90-Day Lifehacker Journal

What I Learned Losing 50 pounds (10 years ago)

2008-03-14T16:21:00.007-04:00

A number of years ago I weighed about 220 pounds which was the heaviest I had ever been up to that point. At the time I eat whatever I wanted and the only real exercise I got was walking 2-3 miles a day to and from my brother and cosines house to hang out. My cousin, who lived on the same street as my older brother, was nice enough to lend me her bike so I wouldn’t have to walk back and forth anymore. The bike was an expensive race bike, although I didn’t know it at the time. The first time I road it I was so out of shape I thought I was going to puke half way home. I ended up walking the rest of the way that day. The next two weeks I would ride it as much as I could everyday going back and forth until I was able to go the whole way. Eventually I started riding it everywhere I went and I was able to go fast enough to even keep up with cars on the local roads. I turned into a complete speed demon too, always trying to go as fast as I could. I would time myself to see how long it would take me to get somewhere and just push as hard and as fast as I could go. One day I ran into a friend that hadn’t seen me in a few months. He said I looked like a rail and thought I was sick. The following day I stopped by my grandmother’s house and she said the exact same thing. So I when I got home I got on the scale and I weighed 170 pounds.

I had lost 50 pounds in less than two months without even trying to lose weight and I had a blast doing it. I wasn’t thinking about what I ate, counting carbs or fat. In fact there where many days I only had a few dollars and I just drank soda and eat chips in between trips and I would stuff my face at dinner and go to sleep. Not that I want to go back to eating like that, but if I was really doing something active that I loved like I did on the bike, I bet the weight would just fall off before I even knew it. Hitting the gym is great but there is nothing like the feeling of speed on a bike and owning the road. To me it felt like I was flying and I never felt so free. I would love to find that bike and do it again. The one thing I learned thinking about this was it doesn’t matter what your diet is, if you’re active enough and burning thousands of calories every day, almost nothing will keep you overweight. So forget about low carb diets and low fat diets, the biggest thing I can do that will have a huge impact is physical activity.

Golden Rule#29 – Only eat cake on your Birthday

2008-02-26T12:59:00.010-05:00

Once every month like many other companies my office passes out birthday cards for everyone to sign followed by the whole office gathered in a large area of the office to sing happy birthday. Everyone hesitates to start singing and once started everyone does their best to just blend in to the song as they sing or lip sync the words. Then finally you get to the part of the song where you’re supposed to say the person’s name whose birthday it is, “Happy birthday dear…”, except it’s like 10 peoples birthdays so no one knows really what to do at that point. This is the point in the song where it really gets murdered and you hear people try to raddle off everyone’s name as fast as possible. It’s excruciatingly painful. Yesterday was such a day here at my company and as always there was a massive sized cake joining the party. A two layer vanilla cake, white frosting and pure sugar red and blue flowers on top with happy Birthday written in blue letters. In the center between the two layers is cheese cake. I love cheesecake. I love cheese cake plain, with fruit on top, chocolate drizzle on top, and a hundred other ways, but to sandwich it between a birthday cake, now that’s genius. So I had to ask since I was already there watching everyone dig in “How’s the cake?” I hated the answer “Oh my god, so good. One of the better ones so far we’ve gotten”. It was time to head back to my office. I had enough.

Yesterday was another solid day. I hit the gym at 5am for 40mins of cardio. Eggs for breakfast, 4 shakes throughout the day, fish and veggies for dinner. During the week in the afternoon I still feel my energy drop a bit so I went out to Burger King at noon to fill the tank. I steered clear from the burgers and fries and spent $2 + tax and got myself a salad and 4pc chicken. This comes out to a lean 185 calories plus the calories from the dressing. I used about 1/8 of the Caesar dressing that came in the pack so I will guesstimate it was about a solid 200 calorie lunch.

This falls in line with one of the key steps in my plan. Eat more. Research has shown that eating 6 times a day will promote weight lose. This keeps your metabolism from slowing down and causing your body to conserve and save energy. Since I am at the very beginning I am filling in the gaps with a diet shake because it helps keep things simplistic. As time goes on and things become habitual, I will replace shakes with healthy alternates like fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains. However at this point eating a healthy dinner, going to the gym and avoiding unhealthy snacks and cakes is challenging enough.

Thanks to yesterday’s birthday fiasco I’m making a new rule. No eating office birthday cake unless it’s my birthday that month. They better have chocolate cake or there will be hell to pay. I'm putting in my request now.

