Tag Archives: healthy living

Fit for life

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I listen to a lot of podcasts about healthy living. It’s amazing how some key topics keep coming up again and again. it’s like there comes a point where collective knowledge just compounds and evidence piles up to support some key ideas. Here are a few things that I have been hearing repeatedly, which all suggest ways to live a long and healthy life. (Not in any order of priority.)

1. Eat more protein. We don’t tend to eat enough, and we tend to eat less as we grow older, but protein is important for both muscle and brain health.

2. Do cardiovascular exercise regularly. At least 5 days a week for the rest of your life. Don’t like to run? Then don’t run! Find something you like to do, spend a minimum of 20 minutes doing it. It doesn’t matter if you like intense cardio, or if you prefer low intensity, what matters is staying active and getting your heart rate up. It’s also important for burning calories, especially if you like food a bit too much.

3. At least once a week get your heart rate up to about 80% of your maximum. This can be done in bursts, like sprinting for 2-3 minutes then slowing down for 2-3 minutes and repeating a few times, or just pushing yourself with a consistently faster pace, or maybe walking on an incline on a treadmill. One thing that really matters for healthy longevity is your maximum VO2 (the max amount of oxygen your body can absorb during exercise). This is maintained and improved primarily by pushing your body past this 80% mark.

4. Do some sort of strength training 2-3 times a week. Constantly remind yourself body that it is not yet in a period of decline. Remind your body that it is a muscle builder. Do this by pushing at least one muscle group completely to fatigue.

5. Take creatine and vitamin D. I’m not a doctor, and you should seek medical advice for supplements, but these are two supplements I feel safe to recommend because they both have tremendous upside and are extensively researched with no downside unless you are an idiot and take extreme doses. Creatine really helps with muscle soreness and seems to have many other upsides too, including for menopausal women. This is not the ‘bodybuilding guy’s supplement’ people think it is, but one everyone can benefit from. Vitamin D is both a vitamin and a hormone used by your immune system. And unless you live in a tropical climate, 90+ percent of the population is low in vitamin D, or at the very most not at the highest levels recommended by health experts.

6. Reduce sugar intake. Our bodies crave sugar. An interesting thing that I heard recently is that this might be something ingrained in us from our monkey heritage. Fruit goes bad, and so when fruit ripens, it’s important to get a lot of it before the fruit rots. Therefore when our ancient ancestors had access to sugars, our bodies made sure to crave more while the supply lasted. Whether that’s true or not, we currently have convenient and continuous access to too much sugar and our cravings for it are unhealthy. I’ll leave you with a simple public service announcement: processed sugars are food for cancer.

7. Stretching and balance are important. It’s not enough to do the same exercise 5 days a week and not work on your overall flexibility and balance. Falls are more common as you get older, and stiff joints don’t help. Breaking a hip vastly shortens life expectancy. Keep nimble, and do things that challenge both flexibility and balance.

8. Self image is important. If you see yourself as someone who exercises regularly, you don’t have to work to get a workout in. To build a habit of good habits, create identity based habits. I am a person who works out regularly. I stretch as part of my routine. I make healthy eating choices. I enjoy doing things that keep me young.

9. Meditate. Find time for gratitude and awareness. Find time to focus on your breathing.

10. This one hasn’t been in on the health podcasts, but it’s a great place to end: Seek laughter. Find joy. Spend quality time with friends and family. Explore new ideas, and keep learning. If you are not finding ways to appreciate the life you have, you aren’t adding value to the life you are trying to extend.

Doctor’s visit

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I recently went to the doctor to request bloodwork. It had been a few years since my last one. The results were not great. With high cholesterol being a hereditary issue on both sides of my family histories, my results show concerning levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol. Levels weren’t great last time, and they are worse now.

I’m going to change my diet, but I’ve also booked an appointment with my doctor and I’m probably going to go on statins… A decision for my doctor to make, not me. The reality is that bad cholesterol is a silent killer because you don’t feel buildup of plaque and fatty deposits in your blood and so a medical emergency can be the first hint of how bad things are. That’s why things like blood tests are so important. That’s one of many reasons why doctor visits are important.

I work hard to stay fit and healthy. Obviously my diet could be and should be a bigger part of that equation. But that’s not enough. Another factor is involving health professionals.

My dad wore a “I haven’t seen a doctor in decades” badge of pride. It was stupid. He was not quite 80 and his body was that of an unhealthy 95 year old. About 5 years ago we went to see my uncle, dad’s younger brother, perform in a band at a local pub. When my uncle introduced dad to a friend of his, the friend asked my uncle if my dad was his dad… I’m not exaggerating about the age comparison I just made.

I’m excited about the diagnosis tools of the future. There will be many ways for us to monitor our health and even be preemptively warned of pending issues. But for now, and increasingly as you age, visit your doctor regularly.

