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Curious Novice Topic for July: Fat loss

Quick post before heading to the gym.

In light of my last post, I thought it’d be good to pick a topic and try to focus on it for a month. A month is pretty short but it’s also a good amount of time to focus on a single topic.

I’m taking some inspiration from what Matt Ragland did with his Ship 30 for 30 essays. He did the 30 essays during the cohort (which is the hardest part, I imagine) and then compiled them, revised, formatted them nicely, and started selling the collection as an eBook along with a video course to accompany it.

30 short essays on a single topic is good amount of time being a curious novice. You’ll, at the very least, be 30 days ahead of someone just starting out. You can guide them.

So that’s what I’ll try for July, but on this blog. Which, of course, goes against the whole thing Ship 30 for 30 is about. (Lesson 1: Don’t start a blog. Write on public platforms first.)

Oh yeah, so fat loss. Why?

This is a little bit of just-in-time learning. I’ve been trying to lose the same 10 pounds for 5 years. I think it’d be helpful for me to get very focused on it, including in things I read and write about.

I have been tracking things in my Road to 159 tag but, you might notice, the numbers haven’t been moving down very quickly.

First book quote I’ll share, from Fat Loss Happens on Mondays by Dan John and Josh Hillis:

Your two most important ‘workouts’ each week are— Journal Review, Meal Planning, and Shopping for Food Preparing, Cooking, and Portioning Food

It’s a great book that helps reframe time you’re allotting to a fat loss goal. If you have an hour 5 days a week, you can be tempted to do 5 one hour workouts. But if you’re not explicitly setting time aside for your food journal and for food prep then you’re not going to get results.

Dirty bulks can be effective. Dirty cuts… not so much.

Stillness is the Key: Get rid of your stuff

Check out the full notes for “Stillness Is the Key” by Ryan Holiday

One of my favorite chapter titles in all of Ryan Holiday’s books is “Get Rid of Your Stuff” in “Stillness is the Key”. Grab a bag, fill it up with stuff you don’t need, and get it out of the house.

A good lesson from living in New York was that I didn’t need all that much space. There were certainly times when I could’ve used more space. But my now-wife and I got by fine.

In California, I’m starting to feel some of what Ryan Holiday calls comfort creep. From “Stillness is the Key“.

There is also what we can term “comfort creep.” We get so used to a certain level of convenience and luxury that it becomes almost inconceivable that we used to live without it. As wealth grows, so does our sense of “normal.” But just a few years ago we were fine without this bounty. We had no problem eating ramen or squeezing into a small apartment. But now that we have more, our mind begins to lie to us. You need this. Be anxious that you might lose it. Protect it. Don’t share.

Sometimes I love the comfort and convenience of owning a car. Other times I very much miss the careless life in New York.

(But as I write this, I got a flashback of rainy, cold subway commutes. Maybe some comfort creep is okay…)

New Tiny Habit hook: After returning home from walking booster…

Check out the full notes for “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg

I walk Booster at least twice a day, so I come home that many times

This is a pretty reliable hook that I should add more to. I sometimes will take the trash out at this point every day. (On a side note, tonight I realized that it’s probably worth it to remove garbage at 3/4 full of it means there will be a fresh start the next morning.)

In Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg describes this with “After I…”

After I (ANCHOR), I will (NEW HABIT).
After I flush the toilet, I will do two push-ups.
After I pull the car over, I will write down the most important task of the day.
After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth.

I always listen to something, so I can try to capture that

I pretty much don’t leave the house to walk Booster without listening to something. (Yes, this can be problematic because it creates some inertia picking something to listen to, but I’ll deal with that in another blog post.)

During the walk I’ll try to take some notes or clip podcasts here and there, but I rarely go back and review them in any way. This new hook could help me with that.

I’ll do 3 minutes of writing about what I listened to

Three minutes seems doable. It’s not quite tiny but it’s not overwhelming at all. I set a three minute timer for this post, but only got through the first question. It did create the momentum to keep going, so that’s good.

I’ll try to capture this in an iOS shortcut to:

  • Start a 3 minute timer
  • Run the “Topics” automation in Drafts

At the very least, I’ll have a quick and dirty outline that I can fill out later.

Road to 159: week 4 of 8

Progress

  • Starting weight: 170 pounds
  • Current weight: 168 pounds
  • Goal: 159 pounds

What went well: Got the workouts in

What went well was actually getting these workouts in. Think that is the thing I’m happiest with from just the past four weeks is that I have been consistently getting three weight workouts in each week.

I’ve also been doing a decent job with the food journal. It’s been a straightforward text file that I’ve been adding to in the Drafts app. The speed of input is really helpful but at some point I’ll probably need to start using something like MyFitnessPal if I want to really evaluate my macros and food choices.

What can be improved: social eating, restaurant choices

I still very much have a treat yourself mentality. A couple things will be helpful for me to keep in mind. First, I regularly listen to Pat Flynn and Dan John and Dan has a phrase: “Eat like an adult“.

Second, this tweet from Dan Go:

At this point a lot of this is really winning the mental game and removing that connection of looking to food as a reward or as comfort. Because then it becomes used in both very good situations and in very bad situations.

I’ve also tended to have a very low bar for what to celebrate with food. Things like “Making it to Friday”.

How did the previous experiment go? (Protein shake + Greens powder lunches)

I’d go with: not great. I think the whole “starve yourself and then eat dinner” works well for some people but not for me so far. I think it hinges on not eating 3 meals worth of food in that single meal. But I like to eat until I hurt.

