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Day 69: Ya gotta have goals

Fitness is about the only area in my life where I don’t have a set of super-specific goals, and a list of actions needed to reach them. In business, I have daily, weekly, quarterly, and even 1- 3- and 10-year goals (Have 1 million people in my database! Make a system of funnels and products that will make people want to join that list! Launch 1 funnel a month! Start funnel #1!). It’s been my experience, and that of enough other people that there’s a whole library of books on the topic, that it’s these smaller objectives that actually WORK to move us along. Simply saying (or even writing down) at the beginning of the year that I want to make a million dollars by the end of the year isn’t going to do a thing; it’s less a ‘goal’ than it is an attempt to manifest something. Absent the meaningful shorter-term objectives that can be meaningfully worked on, the big goal gets swamped in the tsunami of, well, day-to-day life But I’ve never applied the same thinking to my health. I
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Day 68: not so bad...

              When I started going back to the gym last week, I braced myself for the same 30+ days of aches and pains that I’d experienced 18 months ago, when I got serious about working out for the first time in years.               As it turns out, my sporadic runs at fitness during the intervening time actually HAVE done me some good.               Yes, the first couple of days were rough—in fact, I spent most of my Saturday last week laying in bed and groaning (but only AFTER I got my yoga class out of the way)—but with the help of a morning dose of ibuprofen each day, I gotta say, it’s not so bad.               I attend a “bootcamp” (lots of reps of light-ish weights, lots of jumping up and down, all with very little time in between) 3 times a week. I was smart enough to tell the instructor that I was going to ease back into it—20 minutes the first day, 25 the second, and so on—but on Wednesday, I was a 40 of the 50 or so minutes.               I still have to t
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Day 67: so little time

As I’ve gotten older, the voice that tells me that I have a smaller and smaller percentage of my life still ahead of me has evolved from a bare whisper to a claxon that never stops reminding me that time is short. Even back in my 20s, I’d occasionally do the calculation. At 27: I’ll probably live to be 100, that means I’ll live as long as I’ve already lived 3.7 more times. Plenty of time.” At 40: “I’ll probably live to be a hundred, which means that I’ll have the amount of time I’ve already lived 1 ½ more times. Plenty of time.” Today: “Oh my God, if I only live to the average age for women in the United States, I’ve already lived more than half my life, and I’ve certainly lived the healthy part. How many more healthy years do I have to do all this stuff I want to do? THERE’S NOT ENOUGH TIME!!!!” Time is a bloody bastard. It’s the most inflexible, inexorable force we're forced to deal with. We’ve learned to escape gravity, overcome mass, create and resist force, b
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Day 66: Falling for it

           Despite my prior railings about diet religions and nutritionism, I have to confess that during the past year, I’ve tried several faddish eating regimens, hoping, like everyone else does, to find one that’s, you know, magic.               The 4-hour body, which involved a lot of beans and no carbs except for on a cheat day a lot of supplements,   and insisted on no more than a few hours a week at the gym, was something I followed most of the summer. It might be a great program, but my cheat days got closer and closer together and became cheat weeks, and without a DAILY gym routine, I find myself going weeks without visiting there, and by the way I HATE taking pills, much less multiple pills 3 times a day. Next.               I became briefly fascinated with something called the Snake Diet, which involves fasting for days or weeks on end drinking only a mixture of water, salt, potassium and lemon juice that the founder calls “Snake Juice”. I never got further than a
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Day 65 (or 1, or 543): The case for a little.

I started my #100DaysofHealth project on May 22 nd , 2017. Today is November 18 th , 2018. And I still have 35 days to go. Not that I haven’t focused on my health at all during the year + since I last blogged; I’ve had entire 30 day periods when I worked out pretty regularly, concentrated on eating foods that made sense, meditated, and did at least some of the other things I was so dedicated to during the summer of ’17. But it’s fair to say that it’s been sporadic; that I haven’t really, fully been focusing on my health for more than a year now. You’d think, given that it was mostly just the reuptake of old habits, it wouldn’t make much of an impression on me. But since it followed a period during which I was insanely committed to exercise and healthy food, you’d be wrong. The difference between the way I felt in August and the way I felt 2 weeks ago, when I stuttered my way back to the straight and narrow, is made deeply more stark by the recency of the compariso
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Day 64: Are you embarrassed for me?

               I think I have a pretty good (if somewhat cynical) grasp of human nature.               My understanding of “how people are” informs my belief that the most of us—a number in the 98 th percentile, I’d guess—will utterly fail when attempting to make big changes to their behavior.               Big changes like, for instance, transforming oneself from a fat slug with a bad attitude about exercise and no positive habits of thought, or of eating, or of relaxation to a positive, energetic, 6 times a week exerciser.               Every time a friend or acquaintance informs me, usually with great gusto, that he or she intends to (fill in this blank with anything from doubling the size of their business to going back to school to get a law degree to losing 50 pounds to eliminating TV from their lives), I always try to be encouraging.               But there’s a part of me that loudly screams (within the confines my own head, of course), “Yeah, SURE you are! Be
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Day 63: No Moody Blues

Many times this summer, I’ve had the thought that 2017 has been the best year of my life. It’s not that there’s been any significant life event (other than moving to a more peaceful neighborhood last winter). I’ll make about as much money this year as I did last; I weigh roughly what I did when the year started; I’m with the same guy; the challenges in my business have been the same, or perhaps greater, than in the prior year; there haven’t been any extraordinary events or leaps forward. If I think about it, I can even come up with the usual set of disheartening, frustrating, unfortunate occurrences and moments.
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