I’m pretty weary. My first week of pursuing the 40-by-40 goal has been a failure. I changed almost none of my diet. I added no new exercise to my normal routine. My weight went up, not down.

I’m also on the road nearly every day this week, with working lunch meetings substituting the chance I can find my own food and dinner meetings and drinks killing off any chance of a home cooked meal.

I’ll be better by the weekend, when the meetings are over and I’m home and have a chance to regroup. For now, though, I hate this feeling of failure and would really prefer to be paid to go to the gym and work out and then return home to a professional chef cooking me healthy meals.

Related posts:

1. Thought for the week

There’s a Zen saying: Where the body goes, the mind follows.

Often, this is said in the context of meditation. By practicing zazen, you encourage and train the mind to be still. The message is that the mind and body are connected and what one does will alter the other.

The goal of Zen practitioners is to find a balance between all of the elements of the person to find a state of calm. This idea also acknowledges the opposite: when the body is upset or sick or very busy, it will impact our mental state. When the body is sick, we are likely to be upset or anxious or frustrated.

This new effort to get healthy is doing just that to me. As I change my dietary and exercise habits, my body is struggling to adjust but would be more comfortable if I continued to limit the amount I work out and if I continued to eat convenient but unhealthy foods.

As my body is agitated by these changes, it is agitating my mind. I find it very difficult, even impossible, to detach from this kind of stuff. It’s a self-inflicted, constant distraction in a world already filled with distractions. While I’m not hungry with the new diet, I don’t feel the same as I did a week ago. I crave things, like Pepsi or chocolate, that I honestly don’t think I craved last week and didn’t consume in particularly large amounts. While I’m not hurt or sore from my new exercise program, I feel a bit weary and resentful of the time required to exercise enough to make a difference in my health.

Given all this, and looping back to the start of this entry, I’ve decided to add daily meditation back into my routine. The last time I made a serious effort to improve my health, in 2006 and 2007, meditation was very important and blunted the discomfort of change. To be successful with this, it is critical that I give my mind a chance to change with my body and understand how the body feels under the new diet.

I’m reminded of the advice I contemplated in these last few weeks. By following the new diet and exercise routine each day, my body slowly adapts. By meditating every day, I have time to connect with this change and to absorb it into the story I tell myself, about myself, every day.

There are a bazillion diet plans. Of them, almost every one either offends me or seems like such torture that I don’t want anything to do with them. Of what remains, many seem like good ideas turned bad, like Atkins. Worst, every diet can be grouped with some fad that makes me question the validity of its assumptions. (Is this another cabbage soup diet? Or a bacon-only diet? Or…) It’s tough finding a diet that is neither a bad idea for my ongoing health and is something I can sustain for the rest of my life.

Three diets seem to be very reasonable, look easy to follow and don’t prescribe anything to an extreme that feels faddish. These were the South Beach Diet, the Mediterranean Diet and the Paleo Diet. All three have a set of common features:

1. All allow and even require lean meats to be consumed, so I don’t have to go veg.
2. All ban or greatly restrict refined sugars.
3. All restrict or eliminate grains from the diet.
4. All bias towards or require either raw or home cooked foods rather than processed foods…or the diet’s restrictions make it difficult to succeed with prepared/processed foods.
5. All call for 30 minutes or so of moderate exercise on a daily basis.

To start, I’m going to try following the Paleo Diet because the rules are simple and it will be easy to follow this one in summer when fresh fruits and veggies are plentiful. It follows all of the common items I listed in the previous paragraph and adds two more: no legumes (ouch!) and no potatoes (meh…).

I’ll let you know how it goes.

The problem

Sunday morning, I stepped onto the scale for my regular weekly weigh-in. The news was not good. I didn’t gain any weight but I also didn’t lose any, either. I’m heavier than I like and heavier than is healthy given family history.

My scale reports on both weight and body fat percentage. I took these two numbers – weight and body fat percentage – and then considered what would be needed to give me a ‘healthy’ BMI if all other things stayed constant.

What does the math say? I need to lose 40 pounds of fat. Ouch.

The idea

My 40th birthday is 20 weeks away. I’ve been thinking about it since my last birthday but I admit that I don’t care much. I don’t see any substantial difference between being 39 and being 40, except that it’s a nice round number. However, I see one thing that is convenient about it.

Two pounds a week is about the most you can lose per week and still be healthy. That means it would take 20 weeks to lose 40 pounds if things worked perfectly….this turns into a catchy goal: lose 40 pounds of fat by my 40th birthday.

The reality

Losing two pounds a week for 20 weeks is hard. The last time I really worked hard to improve my health, I lost about 30 pounds in six months. That’s half the rate of this plan. (I’ve kept 15 of the 30 off, to date.)

