#100DaysofHealth

I find it amazing that I’ve been doing this as long as it feels like I have, and yet am less than halfway through.

Two things are happening that are conspiring to throw me off track in my #100DaysofHealth efforts. First, I’ve developed a bit of an injury. My left knee (which has no known problems but which does occasionally flare up like this) has been bothering me for more than a week. In the past couple of days, it’s gotten bad enough that I have a hard time walking downstairs (though up seems to be fine) and doing some of the things that are part of the bootcamp I take every other day.

Geez, for something that’s, basically, personal, diet is REALLY emotionally charged. I mean like on a level with religion and politics. I mean like “if you don’t eat like I eat, you’re a bad person who’s [killing the planet/killing your children] and must be stopped” charged.

One of the things I’ve heard over and over about exercise is “find something you like, that way you’ll stick to it”. That’s probably good advice. Unfortunately, it’s not advice I’ve ever been able to take.

So, I woke up feeling like crap this morning. Not ill, exactly, but icky: dragging, depressed, no energy, like I’d slept on an airport floor. This was, of course, because YESTERDAY was day 30, the end of my no alcohol/no carbs 30-day challenge. It was a day that happily coincided with a pie and wine tasting at my gym.

One of the great frustrations of my work life is in dealing with adult students who pay a lot of money to learn HOW to do what I do, but then won’t actually take the (fairly simple) steps to DO what I do. In my industry, this well-known phenomenon is chalked up to all kinds of personal failings: fear, the lack of a good ‘why’, a desire to get something for nothing, insufficient motivation, and a bunch of other answers that are pat and satisfying, but probably not complete.

So tomorrow is the big day: I will have had no refined carbohydrates or alcohol (two foods that I find it easy to consume in quantities high enough that they immediately and directly affect my weight). And all week, I’ve been considering the question, “What now?”

Weight loss this week: -2 lbs Total since beginning of project: -8.2 lbs The good: I’m really getting into the swing of workouts. I did 1 hour 5 days out of 7, 20 minutes on the 6 th day, and stood on my feet all day on the 7 th which, I’m sorry, should count. I had a day when it would have been super-easy to make an excuse to not do it, and I did it anyway. Yay me.

There has not been a day in the last 3 weeks when some part of me hasn’t hurt. I’m assured by all my healthy pals that the day will come, eventually.

According to the very excellent book 4 Disciplines of Execution , the primary reason that small businesses can’t reach big goals is that they plan to work on, monitor, and track the wrong things. Let’s say, for instance, that you own a company that manufactures widgets (don't worry, this will, as always, wend its way back to health)

Confession:   this is not the first time in the last 2 years that I’ve gotten serious about getting healthier. My first trip down “fix this” lane began the day after Christmas 2015, and I was pretty laser-focused until April-ish, when business travel followed by trip to the Caribbean followed by trip to South America followed by busiest and most stressed period of my year, every year, derailed me.

There’s something you’ll find in common among most entrepreneurs, and that’s the fact that while their lives are made up of a series of goals and projects, they have a VERY hard time celebrating their own achievement. No matter how big the goal, when they reach it, they often forget to so much as mark the occasion. That’s partly because once it becomes clear that the goal is in sight, it’s not good enough anymore, and a NEW goal emerges that’s farther out on the horizon.

In February of 2014, I quit smoking for the last time. Yeah, yeah, I know, what was I doing smoking in the first place yadayadayada…let’s call it a 5 year long self-destructive phase following the life-shattering implosion of an extremely long, intense, and, as it turned out, betrayal-filled and toxic relationship. And I gained 50 pounds in the 2 years after I quit, so I think I’ve been punished enough.

It should come as a surprise to exactly no one that a type-A first born, ambition-driven, stressed-out, hard-wired worrier (that’s me) spent the years between 1998 and 2004 in the grips of a full-on, medication-taking, shrink-seeing anxiety disorder.

Week 3 was a mixed bag. The wins: I worked out for an hour 6 days out of 7, EVEN THOUGH 2 of those days were taken up with things that would usually cause me to blow off exercise and meant that I had to work out at night, which is EXTREMELY unusual. I re-learned that when I make something non-optional, it happens.

The inside of my head is a very loud and chaotic place most of the time. At any given moment, there are pitched battles being fought, maps being drawn up, people running around naked, someone screaming, “Wait, you forgot something!!”, 3 lines of a random song playing on a loop (right now it’s “Woman in Love” by Barbara Streisand, for some reason), a funny but kind of mean critic (kind of like the dudes in The Muppet Show, but darker) sniping at everyone around, including me, and one very bad little monkey chattering and leaping about.

I have a friend that I’m pretty sure is a something-rexic. Not anorexic, because her problem isn’t that she eats too little food, exactly. It’s more that she has extremely rigid rules around food. If she’s put in a situation where she may have to eat something she’s decided she can’t eat or else go hungry, she becomes extremely anxious and agitated. Ask her about food, and her reaction is practically compulsive: she’ll start listing all the reasons you’re either killing yourself or getting fat by eating a whole laundry list of common edibles.