On the other hand this does work pretty well for hunger for a few hours. I still want to keep this in the routine in some way, so I may do it for the afternoon snack. Or it can really start to become my go-to snack—previously, this has been things like So Delicious ice cream bars or dried mangoes.

Next Experiment: Bringing the shocking rule back – Sauerkraut and Sardines

Last year I tried out some shocking rules, a concept from Ben Horowitz’s “What You Do is Who You Are”. (Check out my post here.)

One of them to try again is sauerkraut and sardines. I actually use mackerel more but sardines provides a nice alliteration. So I could call it Kraut ‘n’ Kerel it’s pretty catchy as well.

In any case this would be about adding some daily food choices—this fish and fermented food combo would be for healthy fat and gut health.

A list of daily things that I can try to take in:

  • AM
    • Vitamin D & Fish oil
  • Anytime
    • Sauerkraut
    • Sardines (or other canned fish)
    • Broccoli (1/2 lb lunch, 1/2 lb dinner)
  • Before bed
    • Magnesium

A book quote to share

This one is from “Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success“.

The second best practice is to aim for balance in the types of metrics you collect. One example of balance is tracking a combination of behaviors and outcomes. For some, there is a temptation to focus only on behaviors because behaviors are controllable, while outcomes, in many cases, are not. That’s a mistake. The only way to find lead indicators is to record both actions and outcomes and work backward, uncovering hidden drivers.

Actions and outcomes. I currently have been posting the outcome metric (weight) in these posts. I have been tracking food (in the Drafts app) and weight workouts (in the Strong app) but it could be worth posting all of those in some way here as well.

(And, yes, the scale number isn’t as useful as accurate fat % and lean muscle, so I’ll try to get those in the next 8-week cycle.)

Let’s keep it going!

Write of Passage: Digital postcards

One thing that’s been helping me think about content is David Perell’s idea of digital postcards. He views his newsletters as digital postcards—life updates that are easy to put together because consistency is so important with a newsletter.

Easy compared to the heavy lifts of essays that can take days, weeks, months.

I continue to fail with newsletter consistency because I try to include a section that takes too long to write. Curating links + a quick here’s-what-I’m-up-to dispatch is enough if I’m doing my main creative work somewhere else.

And this doesn’t just need to apply to newsletters. (And often the newsletter is the main thing, so you can do the dispatch somewhere else.)

It can’t all be hard, heavy lifts.

Reading Log: “Arnold: The education of a bodybuilder”

Check out the full notes for Arnold: The education of a bodybuilder

I picked up “Arnold: The education of a bodybuilder” yesterday after seeing it in David Perell’s newsletter. He said he devoured it in a few days. I started reading it and can see why. Very fun read so far. Some quick ramblings.

  • It was published before the internet was a thing — The book was published in 1993 and he’s writing about the 70s so it just doesn’t resemble today at all. There’s just things like how he’s in London for a bodybuilding competition and he can barely speak English so he just repeats the hotel name over and over. (He gets to that hotel but, of course, there’s another with the same name that he’s supposed to go to.) Cell phones solve a lot of problems. But not back then.

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  • Arnold had a vision and a mission: become Mr. Universe — He becomes obsessed with bodybuilding early on and has the goal to become Mr. Universe. He tried team sports and different individual sports but didn’t love them the way he loved lifting weights. And then with lifting weights, he also tried Olympic limping but didnt’ love it the way he loved bodybuilding.
  • A lot of hard work (and of course some luck) — He acknowledges that he was blessed with good genetics: a “perfect metabolism”. But he worked incredibly hard pretty much from the start of his bodybuilding career. 8-mile trek to the gym when he lived with his parents, 6 hours of working out in the army, then his AM/PM split with each workout being 2 hours.

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  • Learning mindset: you don’t know what you don’t know — Early on he mentions reading as much as he could from magazines. Learning about American bodybuilders who become movie stars. Then he learns from the older men he started lifting weights with. Then on his trip to bodybuilding competitions he tries to absorb what he can with limited English. The main lesson he learns: he has a whole lot more to learn.
reg-park
I tried to sketch a pose of Reg Park, one of Arnold’s idols. Then I pasted the photo in to see if I got at least the proportions right. It’s…. okay. Anyway the lesson here is that I can redraw this a few times and make changes so quickly. Arnold looked at photos like this and knew it’d take years of dedication to achieve and that inspired him rather than deterring him. To add some definition I just need to add a few lines here and there. For Arnold, it meant months to add muscle and then some more weeks to cut and chisel it.
  • His body is a sculpture, shaped over years — A part that sticks out to me is that he’s super happy about gaining 5 pounds in 3 months. This is a bodybuilder Mt. Rushmore guy and that’s the type of growth he is happy about. You’d probably be able to find that kind of promise on a magazine cover. It just made me think about the ridiculous expectations I have with results when working out vs. how long it actually takes. (That said, I definitely don’t work out hard enough and use age and injury prevention as a little too much of an excuse. Gotta find the right balance.)

Oh yeah he also had this quote:

“People who would never benefit from what I told them kept taking my time. They paid and came to the gym. But it was a disgusting, superficial effort on their part. They merely went through the motions, doing sissy workouts, pampering themselves. And there was so much I wanted to do with those wasted hours.”

It was great because I read it while walking on a treadmill at 3.0 (but with a 1% incline baby!!!!)