Evil Lurks at the Office and it wants to Eat Me

2008-02-22T09:15:00.014-05:00

My work place is not the most conducive environment for healthy eating. The desk I work at sits right across from the kitchen, which is about 2 feet from me it seems, and between 12pm – 1pm it’s a horror show. People microwaving all kinds of good smelling foods, home cooked leftovers, microwave dinners and once in a while you have Satan show up with microwave popcorn. Leaving my office is even more dangerous. There are dozens of traps waiting to catch you. When I walk through to get from one side of the office to the other, which I do several times a day, there awaits the first trap. A candy dish that is always filled with “Fun Size” candy like Snickers, Twix, Milky Way’s, 3 musketeers, etc. After I’ve dodged that bullet, everyone has a little candy dish filled with goodies in their cubical. In the second kitchen someone always brings in some awesome looking treats every day it seems. This will include donuts, cookies, cakes, and pies. You also get comments like “Have you tired the cake so-an-so made? It’s so good!”. People will even take the time to walk to my office and ask “Did you get a piece of cake yet for yourself? Don’t wait too long or it’ll be gone.” Let me not forget the fast food. At lunch smells fill the air with McDonalds, Burger King, Taco bell, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, Chinese takeout, New York style sliced pizza, the list goes on. Everyone is so polite and friendly so many are sure to offer me some when they see me...pure evil.

The second day was a bit tougher then the first, which was to be expected. I hit the gym at 5am and did 40minuts of cardio. The fitness machine in the gym I like to use allows you to enter in your weight and age and also monitors your heart rate allowing it to project your calorie expenditure. I burned over 500 calories focusing on a lower intensity work out by keeping my heart rate between 125 and 130. My goal at the gym for this week is to start the habit and reinforce the habit of going to the gym on a daily bases. I also haven’t really done any strenuous activities in a few years so this is a comfortable starting point for me. I kept with the same diet for the second day also. I had a shake in the morning right after the gym, again at 10am, 1pm, and at 4pm. I also cooked almost the same dinner I had the night before this time with Red Snapper adding an additional 20 calories over the Tilapia, but didn't taste as good. Red Snapper has a more fishy taste to it and my recipe did not balance this out well enough. I had planned on having an after dinner snack like peanut butter and jelly on wheat but I ended up going to bed so it was another low calorie day totaling 1030 calories.

I felt half my energy was gone yesterday so I paid the price for being so restrictive with my diet. This morning after the gym I eat 3 egg whites and one yolk fried with PAM in addition to my usual shake. It was a big boost and I could feel it 15 minutes after I had finished. I love eggs so it was an easy call for me to add to my diet in the morning. With 17 calories per egg white and 59 calories per yolk, not to mention the protein and good amounts of B Vitamins, Vitamin A, iron and riboflavin, all good things necessary for immunity, healthy skin, nerves and vision, it was also a good choice. I also remembered my multivitamin this morning thanks to my wife. I’m feeling good this morning, it’s Friday, I’ve got a good start, and I’m ready to face the day.

Summery – 02/21/2008

Exercise – 40 minutes of cardio

Water – N/A

Breakfast – 190 Calories

Snack – 190 Calories

Lunch – 190 Calories

Snack – 190 Calories

Dinner – 270 Calories

Total = 1030 Calories

What eating at Arby’s taught me about Dieting

2008-02-21T10:13:00.009-05:00

I remember sitting in an Arby’s restaurant in upstate NY one summer with a good friend and he had mentioned that one of his closes friends and someone I had the pleasure to work for, had been diagnosed with diabetes due to him being overweight. He then went on to tell me that with this diagnosis, he ended up losing his pilot license which grounded him from flying. I then thought to myself; here was a guy that had built a successful company on Wall Street and sold it for millions, retiring to do what he loves, fly planes. The good news is he was now on a diet. If he drops the weight his diabetes more than likely will get better. He can pass his physical and will be able to fly again. So I asked how his diet was going, to which I got an answer that has stuck with me. He said “Terrible, it would be like a cigarette smoker being told by a doctor that it was going to kill him, but he couldn’t stop smoking, he just could only smoke 3 cigarettes a day instead of the whole pack. You can’t just put it behind you, you have to face it every day at every meal” I think he summarized perfectly the challenge someone faces when losing weight. I’ve fought this battle many times, and lost every single time, often with me weighing more than when I started. So what is going to make this any different? The Goal is far beyond just losing the weight. It’s about living the life I always had imagined so many times as a child. That little boy woke up every day with the promise of his own dreams filling his heart and I’m not going to let him down. I’m not just focused on the weight lose, but all the things I will be doing once I’ve reached my goal. Finally, the one difference I have now that I haven’t spent the time to do before, I have a plan. No gimmick diets or fades just plain old diet and exercise.

