but as of last night, I was back up to 250.2.  This is not a coincidence, or hitting a wall; quite simply, Vanessa and I haven't been able to get out and be active as much as we would like.

No excuses or anything, but that's just the reason why progress has stagnated.  There are a few external reasons, but to be perfectly honest, we should be able to overcome these and get our butts to the gym.  That's not our reality though, so I'm OK with this "lack" of progress (though I should point out that we're not putting weight back ON, so this is still GOOD).

Obviously, we need to get back into our good habits that had some really positive results.  In short, that was going to the gym 3-4 times a week (our goal is 4) and eating well.  We haven't really changed our eating habits, so we only have one place to look.

We have to do more than just say we'll get back to the habits - here are some things that I hope will work for us, and maybe someone else might find them useful.

• Assigning a weekly value to our gym visits; we have a weekly goal of a minimum of 4 visits per week, so based on what we're paying for our gym membership, we can assign a cost per visit.  Any fewer visits than that and the cost per visit jumps, making the investment incredibly bad.  At 4 visits, the cost per visit is pretty reasonable right now - so from a financial point of view, it makes sense to keep going!
• I recently borrowed Fit To Curl by John Morris from the library.  The curling season is officially over for me, but I intend on starting up again in October.  I'd like to improve my fitness level specifically for the sport, which is what the book is designed to do.  But I feel that a lot of the exercises and stretches will help for the upcoming softball season, so I should see some benefits there too.  In short, a focused training program will help get us out to the gym and doing something other than bike/weights/stretch/go home.

Obviously there will be some audibles called during the summer - I'm willing to flip some outdoor activity for a visit to the gym, for instance - where working out will not be ideal.  We'll just have to deal with those circumstances when we get there.

Mini Goal

I forgot to write on Monday about my next goal.  I should say, "our" goal, because Vanessa and I are going for the same date (just different numbers).

So just a quick update...Monday I started out with an average weight of 258.4 pounds.  Vanessa and I are going to try to lose as much as we can by March 28th, the Friday of her birthday weekend.  While "as much as we can" is nice, it's nicer to have a concrete goal...so I'm aiming for 5% weight loss, which would put me in at 245.5 pounds - pretty much the original number I wanted to hit on my birthday.

I'm going to have to crunch some numbers to figure out the next goal after that, but the next goal takes us to May 5th, so there's opportunity to lose more than 5%.

Day 119

I started this weight loss plan (to lose 30 pounds by the time I turn 30) November 8th.  The goal was to drop from 275.2 pounds to 245.2 pounds by March 5, 2014.  Officially, the last date of this personal challenge was yesterday - Thursday March 6, because my daily weigh-in schedule was on a Friday-Thursday week.  So how did I do?  Prepare yourself for some numbers.

But first...a little background on how I went through this challenge and gathered information.  I read that the best way to get an accurate progress report of your weight loss is to weigh yourself three times a day, and take the average.  For best results, these times should be consistent.  Because I only had time and access for two weigh-ins, I ditched the third and have done a decent job of weighing in at the same time each day.  Armed with those daily numbers, I measured my progress based on my 7-day average weight.

I also participated in a free health clinic offered by my employer.  I was given a CANRISK (your risk of developing diabetes) of 28, which is moderate.  They measured my waist circumference, as well as my body fat %.  I won't bore you with all the numbers - they're a few posts back.

But, my BMI back in November was 39.2.  Today, it's 36.6.  My score is still 28 - but I feel like that's partly to do with my waist measurements not changing (which I don't get - everybody says that they can see I've lost weight, but I don't know where they see it if my waist is the same).  Either way?  Reducing my BMI is really good.

On Friday November 8, 2013, I weighed 272.4 pounds in the morning and 278.0 pounds in the evening for an average of 275.2 pounds.  On March 5, 2014, I weighed 257.2 pounds in the morning, 260.4 pounds at night, for an average of 258.8 pounds.  That's a total loss of 16.4 pounds by the 30-years-old mark.  Just over halfway to my actual goal.  Considering that's better than losing 0 pounds or GAINING weight, I'm happy with that number.

