Tag Archives: healthy living

Body tired

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I’ve known for a while that the weakness in my healthy living lifestyle has been sleep. I just don’t get enough of it. If my sleeping patterns aren’t enough of an indicator, my Garmin watch reminds me of this regularly, (my sleep score last night was 34). it doesn’t help that I’m on holidays and sleeping on futon couches. And I know I’m not going to improve things until I get home. But today I got a reminder of how important sleep is.

I stayed with my nocturnal uncle for 4 nights and was going to bed between 4am and 6am. I headed back to my mom’s last night and although she went to bed around 11, I was still up at almost 3am. I managed to sleep past 9:30 but I was body tired today.

I headed to the gym early this afternoon and everything felt hard. I needed longer than usual rest times before sets, and I cut my workout short. I just didn’t have the energy to continue. It’s obvious that my sleeping patterns and lack of sleep are why I feel this way.

It’s the one area of my life that I really don’t manage well. I don’t sleep for long enough, and often not well enough either. This is something I have to build into my routines. I know this, I just need to start doing it… right after these holidays. It’s time to stop complaining about this and actually do something about it.

Weighing on me

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It has been almost 6 weeks since I did the Everest the Crunch challenge. I was about 3-4 pounds lighter than my regular weight when I started it and I lost almost 7 pounds over the 2 days. I also lost my appetite during that time. Other than overall fatigue, getting food into me at the top of the crunch was the hardest part of the event. And I haven’t regained my appetite since.

Then I went on an 8 day hike of the West Coast Trail, and I can tell that the past 6 weeks have taken a bit of a toll on my body. I’m the lightest weight I’ve been in over 4 years. I recently took a body scan at my gym and my body fat percentage was 11%. I’ll note that this was after a workout, which tends to lower the result, but quite frankly that’s too low.

If I was a high performance athlete training for an event, that would be great, but walking around day-to-day at under 15% isn’t really ideal in my eyes… and being about 10 pounds lighter than my usual weight is not where I want to be. But I’m also not walking around hungry or feeling exhausted, so while this isn’t ideal, I also don’t think this is detrimental.

That said, my goal starting retirement was to bulk and add 10 pounds and instead I went completely the other way. I’m not going to lie, that’s weighing on me. It tells me that if I’m not in the gym 5-6 days a week, my body wants to drop weight. And now I’m heading out on a 3+ week holiday where I’m not going to have access to a gym for most of it, and I’m going to be eating out a lot. I want to add weight, but not burger and fries kinda weight.

My goal over this holiday is to not miss a meal, make healthy choices, and not think about stepping on a scale until I return. I’ll reevaluate my goals in November when I’ll finally have time to establish a retirement routine. Until then I just need to let go of where I am and where I want to be with regard to my weight.

*Note: I feel like a bit of an ass talking about accidentally losing 10 pounds when I know many people struggle to lose weight, but I’ve been there too. I was 20 pounds heavier than I am now and it took me 2.5 years to get to my current weight and another 4.5 to add 10 (desired) pounds. My experience has been that adding muscle is as hard or harder to do than losing fat, and watching myself lose 4.5 years of hard work is very discouraging. We are all on our own health journeys, I hope sharing mine doesn’t create unnecessary compressions in anyone else’s mind.

First day hike

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Dave and I wanted to do something special on the first day of school as new retirees. I suggested hiking the Sea to Sky and taking the gondola down. We took the challenging route up. It was more technical than we expected, but totally doable. It took us a little over 2.5 hours.

What a great way to start the new school year. We might make something like this a new tradition.

Everest The Crunch in a week!

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Dave Sands and I will be Everesting the Crunch starting a week from today. Our training has tapered, and we just need to stay injury free. This morning after a shoulder workout at the gym, we hopped onto the Crunch to do just one, and we created this video inviting people to join us next week.

I mentioned ‘Do hard things’ briefly in the video, this is something that has been on my mind a lot recently as I head into retirement. I’m not just going to the gym, I’m trying to make gains. I’m not just trying to go up the crunch again, I’m trying to walk up it 37 times in less than 48 hours, which involves walking up hill the distance of 2 marathons. I’m not just continuing my daily blog, I’m planning to write a book starting in November.

Hard things.

I think we find more meaning out of life when we try to do hard things. That said, I’m not trying to do it alone. We need to also make connections and maintain meaningful relationships. It means so much that I’m doing this with Dave, and it means so much to us that our family and friends will be there to support us.

Sugar bomb

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I just saw a clip from a very popular podcast where an ‘expert’ talked about the equivalent sugar in a bowl of cereal not being as bad as a bowl of plain white rice. It basically conflated carbohydrate energy with white sugar cubes. This is ridiculous. We have a hard enough time trying to cut sugar out of our diets to have this deceiving information shared to millions of people as if it’s informative much less helpful.