Although I think that motivation is incredibly overrated as a methodology for getting things done, I do spend about half an hour a day reading or, if I absolutely must, listening to motivational literature. One of the more powerful things I’ve heard in the last 2 or 3 years was a TedX talk by Al Switzler (this is really worth watching; I’ve pulled one concept from a 20 minute video, and it’s ALL good stuff) on behavior change.

I believe I’ve mentioned that the first domino in the line that eventually ended in #100DaysToHealth was a book called The Power of Less , which I picked up in an airport back in late March. I believe I’ve also mentioned that reading the book kind of pissed me off. I literally slammed it down half a dozen times over the course of the 2 days it took to read it, exclaiming (he’d call it yelling, I suppose) to the Smartboy something like, “This guy’s crazy!! There’s NO WAY I could limit my objectives to one every 30 days!!! I can’t think of just FIVE things to focus on, let alone one!! My business would fall apart, my staff would quit, WHO CAN DO THIS?? NO ONE!!!!!!” No, I’m not usually like this. I swear. Yes, I’m opinionated, but I’m not mercurial, I don’t generally get angry about a stranger’s opinion about setting goals. It was unusual enough, in fact, that a few weeks later, I thought I’d better explore why I was having such a strong reaction to such a strange th...

So, I’m a food hoarder . Since I was a child, I’ve had this compulsion to make sure that I always knew where a secret stash of food was hidden—one that only I knew about. I would sneak food out of the refrigerator at night, take it to bed, and hide it in the sliding headboard. I’d buy 5 candy bars with my allowance, and stash 4 of them outside my bedroom window on the porch roof.

I’ve long believed that if I could actually focus—both in the macro sense of focusing on one business at a time, and in the micro sense of focusing on one task at a time—I’d probably rule the world. It took me 15 minutes to write that sentence because once I wrote “focusing on one business”, I was reminded that I had double booked a meeting in to discuss getting into yet another business, and I stopped and emailed the people involved in that meeting, and while I was in my emails, a couple of more came through that I ‘needed’ to answer. Yep, my Mind Monkey, Maurice, is really having his way with me today.

 It’s been 14 days now. Not long, in the big scheme of a 100 day project, but long enough that I’ve started to think, “WHERE ARE MY RESULTS???? I should be 100% focused by now!! Working out should be easy!!! How come I don’t look like Gal Gadot yet???” Yeah, I know.

Did you read the cover story in this week’s Time Magazine? Don’t. It’s called “The Weight Loss Trap”, and it’s all about how diets—from Paleo to low carb to, get this, eating fewer calories—don’t work. Or at least that no single one of them works for everyone. That, basically, losing weight is really hard, and that most people will fail to do it and that most people who do succeed put it back on because their metabolism slows significantly and and and…

Even beyond whatever psychological or emotional satisfaction food provides, there’s absolutely no question in my mind that it sets off actual, chemical reactions that act as on my body like a drug. When I overeat, it’s for a variety of reasons: the food is delicious (I have a couple of foods that I call “binge foods” that I can’t bring home with me because I’ll eat them until I burst. Sushi is one. Ethiopian food is another. Indian food. All because they are so, so good.); I’m in a social situation and eating mindlessly (I actually do that MORE when I’m with other people than when I’m alone, because being around others stresses me. I also don’t really taste food when I’m eating with other people, excepting a very small group of very close friends where I can actually fully relax); and when I’ve had a stressful/exhausting experience and want to “party”.

Ok, so there’s this whole big scary question of, “Am I going to do what I’ve committed to do?”. That’s true in my #100DaysofHealth project. It’s true in business. It’s true in relationships. I stress about making plans or promises BECAUSE I know I’m then going to have to find a way to fulfill them. But then there’s this whole OTHER question I’ve been asking myself lately: “ Am I actually doing what I think I’m doing ?” No, I’m not crazy (I don’t think), and I’m not Mr. ShortTerm Memory (though how would I know?). I’ve just noticed lately that when I have strong intentions, I sometimes THINK I’m following them better than I am. To wit: a month or so ago, I decided that in my regular business, I was going to delegate every single task I had on my plate that didn’t either move the needle in my business (that is, put it permanently into a better position to make money, something like creating and filling a new job position or creating and implementing a new marketing ...

A few months ago, I read a book that really messed with my head. It’s called The Power of Less , by www.Zenhabits.net founder Leo Babuta. I say “messed with my head” because one of the theses of the book is that we should never have more than one major goal that we’re working on. Babuta gives multiple personal examples of how, by focusing on one thing at a time until that thing was finished, he wrote a book, lost 30 pounds, and so on. At any given moment, I typically have at least 3 major goals—in each of the 7-8 businesses and organizations that I run or am involved in. The idea of finding ONE thing that was so much more important than the other things that I have to do that it was deserving of being put front-and-center in my life at first made me mad (“Is he kidding? Who can get their goals list down to one at a time? That’s not a way to live!!!!”).  And then it occurred to me that the fact that I was having such a strong emotional reaction meant that I was pro...