Perseverance

Today I woke up 30 minutes early and did 38 pushups.  I had a bigass scoop of whey protein powder in 8 oz of milk.  And now I’m eating egg whites and grapes for breakfast.  With coffee, of course.

Setting myself on these nice lifestyle paths has never been the issue for me.  The real issue is sticking with it.  For some reason I have a stubborn resistance to setting bite-sized goals for myself.  I’m sort of an all-or-nothing personality type, with a side order of letting stuff slide.  And so here I am pledging to get back in shape without a clear plan or any tangible milestones set up.

So here are a few promises:

1. I won’t turn this blog into a list of what I ate every day.  I hate reading those blogs, so I’m not going to produce another one.  I’m eating healthy, and you’re just going to have to remember that.
2. I’ll write goals for weight loss, sobriety, and exercise on actual pieces of paper (index cards, actually) and put them in the same order rail where I keep my work to-do cards.  I’ve harnessed the power of my addictions to improve myself before so I might as well put my productivity jones to good use.
3. I’ll be a comfortable size 32 by July 4.  Right now I’m somewhere between 33 and 34.
4. I’ll stay out of bars.  This one is so tough it makes me shudder.  I just shuddered just now.  If you’d like to help me with this goal, please invite me into your home for cocktails.
5. Apropos of nothing, I’m going to decrease my public output of written content.  Less tweets, less forum posts, no more Facebook notes, and less frequent more substantial blog posts.  I’ve sort of been throwing all my thoughts into the cyberether without any real filter and I have to learn to rein that in.  I don’t think I’ve hurt my personal brand too badly thus far, but it’s important to present myself in a way I can be proud of.  Starting a family and a new company and all that.

Right, I’ve written a list and Day 1 is so far, so good.  But I’ve been here before.  This is where it gets interesting.

Accountability

photo by Jonathan Warner

The trouble with leveraging accountability into your diet by posting lists of everything you eat on the Internet where the whole world can see it is that nobody reads those fucking things.

Half a Fast

I’ve taken it upon myself to use Lent as an opportunity to stop drinking for a while.  I call this Fake Lent because I’m not really doing it to please the man upstairs; I’m doing it to save money and drop the 10 pounds I’ve gained since the end of my last dry spell.  It’s been working, too.  So far I’ve dropped about 5 pounds.  Of course, not drinking has been a key factor in this little victory, but another important step has been my decision to stop eating after 6 PM every day.

True, this has only been accomplished on weekdays.  I’m in the office until 6 on these days anyway, and that provides a clear, tangible deadline for me.  Once I leave work, I stop eating.  Done and done.  On weekends it gets a little less distinct and it’s hard for my food-brain to parse.  Still, in the words of the immortal Whitney Houston, it works for me.

I’ve realized that I stay up every night until midnight, and I don’t wake up until 7 or 7:30 on weekdays, so I’m effectively fasting for half my life.  Add to that the fact that when I do eat I try to keep it healthy (sugar is the enemy), and it’s no wonder I’m seeing results. 

Also, I’m doing this again:  http://hundredpushups.com/.