A few months ago, I interviewed a man by the name of Mike DiCerbo.

It’s likely you haven’t heard of him, until now.

I met Mike in 2007 when I joined the Scottsdalian Toastmasters club. He immediately impressed me as someone with an iron will and a sure sense of who he was.

I interviewed Mike because he is what I call a successful ager. He’s 88 years old. He’s self-reliant, self-sufficient, healthy, and vital. The kind of guy you say, “Wow, I want that when I’m his age.”

Mike doesn’t exercise. This might come as a shock. Healthy, vital, and he doesn’t exercise? Exercise isn’t what you think it is—listen up.

Mike doesn’t exercise, but he stays active. He walks, outside or on a treadmill. He does all his own gardening, trims trees, climbs up on the roof.

Some weeks, he works 40 hours. He volunteers with kids teaching them Toastmasters speaking principles.

What does Mike say about activity?

“I’ve always tried to stay active, even while working. I got involved in things, volunteered for whatever was coming up outside my job.”

What about Mike’s habits?

• He quit smoking in the 1970′s. He’d been smoking since he was 16 years old (he’s 88 now, you do the math!). He quit cold turkey.
• One day he looked at his coffee mug. He’d been drinking close to three pots of coffee per day. The mug was stained. He wondered, “What is that doing to my body?” So he quit. Cold turkey. Now he drinks two cups of tea at breakfast.
• He eats two vegetables at every meal. At lunch he eats light. Once a week he has some ice cream—two scoops. He has dark chocolate once per day, a portion that’s a bit bigger than a Hershey Kiss.

Notice a trend here? Sensible. Simple. Self-discipline pouring through.

I’m a big believer in exercise. I think our modern life makes us soft, fat, and weak if we don’t intentionally do something to stay active. It doesn’t have to be exercising, though. Too many people get caught up thinking they have to exercise. For some people, it’s perfectly acceptable to just be like Mike.

“It is necessary that we release all thoughts—as well as things—that clutter up our lives.”

- Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind

My wife used to drive me nuts with always putting things away. She didn’t like the clutter, she said. It drove her nuts. TV remotes, coasters, keys, wallets, movies, everything has its spot.

And you know what? Now I like it. Now part of my evening routine is making sure stuff is put away where it belongs. There’s gotta be something feng shui about it.

Things of course are easy. We can see them. We have a small number of them. Thoughts, on the other hand, wow. Talk about tough!

Sit down to meditate and you’ll see how quickly your mind acts up and starts thinking about things it has to do. Or, just try to observe your thoughts about going to work or in the morning. Does a particular person elicit a particular sequence of thought?

Perhaps you’re familiar with the sequence: thought -> word -> deed. So, the Science of Mind quote is appropriate. Remove the clutter in your thoughts and you’ll remove the clutter in your life.

The other day I was browsing Netflix movies and one by the name of Ip Man caught my eye. I guessed correctly that Ip Man was referring to a person who I had always known as Yip Man—Bruce Lee’s martial arts instructor.

Full disclosure: I’ve never studied Yip Man’s life. Knowing full well that biographical movies are often loosely based on actual events, I have to take many of the events with a grain of salt.

Whether or not all the events and stories are true, I found Ip Man’s character extremely inspiring.

Here’s what I liked:

• He defeats a well-known local master in his town of Foshan and agrees to keep it quiet. He doesn’t brag about victory or make a big scene like we so often see in today’s athletes.
• When the Japanese invade his town, he accepts his new, lesser conditions admirably—going from being independently wealthy to poor and hungry overnight. (As an aside, here is one of my favorite Chinese quotes about accepting your circumstances and being grateful, “I complained about not having shoes until I saw a man with no feet.”)
• He exuded calmness, serenity, and composure. One of my favorite scenes in Enter the Dragon is where Bruce Lee is challenged on the boat that’s heading towards Han’s Island. In an interview, Bruce Lee commented on the scene saying that if you’re secure within yourself, challenges won’t bother you. That’s the kind of composure Ip Man displayed in the movie. It’s the kind of composure that you develop from being true to yourself, over and over again.

As far as the film is concerned, it kept me engrossed the entire time. The movie follows Ip Man’s life from Foshan, through the Japanese invasion, to his leaving to go to Hong Kong. Throughout, Ip Man exudes the kind of calm and composure that always inspires me.

If you want to check it out, both Ip Man and Ip Man 2 are still on Netflix.

Went to restaurants under glass tonight at the Mitchell Park domes (a local Milwaukee, Wisconsin event). There was a large crowd of people and long lines and I was hungry.

I’ve overcome alcohol addiction and have subsequently been working on other addictions as I’m becoming aware of them. Now I’m really seeing how I’m addicted food—the kind, the amount, and the combinations of it.

Alcohol, I can turn down left and right. I can have it in the house without issues. Even coffee I’m capable of turning down and not falling into the daily habit. But food. Wow!

