#100DaysofHealth

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...

              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...

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...

           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 ...

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...

               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 ...

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.

The thought that overabundance of certain resources in our culture is both a blessing and a curse isn’t an original one. In fact, the issue is so pervasive that it’s become a political weapon (“How can we say that the poor in America are poor when their biggest problem is obesity, not starvation!”)

I’ve been thinking today about what a great job the cooking oil industry has done of controlling the conversation about its product. Case-in-point: Which oil do you think is healthiest? Olive, coconut, flaxseed, and avocado are all contenders, right?

I think the Buddhists are onto something. That, or I’m suffering from a serious psychiatric disorder. One of the things I’ve discovered during this whole ‘do things differently and see if something different happens’ experiment is that there is not, in fact, a single “me”.

I’ve always had a weird fascination with the evolutionary, spiritual, and philosophical significance of fasting.

I’ve always been a huge sucker for food festivals. Taste of Cincinnati. The Great Inland Seafood Festival. Bacon, Bourbon, and Barbeque. Bacon, Beer, and Bourbon. Bourbon and Bacon. Cheesefest. The Sausage Festival. The Sauerkraut Festival. The Food Truck Festival. Goettafest. No, not Goettafest.Well, Goettafest once. But I didn't inhale.

It’s no wonder that the standard American diet (abbreviate SAD, and appropriately so) basically consists of one long meal interrupted from time to time by work. I’d like to say I made that up, but I read it someplace recently, and can’t find the attribution. Anyway, I wonder whether we all realize how constantly we’re exposed to food, and pictures of food, and the idea of food. It’s EVERYWHERE, and it’s all the time.

Something weird is happening.  I have not, overall, lost one single pound since starting #100DaysofHealth.

Hey, I’m on a roll. 10 things I like about my body, about exercise, why not about eating right? Way back in the first week of #100DaysofHealth, I set up my philosophy on eating during this time as, “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants” (which I stole directly from Michael Pollen, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma).

After nearly 8 weeks of nearly constant exercise, I gotta say I’m not as excited about it as I was at the beginning. In fact, I’m starting to have some of those thoughts one has (“Do I REALLY have to do it today? It’s not working. I hate it. I can’t wait for 100 days to be over”) that lead pretty quickly to giving up.

I’ve decided to think good thoughts instead of discouraging thoughts about my health and body this week (see day 52). Being a born and, at this point, highly skilled pessimist/critic, this has been harder than you’d think. Starting with, I’ve struggled with what to think positive thoughts ABOUT. So I’m just going to start with the obvious thing: the body that I’ve been modifying (or perhaps abusing, depending on your POV) for the past 53 days.

Yesterday, as I was sweating and straining my way up a mile-long hill on my bike during an 18-mile ride that I would have called impossible 2 months ago, I was simultaneously listening to a Tedx talk by about body image and how it contributes to the epidemic of eating disorders in the U.S. today. The gal presenting the talk related how, as a not-even-very-pudgy 10 year old, she was ridiculed and excluded by her classmates, which of course led to 20 years of incessant dieting and fear of food, which led to the day she actually DID reach her goal weight, and then burst into tears because being 125 pound was supposed to make her life perfect. She blamed ‘society’ for the pressure she felt, for the anti-fat prejudice that she faced, and for the abuse she took as an overweight person.

I still find it strange and fascinating that we have so many well-defined options for getting and keeping the bodies we want, but so few for creating the minds we want. Sure, there are widely varying opinions about which diet and/or exercise plan is the right one, or the best one; but there’s no question that there are plenty to follow, and that most of them, if followed, will work.

So I have this friend. I know, it’s surprising. In fact, it might be more apt to describe him as an “accomplice”. I assume we all have one of these: the person you’d go to if you really wanted weed (and didn’t have tenants). The one you text when something hilarious occurs to you that’s waaaaaaay too inappropriate to go into your Facebook status.   The one with whom you either drop all pretense of being offend-able, or else get offended, a lot.