I’ve only ever spent a few weeks tracking my calorie intake and that was only about a year ago. I didn’t really give it an honest effort. However, 7 years ago I started paying attention to sugar content in foods and that had a dramatic effect on my healthiness. I reduced my sugar intake considerably, and I dropped the weight I needed to.*

It was really challenging. Almost everything had more sugar than I expected. Here are two examples:

1. Ketchup. Sugar isn’t on the ingredients list, it’s usually corn syrup. But a serving of one tablespoon has 4 grams of sugar – and who ever just uses one tablespoon of ketchup? I used to consider ketchup its own food group, I put it on everything. Now, I have almost completely eliminated ketchup from my diet. I’ll only have it occasionally on fries or cooked into a recipe, but I often substitute it with mustards (plain, Dijon, and/or honey Dijon, although you need to check the ingredients for sugar in the honey Dijon).

2. Granola. When you go into a granola aisle in a grocery store, you might think you’re choosing a healthy meal. Most granola has at least 14 grams of sugar per serving and some go up as high as 22g or more. The first time I looked, the lowest I could find was 8g. When you factor in that the recommended serving sizes are usually half to 1/3 the size of what my typical serving would be, all of a sudden this ‘healthy meal’ has a crap load of sugar in it!

There are also other very obvious places where it’s easy to cut out sugar. Cookies and soda are easy examples. I don’t drink a lot of pop, and when I do it’s usually sugar free. I will also have the occasional cookie (or 3), but occasionally means 2-3 times in a month at most.

Sugar is added to so many things, and it affects our gut biome, which in turn can generate cravings and a cycle of always seeking/desiring more sugar. I’m not immune to this, but by intentionally avoiding sugar I can say that my desire for it has been dramatically reduced.

The newest thing I’m keenly aware of is keeping away from sugar replacements as well. Foods don’t need to be sweet to be good. But again, this is hard. It seems like every processed item in the grocery store is filled with sugar, corn syrup, or sweeteners. It takes effort to avoid. But it’s worth the effort.

I like to think I’m already sweet enough, I don’t need loads of sugar to make me any sweeter. 😆

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*Note: When I lost the weight 7 years ago I didn’t just cut out sugar. Initially I combined this with a couple other strategies to get the greatest impact: 6 weeks on a ketogenic diet, and about 10 months of intermittent fasting, which I still try to follow several nights a week, eliminating after dinner snacking, which for me is seldom healthy. I still pay a lot of attention to my sugar intake.)

Gains not pains

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I lift heavy in the gym. Not crazy or super strong, but for how much I weigh, I can move some heavy weights. That said, my age has changed my strategy on how I do this… safely. When I was younger, I’d often lift to my maximum, my one-rep max. Now, I don’t know what my one-rep max is for any of my exercises? I never try.

Instead, I work to get every set to 10-12 reps. When I can get 10-12 on my third set, that’s when I consider moving up in weight. That happened today on shoulder press. When I move up in weight next week, I will be at that new level for a long time, I’m not going to get to 10 reps any time soon… And that’s ok.

I haven’t moved up in weight for bar bench press in a couple years, but I have significantly improved my free weight barbell bench press. Why? With the bar, I feel a lot of pressure on my shoulders. That doesn’t mean I don’t push hard. I’m still only at 5-7 reps for my last 2 sets, I just haven’t seen gains with the bar, and again that’s ok with me.

The point being, with any set I’m still going to the point where I’m struggling to get to 10-12 on my second last set. I’m going to hopefully get 4-7 reps on the 3rd set. I’m going to be pushing my muscles to fatigue. What I won’t be doing is straining to lift a heavier weight which I can only lift 1-2 times. Those days are over.

I’m so much better at listening to my body now. I’ll lift lighter when I feel fatigued. I’ll adjust my hand placement or change my workout when a set doesn’t feel right. I’ll sacrifice lifting heavier for good form. That said, I still need to do a lot of self-talk to temper pushing hard with pushing smart.

And while I’m doing my best to lift safe and smart, I also want to push hard and make gains. I’ve got a few more years of gains to make, as long as I stay healthy.

The (grey) sands of time

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It has been several years since I’ve left my beard for over a week, and now that I have done so, I’m a little surprised by how much grey I see. My beard used to be mostly pepper with a hint of salt, but now the salt has really taken over.

For years now, a passing conversation with my mother-in-law has stuck with me. She was only a few years older than I am now when she shared the following. She said, (and I paraphrase because this was over 25 years ago), ‘You’ll see. You’ll get to my age and you won’t feel old. Your mind will still tell you that you are young, but then you look in the mirror and you see an old you looking back.’

She didn’t say it lightheartedly, but rather with a hint of duress, which is probably what made me remember the conversation. It comes back to me more frequently as I age, and especially when I have moments like this, looking in a mirror and seeing so much grey in my beard. These are ‘where did the time go?’ kind of moments.

And then I shift my thinking. I realize that a lot of time has indeed passed. I see my grown, adult kids and recognize that they too have moments like this, where they wonder how they got to be as old as they are. I see what I’ve built around me with my career, my family, and my friends. I see the commitment I’ve made to care for myself, to dedicate time to writing and to my health… this all takes time. And while I can’t stay young forever, I can continue to feel young.