Just try to change the way you eat. Maybe I’m taking on too much at once. But the pull of food is incredible. I wasn’t “myself” tonight until I had some food to calm the beast inside. And not just some food, but enough of a quantity of food to make me believe that I had at least gotten enough—not that I was ready to stop there.

Lest you think I pigged out completely, I didn’t. I just had more than necessary and couldn’t control my thoughts about it while I was eating it. I tried to chew slowly, but another part of me kept trying to speed up. Eventually I settled down, and then I realized I had another ticket for food, and I couldn’t waste that dollar ticket—no way!—so I got another small portion of food from one of the food vendors.

I overate.

I’ve expanded the time per day where I feel peace of mind. Where I’m in control of my actions and not being dragged around by my addictions and compulsions and runaway thoughts. This only serves to make me increasingly aware of the times when the peace of mind is destroyed by out of control thoughts and emotions.

I eat very well the majority of the time, but now I’ve learned more about food combinations and how certain combinations of food can lead to stagnation. Being aware of this, my ego wants to continue with its old ways while my higher self wants to make improvements. The battle plays out at events where food choice is prevalent and my ego is accustomed to having its own way.

Awareness is the first step.

In a New York times article several years ago, I read about a parking structure that collapsed during construction. The reporter interviewed the workers and one of the memorable quotes was, “Everything about this job was rush, rush, rush.”

The man they interviewed went on to explain that the concrete was too green, and they didn’t allow it time to settle in before going on to the next floor.

It is a cultural tendency to rush progress. We know where we are, we want to be somewhere else, and we want to skip steps along the way to get where we want to be as quickly as possible.

You might be rushing progress in your exercise if you’ve ever experienced any of the following:

• Overuse injuries
• Traumatic injuries
• Overtraining
• Sickness
• Excessive fatigue
• Pain
• Swelling

In our rush to get where we want to be, we fail to establish a solid framework to support our future aspirations. We want to learn to play tennis so badly, we keep practicing until we get tennis elbow, and then keep practicing trying to work through it, and then our form suffers and we’re building a poor quality skill.

What can be done to curb our incessant drive for improvement at an unsustainable rate?

• Measure and track your morning pulse. Three beats or higher than your weekly average indicates a stressed state—you should take it easy.
• Be anal about your form. Occasionally video tape yourself performing exercises, or have your form analyzed by a professional, to make sure you’re not allowing sloppiness to creep in.
• Use a metronome or other device to measure your rep speed on occasion.
• Track your workouts and record your progress—keep a detailed training log.
• Pay attention to how you feel, and don’t allow pain that meets or exceeds a “four” on a scale of 10.

It takes self control to progress at sustainable rates. It takes self deception to plow forward and attain fake progress at the expense of quality and skill.

It’s not just fitness, it’s fitness and health. What’s the point of being fit, if you’re not healthy?

Yet, when you think about health, you might think about exercise—and you’ll definitely think about what you eat—but will you think about how you take care of your teeth?

According to Wikipedia, several clinical studies show a correlation between poor dental hygiene and the following diseases:

• Cardiovascular Disease (Heart attack and Stroke)
• Bacterial Pneumonia
• Low Birth Weight/Extreme High Birth Weight
• Diabetes complications
• Osteoporosis

Here are some tips to keep your teeth clean and looking good:

• “Teeth flossed seldom lost.” Floss at night before brushing, every night. Make it a habit.
• Get a tongue scraper and scrape your tongue every morning. I like the stainless steel Banyon Botanical tongue scraper.
• Get a Sonicare Toothbrush. My dentist explained this way: your old toothbrush is like the horse and buggy. The Sonicare is like the car. Light years difference.

Of course, that’s just cleaning the teeth.

It helps to have a clean diet, too:

• Curb your sugar intake.
• Stay away from soda.
• Be careful with hard candies and nuts. (Insider dentist secret? After the holidays, many people come in with chipped teeth because of nuts.)

I know several fitness people who are frequently sick or run down because they exercise too much (i.e. they overtrain). These are people who want to be fit, yet the activity they’ve chosen to make them fit, exercise, is actually making them sick.

There are limits to what your body can recover from. If you exceed those limits you will experience ill health in one form or another. Different people have different recovery abilities. It depends on your diet, your digestive system, how much rest you get, your body’s constitution, etc.

The problem occurs when people confuse motion for progress and exercise for exercise’s sake. Exercise is a stimulus that tears down the body. It is only while we rest that we give our body time to recover from exercise. If we shortchange our body on this needed time, our recovery is compromised and ill health is the result.

Most people can only handle 2-3 hard resistance training sessions per week. I train hard three times every 8-9 days. The other days I take it easy and do joint mobility, stretching, and walking.

One quick way to determine whether you should push it is by listening to your morning pulse. Take your pulse everyday and average it out for a week. If your pulse is higher by 3 beats, you should take it easy that day and skip the hard training.

