Alright so the check in:
- Current weight: 169 lbs
- Initial goal: 159 lbs
- Adjusted goal: 164 lbs
- Weeks left: 3
Not great but picking up some momentum.
What’s been working: two a days for the mindset
As mentioned in the last update, aiming for two workouts daily has helped mentally. It’s just a nice way to bookend the days. I previously looked forward to my morning workouts. Adding the night cardio has been good in a few different ways.
- Getting reading in: the night cardio makes it clear that I can read while walking on a treadmill. It’s often time I’d waste on the couch on the phone anyway. So I think it’s helping clean up the info diet a bit as well.
- Getting writing in: I’ve been building up the journaling habit (using the 5 Minute Journal app) and have been getting back to blogging the past few weeks. It seems to be good for my head even if there are no extrinsic results. I’m not going viral or building the audience with these blog posts. But I’m probably being a little more present with reading and retaining information through writing. Good for the long game, maybe?
- Getting the pre-bed routine started
- Maybe some metabolism benefits (?) though this might backfire because there’s probably some mental thing of “oh I can eat a little more because I’ll do my cardio later…”
Also, just a note: writing makes the cardio time just disappear. Writing generally just makes time melt away for me. I love it when it’s on the treadmill or bike. I absolutely hate when time melts away while I’m sitting at a desk on a weekend.
Here I’ll just post that quote from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years as a reminder.
I only say this because part of the reason my life had become uninspiring is I’d sat down to earn a living. Literally, I sat in a chair and typed words. And that’s fine, because I like the work, and it pays the rent. But Jordan was right: my life was a blank page, and all I was putting on the page were words. I didn’t want to live in words anymore; I wanted to live in sweat and pain.
I already have a career behind a desk. I don’t want to spend the leisure behind it as well.
The “one workout must be outdoors” rule of 75 Hard is having some effect on me as well. I’m looking for more opportunities to get outside when possible.
What can be improved: After dinner snacking
There was a time in my life where I didn’t understand dessert. That’s exaggerating, but I usually reserved dessert for restaurant outings.
Now it’s as if I need to top the day off with dessert. I want to get that mentality out. Because it just seems so wasteful to eat well through the day and then toss it out the window with a little too much after dinner.
I’ll just throw a Bigger, Leaner, Stronger quote in here for some motivation. Michael Matthews describes the crystal ball of delusion:
be on the lookout for the lure of future virtue justifying today’s vice. Avoid the trap of viewing Future You as some abstract entity whose emotions and desires will be different than Present You’s. Realize that, when tomorrow comes, the chances of actually following through on what you didn’t do earlier are slim. More often than not, you’re going to find yourself in the exact same state of mind as previously, and you’re going to sell yourself a little further down the river.
Which reminds me of something Tim Urban said in a Q&A: he doesn’t back the car into a parking spot, but it’s probably worth doing. You can do your future self a little favor by backing into parking spots.
I nearly always default to backing into parking spots. Not as a metaphor for life, but maybe I should start thinking of it that way.
What to experiment with: Bigger, Leaner, Stronger
Dan John has a saying along the lines of: it’s going so well, do you have suggestions for how can I screw it up? We get bored with boring things that work.
Doing RPT training 3X a week was working pretty well, but I want to switch it up a bit. Mostly for the sake of wanting to switch it up a bit.
Actually, there’s a little more reason: I’m making the time to work out daily so I should add some more weight sessions in if possible.
The argument against: you shouldn’t spend life in the gym. The argument for: time in the gym makes life outside of it better.
Or something.
Anyway, I started reviewing the 5-day program from Bigger, Leaner, Stronger and will try to use it in these last three weeks before my next NYC trip.
I did actually see results from it when I was doing it late last year. But then the gym shut down and I couldn’t reasonably replace the weight routine with lighter kettlebell equivalents without it just being an entirely different program altogether.
But I’m back to it, so I’ll let you know how it goes.