Wellness Wednesday... late (or early)

Wellness Wednesdays are about improving my physical (and mental) health. The first step is an inventory/assessment of where I stand. Possibly followed by an analysis of how I got there and then a plan of attack - goals need to be set in order to know how to reach them.

 

I weighed myself on Sunday morning (May 1st) and was pretty sad with the results - 266. After any bariatric surgery (and mine was in July of 2008), there's a year called "the honeymoon" where weight loss is generally effortless. Mostly this is because it's nearly impossible to eat enough of the foods that would keep you at the heavy weight that you started at, but also there are some medical reasons - calorie malabsorption being the primary one. I originally weighed somewhere north of 400 pounds, and had been able to drop to +/- 5 pounds from 230. To creep up almost 40 pounds since I'd reached my lowest weight was something I'd really feared happening. It's called "the rebound" in the weight loss surgery world, and I was happy telling myself it wasn't going to happen. But it did. I needed to do something about that.

 

A couple of years ago I read a wonderful book called "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss. It details "lifestyle design" which I've also seen referred to as "lifehacking" - the idea being that you can make your life more efficient/successful by challenging the status quo and looking for shortcuts, new ways of doing things, and not just taking "common sense" as something that is gospel. Not being ultra-responsive to email (checking it just twice a day), taking mini-retirements, etc. Recently the author applied that same template to the body/health in a book called "The 4-Hour Body". Several of my friends had already picked up the book and read through it and taken much of the advice and applied it, particularly the diet (referred to as "slow-carb"), and had very good results. I decided to look into it.

 

Now you may be saying - "Mason, you had life altering surgery, why are you investigating some crazy diet?" and I'd say that while I have had alterations made to my innards, my brain remains the same. One of the things I appreciate the most about Tim Ferriss' approach is that he refuses to take the status quo as something you can't walk away from. I've always been willing to challenge the usual thinking and so I was ready to read the book and see if there's something to it for me. At no point would I have approached the diet if it felt "crazy" and it does not. Essentially it's what's known as "Paleo" or "Caveman" diet, which means if a caveman could not have eaten it, neither could you - but there are some substantial differences. The gist is as follows: Avoid white carbs; Avoid dairy Avoid fruit;; balance every meal with proteins, legumes, and veggies; cheat once a week to keep your metabolism from adjusting. I'll write a more detailed post about the diet in the future, but those are the guidelines to get started with. I don't feel like I'm eliminating anything that my body NEEDS (because I'm not eating enough fruit as it is to get my vitamins from them) and I'm also not overindulging in anything that I would consider gross. I'm just approaching it with a balance and with some recompositing of my food choices. I'm still taking in all of my supplements that weight loss surgery requires of me, and of course I have Jennifer keeping guard on my health like a hawk.

 

One of the things suggested in the 4-Hour Body is to take some measurements so that you have a baseline to see how you improve, so here's my baseline (along with some of Jennifer's information for reference).
                 Me   Jenn
Left Bicep 13.5  12.5
Right Bicep 13.5  12.5
Left Thigh 25 22.5
Right Thigh 24  23
Waist 50  36
Chest 39
Pants size 44
Weight 266  163

 

Those measurements were a week ago. Today... I realized that Jennifer and I fall outside of those measurements, except for weight and how our clothes fit. Our skin is too funky to be accurate.

This morning I weighed 254.5 and Jennifer weighed 158. So good progress for both of us. Then, our first cheat day!

Posting here requires that I dedicate the time to actually doing it - and while I feel like I could have spent time posting, I have not. Rather than beat myself up about it, I'm going to move forward and go ahead and start from scratch.

The point of this blog is to track my progress in several areas and provide a structure to my thinking about ways to improve my life - specifically in areas that I have found particularly challenging in the past - financial, health, and focus. To give myself some diversity in projects, I've divided my thoughts into three days - Money Mondays, Wellness Wednesdays, and Focus Fridays. I'm going to steal some thunder from my first Focus Friday and clarify my thoughts on how to go about improving my life, regardless of the area of improvement.

In much of the reading I've done about success, productivity, and personal growth, the single most powerful tool suggested is to set clear goals that represent not only long term success, but also smaller breakdown goals that are reachable in short time spans - the idea being that you can't lose 10 pounds without losing 1 pound 10 times. Part of the delay in making this first post has been somewhat of an analysis paralysis when it comes to laying out goals for each area. However, I feel like I have some more concrete ideas about what I want to achieve in the future, so I can start moving forward with laying out the smaller steps to get to the end result.

When it comes to personal improvement, I've also come across the idea of attempting to visualize the person you want to become, which helps in goal setting (you have to know where you're going in order to draw a map there). So I think the first step is to make a sketch of the person I want to be, and that will help me set smaller step goals that I can work on in the near term. I've attempted this in the past on my livejournal, with the "When I'm 40 I will..." set of goals. I've accomplished some of those already - and others seem destined to probably not come true. The lack of smaller step down goals probably made those goals harder to reach, and so I may be able to accomplish them now with a little bit more focus on breaking them down.

So here's the sketch:
My finances - I want to accomplish becoming debt free as soon as possible. I don't have a good time frame yet, but one of the first small goals I'll be setting is to create a manageable time frame based on the inventory I'll be doing soon.  Debt freedom should happen in concurrence with the second part of the sketch, which is owning a home with Jennifer. Jennifer and I have an idea about the type of house and location we want, and creating the road map to buy that house is another priority. The third piece of the puzzle is finding new ways to produce income passively - with investments. I've done a lot of looking into the idea of being a landlord, owning a rental single-family home and then expanding into multiple homes. Finally, once I have enough passive income to replace my "job", I'll devote myself fully to working for myself - though I feel that the type of business remains to be seen. Perhaps I'll just buy more rental properties, or I'll own a game store - I think that when I get closer to that dream, I'll address what my plan is.

My health - Strong and fit - and that's far too generic a description to be a goal, but I think that in some realms, it's harder to nail down a specific thing. I could say "I want to weigh 200 pounds" but I think I need to spend more time considering what I want from my health. I think that I'd like to feel comfortable participating in any athletic event and that I wouldn't feel winded after 30 seconds. I'd like to feel comfortable taking my shirt off at the pool (my hairy back be damned!). I'd like to either use diet and exercise or surgery to give myself a normal man's breasts and belly. I'd like to feel strong and fast - and I recognize that as a relevant idea, but I want to feel like I've reached a reasonable body potential for myself. I'm not shooting for superhuman - pretty good normal human would be just fine.

My focus - This is an area where measurable results may be harder to come by. I feel like I've let my brain go somewhat - not that I feel like I'm not intelligent - I still feel competent and smart - but I don't know that I feel as on top of my game as I did when I was in high school. I don't read as much, I don't feel like my problem solving skills are as sharp, and I feel like my intellectual life has.... dimmed. In my dream sketch of my focus/intellectual life, I see myself continuing to watch some TV, but continuing to elimninate the watching without purpose. Recorded TV (never live) allows me to just watch the content I'm looking for and avoid wasting time watching commercials or terrible shows. (Why do I ever watch Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives? What do I possible get from that? I recognize that there is the idea of mindless entertainment, but I feel like I want to trade that time for health and wealth improvement). This area has the most nebulous room for growth, possibly unlimited.