Aside from taking your pulse, you can take a health inventory. How do you feel? Do you get sick frequently? If you do, then you have some work to do to figure out why.

Finally, the next time you feel a compulsion to exercise, remember this Dan Kennedy cartoon:

Start making plans for all your extra time that you’re not spending exercising.

The ever-dangerous thought bombs. You have an addiction. Or a compulsion. You’re trying to eliminate it. You don’t want to experience your addiction or compulsion any longer. You’re doing well. Making progress.

Then, something reminds you of your addiction or compulsion. You have your guard down. You’re not fully aware. You start imagining the addiction or compulsion and the enjoyment you’ll get from partaking. You’re caught in a reverie, feeling joyful, a sense of relief that you’re enjoying yourself and your addiction instead of that boring self control. Then, awareness kicks in. What was that? You wonder. You were off in some land of the mind and the real you, you’re higher self, the one who wants the best for you, was gone! How many minutes just passed by? You realize what has happened, but by now you’re so keyed up, the battle is practically lost.

Now, you might consciously begin to partake in the indulgent thoughts. Oh, well, I’ve already come this far, might as well imagine some more, you say to yourself.

You might succumb to your addiction or compulsion right then and there, or take the steps to succumb later on if it is not convenient at the moment.

You’ve just experienced a thought bomb. Your consciousness was calm, serene, and then before you knew it, you’re all keyed up over some habit that you’ve developed that you want to get rid of. It’s very difficult to get back on track at this point.

Maybe you’ll enact your addiction or compulsion, whatever it is. Maybe you’ll experience a surge of willpower and suppress it. Ideally, you can overcome it and not enact it—the battle might have been lost on the mental plane, but you don’t have to lose it on the physical plane, too.

Whether you succumb to or overcome the thought bomb, the next step is to identify the trigger. What triggered the onslaught of the thought bomb? Was it a picture? Was it a conversation? Is it fatigue? What was the first thought that led to the chain of thoughts?

Now, what are your higher thoughts regarding the matter? Say your addiction is alcohol. You have an alcohol thought bomb and all you can think about is pouring your favorite drink down your throat. What kind of person does that activity make you become? If you engage that habit, and multiply it by time, where do you end up? How does that road compare with your higher road, the one you really want to travel but your addictions and compulsions are getting in the way? Think about that ideal road. Compare the two roads and allow negative emotions to dominate while thinking of the lower road and allow positive emotions to dominate while thinking of the higher road. Then, think exclusively of the higher road, assert that this is the road you want to travel and then let the matter drop. If you can’t drop it that easy do a set of push ups and do something that will otherwise engage your mind.

Personally, when I experience thought bombs, I imagine myself seated in a chair, with other people around, totally at ease, totally calm, peaceful, and serene. Nothing can affect my serenity because I’ve conquered myself and can call myself self-governed. I think of the Zen master who had his house broken in to and who looked at the assailant and calmly inquired, “For which have you come, my money or my life?” An impenetrable consciousness that nothing can disturb. Totally centered.

When you’re changing habits, you have to flood your mind with your higher desires that will replace the lower desires. Getting drunk, eating too much food, smoking, etc. are all lower desires. These activities, when habitual and multiplied by time, bring you lower and lower. They make you animal-like in some respects. But you have things you want to accomplish, things you want to do! Anything that brings you lower, that lowers your vitality, your energy, your luster, will make it harder to do accomplish those things. Worse, certain drugs are value-changing drugs—these will make it all the harder to identify your true desires.

The thought bomb is a dangerous landmine on your path to self-control. By identifying the triggers, and then engineering the proper response, you can stop the thought bomb in its tracks.

This four step challenge will make you more conscious of your caffeine habit. It’ll also be a chance to flex your self-discipline muscles—always a good thing to do.

Caffeine Challenge Step 1

How much caffeine do you drink?

Count your sodas, coffees, and energy drinks.

What’s the number? Write it down.

Caffeine Challenge Step 2

Work to eliminate caffeine from your diet. Decrease your consumption over the course of a week. By day seven you should consume only a small amount.

Caffeine Challenge Step 3

Avoid caffeine entirely for one week. You might have a slight headache, but if you were consistent about lowering your dosage it should be minimal.

Caffeine Challenge Step 4

After the end of the caffeine-free week, suddenly switch back to the amount of caffeine you were drinking previously.

Note how you feel.

*     *     *

Chances are, you’ll be re-sensitized to caffeine and have quite a stimulative effect. Maybe even too much stimulation. This will bring awareness to your stimulant habit and show you what that caffeine is really doing to you.

Let’s consider caffeine the drug that it is. Ask yourself—do you really need a hit of stimulant every morning to get through the day? Really? Can’t get by without that coffee? Figure out how much you really need. If you find you can’t by without caffeine, look towards your diet, your sleep, and your life to find out what is causing you to require additional stimulation.