The moment I got out of bed yesterday morning, the first day of my 90-day Lifehack, I immediately succeeded in one of the first steps in my plan, wake up early. I got out of bed at 4:45am and made a beeline to the scale, 330 pounds. I must say, there is nothing like numbers to put some reality to any situation. I threw on some shorts and sneakers and headed for the gym. I was surprised to see the gym so busy at 5am and I took it as solid evidence I was on the right track. I did 40mins of cardio trying to keep my heart rate under 130 the whole time to focus on fat burn. I also brought my video media player which helps the time pass quickly otherwise I’m just a mouse on a wheel and bored out of my mind. When I got back home I had a 190 calorie shake to fill my stomach and headed out the door to work.

At the office I had 3 shakes at 10am, 1pm, and at 4pm totaling 570 calories and managing to stay away from snacking on junk like chips and soda. When I got home I was greeted with the smell of bar style wings my wife had made for dinner. God did they smell good. Wings with an Ice cold beer after work, now that’s a tough combination to resist. I didn’t touch the wings and prepared my own dinner. A cup of broccoli (30 calories) , Tilapia (100 Calories) and a table spoon of olive oil (120 Calories) pan seared together with a lemon pepper seasoning for a healthy 250 calorie dinner. This ended the day with a very positive start with 89 days left to go.

With that there are a few adjustments I need to make in the coming days. The first is I ended up eating less calories then my target of 1200-1500 calories a day. Anything less than that will be too restrictive to maintain for any length of time. I didn’t remember to take a multivitamin, can’t forget that. I didn’t drink enough water.

Summery

Exercise – 40 minutes of cardio

Water – N/A

Breakfast – 190 Calories

Snack – 190 Calories

Lunch – 190 Calories

Snack – 190 Calories

Dinner – 250 Calories

Total = 1010 Calories

How the “King Of Kong” will change my life in 90-days

2008-02-20T12:45:00.008-05:00

So I'm watching a documentary called "The King of Kong" which is a movie about Steve Wiebe, a middle-school science teacher and Billy Mitchell, a hot sauce company business owner that compete for the Guinness World Record on the an old arcade game called Donkey Kong. What struck me most among the many contrast between the characters in the story was what their lives had become outside of the video game world. Steve is a guy that has a great marriage with 2 children, has a master's degree, is a teacher, plays drums, piano and is vying to be the best Donkey Kong player in the world. On the other hand you have a cast of characters that appear to have very little else in their lives. Steve submits a video of his high score as proof he had won the title to a company called Twingalaxy, the official score keepers. However, this was not good enough; he needed to be vetted before they could accept his score. They have strict processes and standards that everyone must go through before a score can be announced officially. The climax of the film takes place in an arcade where Steve comes to prove in public that he is the real champion. After hours of grueling game play he tops the best score, only to be beat 10mins later by a poorly recorded video submitted by Billy Mitchell with no vigorous investigation or scrutiny. It was enlightening to see Steve Wiebe plunged in a world of people that had lost prospective of the world and see how they fought to protect their long time champion even when going against the very principles they claimed to believe in.

After watching the film I kept thinking about how even if Steve didn't get the title he still had a whole life full of accomplishments as opposed to the others who seemed to have little else. I began to wonder what I have been doing with my own life and have I been living life or letting it pass me by. I thought about all the things I imagined doing when I was growing up. Exciting things, like becoming an ace pilot, racing cars and motorcycles, becoming a championship fighter and a million other things that I thought would be really cool. I then got this great feeling about life itself, the feeling I get when I'm on vacation somewhere I've never been. It's a new place, it's exciting and fun. I'm just visiting so my focus is on all the fun and exciting new things I'm going to do. I never lose the perspective that my visit is not permanent, I only have a short time before I must leave and return from where I came so I make the best of it. I'm not feeling fear, frustration and worry. I thought to myself that life should always be this way; it should always be an exciting adventure, and never a bore. I should be getting out of bed to do the things I want, looking for the circumstances I want and if I can't find them, make them. So with this I've decided to hack my life, and start going on my own adventures and take on new challenges. I read somewhere that it's not just about what you do with your time, but what you do with your spare time that counts the most. So my goal is to take on new challenges that will literality change my reality in my spare time and doing it within 90 days. The official website will be Ninetydaylifehacker.com which will serve as the main site for this project; this blog will be my daily Journal as I go through my 90-day experience and will play an integral role in the project and my personal success.

The First Challenging Adventure
I have tons of ideas on all the things I can do with this project; however the one large barrier right now is my weight, 330 pounds of it. So my first 90-day Lifehack will be to reduce a significant amount of my weight in this time period. I have set a very big goal to achieve by the end of 90-days, which when I reach it, my life will have changed. I have been over weight now for a good 7 years and needless to say it has had a huge impact on my life. Today is February 20th 2008 and it’s time to get started.

I'd like to tip my hat to the following truly great websites:
Zenhabits.net
4-Hour Workweek.com
lifehacker.com