It wasn’t difficult at the start of those six months but it was tough at the end. I was working out at least once a day, often twice. My diet was reasonable, but still included things like beer, sugary desserts and occasional fast food meals. If I’m going to make this healthy weight, I’m going to have to do more than just work out. I’m also going to have to significantly change what kind of calories I consume.

Still….it’s a goal. It’s a number to pursue, even if I don’t make it all the way to that goal by my birthday. Heck, if I make half, I’ll view it as a great success.

Related posts:

1. Neither there nor there

Yesterday, I was thinking about advice I was given that suggested I do something difficult every day. The assumed goal is to build character and to understand ourselves better.

While there are many difficult things we can do, boot camp is especially difficult. Friends who attended told me their stories of boot camp and what they experienced there as they progressed from raw recruit to soldier. Stories weren’t as bad as what the media shows, but they weren’t great…but they all said they were changed for the better after weeks spent in the basic training boot camp.

What strikes me, though, are the many “boot camps” that appear in the public space. You can find them anyplace you look. If you search for the term on Google you will get a reasonably infinite number of links to boot camps of all kinds.

The most common are the extreme workout sessions that advertise that they will get you as fit as a new Marine. There are also bridal boot camps for weight loss, teen boot camps for kids in trouble with the police, drug treatment boot camps, bible boot camps, computer programming boot camps, MBA degree accelerated boot camps, and..well, there are as many kinds of boot camps as there are things to learn or do.

This got me thinking about questions that I can’t answer:

1) Are these boot camps good for us? Or are they a variation on the quick-fix mentality by pretending that attending a short boot camp will suddenly give a person the amazing physique, knowledge or whatever the boot camp promises?

2) Why the boot camp metaphor? Is it just a handy metaphor given the last decade of U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? Does it show some greater cultural angst and by going to a boot camp, we somehow feel connected or in control while these conflicts are in progress?

3) Recruits in boot camp have very little control over their destiny. The boot camp image in movies and television show nearly brutal experiences where recruits are pushed to their limits and they rarely look back fondly on the experience. Given this, why would anybody be attracted to a situation that claims a connection with that mythos?

4) How do the people who connect the phrase “boot camp” with completely unrelated topics like “bible study” or “computer programming” or “dog training” get this idea that these things are similar in any way to the real thing?

5) Why don’t people laugh at how often this term is used, especially in corporate culture? (Raise your hand if you’ve had to attend a “boot camp” at your work that pretended to teach you something important in one day or less.)

Anyhow…yeah. Boot camps that aren’t boot camp. What the heck?

Sometime in the past, somebody gave me the following advice:

“Do something difficult every day but don’t tell anybody.”

This seems like simple advice. It tells us not to brag. However, as I’ve considered this advice over the years, I feel there’s much more to it…

Sincerity and Humility
It’s true that this advice recommends against bragging. If you keep something difficult a secret, you eliminate some reasons for having done the difficult thing. Obviously, pride and vanity are eliminated as motivators when we do something for ourselves as opposed for a hypothetical audience.

So, by pursuing something for own ends, we avoid the political. We avoid the temptation to review the personal benefit of our options against the increase in our ability to manipulate, sway, argue or bargain with the people who observe our struggle.

Purpose
Of course, if you aren’t doing something difficult for fame and glory, then I have to ask why do we do difficult things? Why don’t we simply take the easy path if nobody is watching us?

The advice to do something difficult also suggests that we find things that align with our belief about what is important and pursue those. It would be foolish to do something difficult (example: drink a bottle of hot sauce) if there were no other personal benefit.

Waking up early to run, eating healthy when junk food is easily available, reading a book when television is so simple to watch…all of these might be very difficult for some people. Each suggests some kind of personal improvement that is meaningful for the person engaging in the task. Running is difficult but can improve your health. Reading may teach you something you didn’t know or enrich your life with a wonderful story. Whatever the situation, the difficult activity is made worthwhile through some personal, internal benefit.

(Tangent: Is struggling with temptation the same as accomplishing something difficult?)

Growth
Why do something difficult every day? Given the assumptions to this point, by repeatedly doing something difficult, we accumulate benefits with each repetition. I think this is because of our physiology, as both physical and mental changes require regular practice to establish.

As illustration of the assumptions: Running every day is important to see results but drinking a bottle of hot sauce every day doesn’t show any benefit when repeated daily. Breaking a bad habit or establishing a good habit requires practice over many weeks or months. Often, these difficult things provide a small benefit on an individual basis but when repeated, changes accumulate.

By choosing to do something difficult on a regular basis, we force ourselves to change and to grow. If something is difficult, the largest challenge is emotional or mental. We need to learn how to adapt to the difficulty. Our bodies can run, but we need the willpower to run…and learning how to exercise that willpower is not trivial. As we learn that we have the capacity to do progressively more difficult things in one part of life, we see that we can do the same in others.

Of course, if we randomly pick difficult things, we’re just being masochists. We torture ourselves because we don’t have enough time to adapt and grow and accumulate the benefit of the difficult activities.