If I had the time

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Here’s a great comic by @MrLovenstein:

On the same topic, I printed this and stuck it to my home gym wall by my exercise bike, after I read it in James Clear’s weekly email last March:

Author Julia Cameron on how to find time to write (or do anything, really):

“The “if I had time” lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born — without the luxury of time.”

Source: The Right to Write

Sometimes I’m brilliant at making the time for things. I’m up every day between 5 and 5:30am, I write these posts (if I didn’t the night before), I meditate, I do a workout, all before I get in the shower to start my work day. Recently I was challenged to do 2,000 pushups in February. I started on the 3rd, and as of yesterday I’d done 80 pushups for 10 straight days. I might take today off before doing another  800 in the next 10 days. Then a last break before 5 straight days and hitting 2K on the 29th. That’s the plan. If I forget and miss a day, guess what… I’ll make it up and still make sure I hit the target.

For other things I’m notoriously bad at finding the time. Tidying up my closet is a great example of that. I seem to know how to mess it up, but I never seem to have time to organize it. Some days I get home and my back is sore, but I’ll sit uncomfortably on the couch and think about getting in the hot tub until it’s too late and I just skip it. My blog drafts usually have a whole bunch of idea starters for when I get stuck, but now it’s filled with longer writes that I’ve started and don’t seem to have the time to follow up with. Drafts used to be drafts, now they are just good ideas that have died from a lack of taking the time to expand on them.

If only I had the time… would I use it? Would you? How convenient and comfortable is this lie? The reality is that if it’s important enough, there’s probably time for it, time we can find, time we can make, rather than making up excuses.

Maintain and Sustain

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If you asked me, before today, I’d say that I was slumping with respect to my daily workouts. But what does that really mean? For many, slumping would mean that I’ve ‘fallen off the wagon’, or that I’ve stopped my habits and routines and need to get back into them. That’s not the case. I’ve only missed 2 workouts out of the first 32 days of 2024. That’s not a slump, that’s a great habit. One of those 2 days was a choice, the other was an unexpected day trip to the island, and I was either with people or traveling from 6:15am to after 11pm. So why was I thinking I was slumping?

Well, even though I’ve been pushing myself on my daily 20 minute cardio, my weights workouts have been tough. I tend to only do one muscle group every day, and so it’s not like I’m in my home gym for a long time. I’m usually in and out in less than 45 minutes, including my cardio and 10 minutes of stretching. So, basically I’m talking about 3 sets of 1 exercise, sometimes a bit more, but not much more. And this one part of my workout has been, well, ‘slumpy’. Normally I can get to my last few reps and really push hard. I can focus and push and grunt my way past the mental pressure to stop, and eek out reps that are unpleasant but very beneficial for growth and/or increases in strength. Recently I just don’t have what it takes to get those last few reps out, and I stop when I should be pushing through… that’s my slump, and it has been a challenge since the Christmas holidays.

The reframe for this, after talking to my buddy after our Saturday morning Crunch walk,  is that this is not a slump. He framed it as ‘the space between’. That didn’t work for me, because I think of those between spaces as sacred times that are productive. Still, I understood the message he was sharing, that I was beating myself up about not making gains, when I was still committed and showing up! I’m not running a sprint, I’m working on perseverance and the long game, and so 30/32 days so far this year is better than the start of any year so far. That’s not a slump.

We live our lives with expectations of always improving. The whole 1% better every day, fake it ’till you make it, push, persevere, strive, and even ‘try-try again’, are all messages that we have to keep going and we have to be better than we were yesterday. These make for wonderful quotes on posters, but the expectation is unrealistic. What about the spaces in between the 1% improvements? What happens there really matters. Are we maintaining and sustaining our previous gains or are we slumping and letting things slide?

I’m not slumping, I’m just not making fast gains. I’m maintaining my positive habits, I’m sustaining my routine so that when I’m both physically and mentally ready I can and will be able to make small, incremental improvements. I’ll repeat that for emphasis: small, incremental improvements. I’m no longer that guy that went on holidays in March of 2018 and couldn’t see the strings on my bathing suit because of my belly paunch. I look better at 56 than I did at 36, (well maybe not my hairline, but everything else).

Right now I can’t seem to get that extra push at the end of my workout sets… the sets I do almost every single day, even when I don’t want to do them. I’m not slumping, I’m just in between gains, I am maintaining and sustaining awesome habits and more improvements are in my future. The more I let go of the expectations, while keeping the positive habits, the happier and healthier I’ll be!

Creativity struggle

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The one place in my life right now that I seem to be struggling is with being creative. I can find time for everything I need to do… except when I want to do something creative. This includes writing. It doesn’t seem to be about time, it seems to be more about focus.