As of Thursday March 6, 2014, I weighed 258.0 in the morning, 261.6 in the evening, for an average of 259.8.  The total loss from November 8th is 17 pounds.  That also gives me a 7-day average of 258.1 - which is still a 16 pound loss over 119 days.


I'm not nearly done yet, either.  I'm taking a bit of a weekend break from tracking everything so I can re-start on a new Mon-Sun schedule, but the new goal is to lose even more weight.  I haven't determined the exact amount yet, so I'll report back on Monday.

Numbers Update

I shouldn't be writing this after entering the numbers I just did, but I need a kick in the pants, really.

Starting weight:
275.2 lbs AVG (272.4 AM / 278.0 PM)

Last night's totals:
269.9 lbs AVG (267.4 AM / 272.4 PM)

And this morning:
270.4.

According to the average yesterday, the numbers are great - I've lost 5.3 pounds.  Even if you take this mornings weigh-in less the average weigh-in, it's still pretty good.  But compare this morning to the first morning weigh-in - that's only a 2 pound drop.

All I feel about this right now is disappointment with myself; the long and short of it is that I ate too much yesterday, and that's my own fault.  I was fine all weekend until I decided to snack.  I don't even view the two beers I had Saturday night as all that bad - it's the snacks I had Sunday afternoon that did me in.  We also had a big dinner, but it wouldn't have been all that bad had I not had so much to eat earlier.

This can and will be turned around, however.  Today might be a bit of a challenge - there's a lunch buffet in the plans at Pizza Hut - but I think I can restrain myself and still get a good meal.

30 by 30

My numbers as of 11/20/13

Do a Google search of things to do before you turn 30.  You will likely find several lists of things that you should accomplish in your life before you turn 30.  Vanessa and I have had conversations with friends recently about that specific number.  You may have guessed by now that I am turning 30 in just over 3 months (101 days, to be exact - thanks again, Google).

I've given some thought to what I'd like to accomplish in that time, but either I'm not the ambitious type or I'm just content not pushing the envelope.  Still, there is one thing that I'd like to do: lose 30lbs by the time I'm 30.  I made this goal about a week ago or so, but some of the numbers I got to the right got me thinking about it again.

While my numbers are OK - I'm high in the BMI & Body Fat %, and my blood pressure is a little high, but my cholesterol and glucose numbers are pretty good - they can be better.  I'm roughly 3 inches away from the "ideal" waist circumference for males.  Other than Body Fat % and BMI, I'm pretty close in the other numbers.

So far in my goal, I've lost 2.3 pounds.  When I calculated my goal last week, I estimated that I needed to lose roughly 2 pounds per week to meet this goal (30 pounds / 16 weeks).  So far, I'm behind that goal.  I've decided to look at a more attainable number - how many pounds do I need to lose per day?

With 101 days to go, I need to lose 27.7 pounds; that works out to 0.3 pounds per day (rounded up).  While that is 2.1 pounds over a week, in my mind it sounds a lot more do-able to drop 0.3 pounds every day.  I've learned that the best way to track weight loss is apparently to weigh yourself three times a day, and take the average number of those three.  I'm only able to weigh myself twice a day, so I'm taking the average from the morning when I wake up and just before I go to bed.

It's not a perfect system, but it's what I have.  In previous posts I've talked about what I'm doing to attain various writing goals.  Guess what?  I haven't spent 15 minutes every morning writing.  However, I am actively working toward this fitness goal.  It's something much more important to me than writing goals.  It also helps that I have a partner that is working toward similar goals, and we are motivating each other.  I can't say the same about my writing, at the moment.

Back to weight loss: so what are we doing?  We signed up for a gym membership; we're doing a 30-day plank challenge (this is pretty tough, but it's going to be worth it); we're eating right (or as well as we can without a nutritionist guiding us properly).  And what I'm doing now is keeping honest with my progress by sharing it here.

I'll check back in a month with some results - but until then, I'll get back to my "regular" writing.