I think there’s more hiding here within that phrase and within the ideas surrounding growth through struggle…but this is what I’ve got, today…

I use my iPhone constantly. I’m pretty sure that I’d use any smartphone with the same frequency if they had as many apps that entertain me or simplify my life.

However, a few friends who use iPhones and iPads seem to have a problem finding interesting or useful apps, so I’m going to write about those I that find most addictive or valuable. But don’t worry Pete, I’m not going to turn this into an iPhone site.

[The app links in this post go to the iTunes store via their link sharing service. The book links go to Amazon via their service. If you click a link here and wind up buying the thing, a few cents come back to me and go to my hosting costs. Obviously, it's more symbolic than anything...]

The first app that has been entertaining me is one called Level Me Up HD! It’s part productivity app and part entertainment. It does both by combining research from real life with a gaming metaphor. These are:

1. The now-popular idea Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in his book Outliers: The Story of Success that it takes 10,000 hours to become an “expert” in a field of study.
2. The gamer’s favorite: an RPG-style level system where the more time or turns you spend studying a subject, the higher your character’s level in that field in the game.

Specifically, this is an app that records the time you spend working in a field of study and then assigns RPG-style levels to you based upon the total accumulated time with the top-level goal being 10,000 total accumulated hours of practice. I find this hilarious and addicting.

Creating a profile
You start by creating a profile for yourself that will acquire the various skills that you later define. There’s not much to this, except to assign a name and a photo and a first skill. The real meat of this app — and the motivator to practice a skill in real life — is centered around the skill timer and level-up mechanisms.

Creating Skills
Defining a skill allows you to name it, assign an icon, assign a parent skill, and choose a level-up mechanism. The first two are self-explanatory, but the second two are what make this fun to use on a regular basis…even though, at the end of the day, it’s really just a timer. The parent-skill allows you to create a top-level skill, such as “Writer”, that will collect and advance along with all the child-skills, such as “Novelist” or “Blogger” or “Bathroom Wall Sharpie Poet”. As you log time against one of the children, the parent category collects time and advances as well.

This is probably more useful for skill sets that are closely related but a bit more discreet, like what I created for myself with the parent skill called “Programmer” with children skills “C# Programmer”, “Java programmer” and “SQL Query writer”. Others that I use are the “Athlete” parent category with “Runner” and “Weightlifter” children categories. As you can see, I’m using the RPG-style naming where the skill is described in terms of the vocation or with a noun rather than as a verb (e.g “runner” instead of “running”) but you can name the skills any way you want, of course.

Finally, you choose a leveling mechanism that is either RPG-style or normal-style. For RPG-style, early levels come quickly as the timer progresses and you collect levels and ranks such as “Level 3 n00b Programmer “. There are ten levels per named tier. The normal-style assigns a set amount to each level within a tier and moves more linearly.

Using the app to LEVEL UP!!!!
This is all just silly to this point…until you start to use the timer. To start to practice a skill so that you can LEVEL UP!, you open the skill from the list of skills under your profile and start the timer. At this point, you can close the app and the timer will run while you do whatever it is you are practicing. For example, at this moment, the app is recording the amount of time I spend on this blog entry.

When you stop the timer, the app will collect the amount of time you have invested in practicing the skill and if you have passed a LEVEL UP! threshold, you get an image with a message that shows your new level and title and gives you the option to share this on Facebook…if you are into that sort of thing.

The timer and the function to collect the total amount of time spent on a skill is the real value here. The goofy RPG-style levels, titles and image shown when progressing through levels are nice fluff that make this easy to remember and is also a motivator…if you enjoy RPG style games.

Things I wish this app had…
There are four things I hope the people who made this app add in the future as it would make the app both more useful as a motivator and more fun…

• Images for higher-ranked titles that are more elaborate. After all, if I’m a “Master Programmer” or whatever, wouldn’t my level-up column of light be so much more impressive than a n00b?!?
• A way to share progress with friends, other than through Facebook. Getting a notice that a friend spent a few hours on a shared skill is a nice motivator. Several fitness apps already have this function, to allow friends to encourage each other to workout and pursue other fitness goals.
• The option to compress the skill list (turn off icons, use smaller fonts) so that it’s easier to find the skill you will be timing during that session.
• A simple way to organize the skills in a custom list. At the moment, the options are to arrange them alphabetically, by level or by total hours spent. These aren’t bad, but I already found that I’d like to float a new skill to the top to save me from scrolling down every time.

I can imagine that this app could be developed in several other directions, too, such as setting weekly goals or creating some other more sophisticated way to define skills…but really, that’s not the point of this app. It’s really a timer and motivation tool combined into a single app. Adding more sophisticated functions might ruin the app’s ability to suggest “Hey! Shouldn’t you go for a run and write for an hour today? If you do, you will LEVEL UP!“.