The grey has come. It will spread. Wrinkle lines will deepen. Reflexes will slow. But I will not yield to these things. I will not accept them as signs that I’m old. No, instead I will work hard to slow the decline in ways I have the power to, and I’ll accept the things that age will make inevitable. Let the grey come. If I still have ways to grow, things to learn, places to see, and experiences to have… I’ll still be young at heart and mind.

Let the grey come.

Routine Ownership

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I heard this quote by Alex Hormozi from Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast:

“…if you cannot function without your routine, your routine owns you, you do not own it. Full stop.”

At first this hit me hard. I’m so committed to my routines that I thought he was talking directly to me… a metaphorical gut punch of insight that I needed to hear. That was my first instinct. Now I see it differently.

Basically this is true if you are obsessed with your routine, but otherwise it’s healthy. Only if your routine is costing you your wellbeing or your relationships with others would I agree that a routine owning you is an issue. Beyond the routine costing you in a very unhealthy way, you need the routine to pull you, to ‘own’ you in a way, or it wouldn’t be a routine.

We have some routines that are non-negotiable commitments. For example, if you have kids, you need to feed them. You don’t break the routine and not feed them dinner. But if the routine (or habit) is something negotiable, like meditation, or working out, or a minimum number of steps in a day, for example… Then there are always reasons to break the routine, or break the streak. If you don’t let the routine own you, it will quickly not become routine.

The routine needs to own you or it will no longer be something you regularly do. It’s that simple. If I’m headed to bed, exhausted, and I haven’t written my daily blog post, it’s easy to say, ‘I’ll just skip today.” But then it’s easier and easier to have other ‘acceptable’ excuses… And I would not have recently achieved 7 years of daily blogging. It’s not that I can’t function otherwise, it’s not an issue that the routine owns me more than I own it. In fact, this is precisely what is needed to ensure the routine continues.

I’ll end where I started just two days ago when I said about ‘Streaks and hard things’:

1. Our streaks are part of our identity. They don’t define us, we are defined by the act of keeping them.

2. Do hard things. The effort is its own reward. I don’t know anyone with a hard-to-keep streak who isn’t also doing well in other aspects of their lives, and ‘crushing it’… A life with intentional hard things begets a life where challenges are met and overcome rather than seen as barriers and limitations. 

There might be a reason to stop in the future… but until then the streak will keep streaking.

And the routines will keep routining… but they’ve got to own you a bit for this to happen.

Habit revamp

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Summer is here and I’m don’t have a morning routine anymore. I’m currently between sets at a gym I don’t usually go to, because last night I stayed with a cousin in a nearby city. I’m here 3 hours later than usual, which is perfectly ok, I really don’t need to be out of the house at 5:45 anymore… or anytime in the foreseeable future.

I don’t care about the actual time I work out, or write my daily blog post, or meditate, or take my vitamins, but I do care that I actually do these things very regularly. A perfect example is that today I went directly from cardio to weights and only now realize that I skipped my stretching routine… a key ingredient to keeping my back healthy and ready to do weights.

Basically I had a habitual routine that was rock soiled while I had a work schedule to plan my routine around, and now that’s gone. I’m not going to figure this out today, and new habits take a while to form, but I want to figure out a kind of flexible routine in terms of times of day, location, and summer plans. I don’t actually know how to do this, so it may be messy for a while. Even so, I know me, and if I don’t have systems in place I miss getting things done.

There is a saying that if you want something done, give it to a busy person. That was me for a long time, now that I have more time I really need to create systems that will ensure all the healthy habits I developed are part of my new patter and pace of life.

If it hurts…

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I had sciatic pain from about December to March. It got bad enough that my doctor requested a pain specialist appointment for me, and I had it yesterday. Despite the fact that I’m no longer in pain, I kept the appointment so that I can learn more about my disc issues and maybe figure out some preventative measures to ensure I don’t end up in 4 months of pain again.

Have you ever seen that joke where a patient is talking to a doctor and says, “Doctor, when I poke right here, it hurts.” And the doctor replies, “Well then don’t poke there.” That’s essentially the advice I got.

The specialist said that I’m getting old, (it wasn’t intended as an insult, he told me we are the same age), and that the wear-and-tear that my back shows is typical for active people my age. He then said that of course I should stay active and keep doing what I’m doing. Then came the punchline: “If you do something and it hurts, then stop doing it.”

That’s what I waited months to hear. He told me that he used to do a lot of running until he had a knee replaced and now he walks. I asked him if I should stop using a weighted vest to workout, something I was doing before the pain, but haven’t tried since. His response you can guess, “Try it. If it hurts, stop.”

“But if it hurts, the pain might come back for a while.”

“Oh yeah, it could be two to three months.”

It ended with him joking that he could write me a note to give to my wife to get out of doing dishes for a while. I wasn’t amused.

I don’t know exactly what I was looking for, but it wasn’t this. I suppose I’ll just keep doing my physio exercises, keep going to the gym, and if something hurts, I guess I just stop doing that thing.