I can put my head down and get to work. I can push myself on the treadmill or exercise bike. I’m struggling a bit to work out hard for strength exercises, but I still do them. I’m home a good amount of time now after a lot of late nights at work to start the school year, and I have been sticking to my routines that I’ve created.

But I can’t seem to focus on listening to books or podcasts. I can’t sit and start any creative tasks, and I find myself easily distracted any time I have down time. Normally blog post ideas come at me and I throw them into a note on my phone, or I see something interesting and my mind starts making connections to new ideas. Normally, but not right now. Now I’m in a bit of a creative slump. I’ll keep my routines that are working. I’ll try to get more sleep, since I tend to not get enough, and I won’t try to add anything new to my plate. I think I’ve got enough going on.

The one thing that seems to be working well right now is a new meditation app called Balance. So I’ll continue to meditate, exercise, and of course write something daily, all while being grateful for the things going well right now. I don’t know what to do differently to spark my creative juices, so I won’t stir things up, I’ll just be patient. It’s hard to come up with creative ways to be more creative when you aren’t feeling creative.

The power of protein

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I’ve listened to a few people like Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who are both looking at the recommended daily allowance of protein (for healthy people) and questioning it. In this video they discuss, “The longevity benefits of proper protein intake and strength training.

I already start my mornings with a protein shake, but now I’m looking at ways to increase my protein even more. There are risks around eating things like too much red meat, and after watching ‘The Game Changers‘ on Netflix, I could see myself moving to a vegetarian diet at some point (not too soon, I just love animal meat too much).

But for now I’ll blend my intake of protein between meat and vegetables… and I’ll increase how much of it is part of my diet. I remember when I did 6 weeks of the Keto diet. My body loved it, but my social life didn’t. It’s too restrictive, but I do recall just how good I felt when I was consuming a lot more protein than I do now.

I also loved the book, ‘Younger Next year‘, and I’ve shared it and suggested it to more people than any other book in the last few years. The reality is that I may be 56, but I’m not done building muscle. I’m on a path where at least 5 days a week I will work a minimum of one muscle group to fatigue and remind my body that it’s not going down hill and degenerating. Instead, I’m giving my body the message that it is still young and growing. And what I also need to do is give it enough protein to keep my body healthy… and that’s more protein than I currently eat.

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*I am not a doctor and I don’t play one on the internet.
This is my plan and please do your own research and
consult your own doctor about diet changes…
especially if you are not already healthy! 

Rethinking sleep

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I probably shared this before, but as a 30 year old, new to teaching, I got used to very little sleep. I’d routinely get 5 or less hours sleep for several nights in a row. A friend and colleague who struggled when he had less than 8 hours sleep told me that I was burning my candle at both ends and that I was going to die 10 years younger because of my lack of sleep.

That night, some time after 1am, I sent him an email basically explaining that I’d done the math and if I lived to 70 and he lived to 80, then I would have been awake longer than him.

Now in my mid 50’s I definitely need more sleep. I also notice that I really don’t function as well when I’m tired. However I still struggle to get 6.5-7hrs sleep most nights in a week. My weekly average is probably closer to 6 than 7 hours nightly. And my sleep is a little more interrupted too.

And this is despite the fact that every medical professional I follow and learn from speaks about the value of sleep. I know I don’t get enough of it. I know this isn’t a healthy choice. Yet I’m still up late writing this and I’m going to be up before everyone else in my family tomorrow morning.

I need to rethink this. I need to schedule longer sleep times… and I need to go to sleep now.

Sweet dreams.

Hello 2024 – Healthy Living Goals

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A new year, a new plan.

I’ve learned a lot about setting goals and keeping them since I started my Healthy Living Goals back on January 1st, 2019.

I picked up the book Atomic Habits around then, and it both reinforced some good systems I had in place and also gave me new and powerful insights to keep my good habits going. I used a year-long calendar to track my goals and continued doing this for ’20, ’21, and ’22, but decided I didn’t need it for 2023. And while I did a fantastic job with my fitness. I did however develop a herniated disc in my neck that set me back quite a bit at the start of the year, but I came back with a new focus and feel that my body has responded and recovered. But on a less successful note, I totally let my meditation commitment slide.

For 2024 I’m going back to my calendar, and I’m publicly sharing my goals, because I know it’s a good external motivation for me to make my goals public. Here they are:

1. An average of 6 workouts a week. 20 minutes of cardio, stretching, and at least one body part pushed to 3 hard sets.

2. Meditation: A minimum of 10 minutes daily, and one day for longer than that, (tracked with a black dot on my daily sticker when I at least double the 10 minute minimum).

3. Writing my Daily-Ink every day… Continuing my streak from July 2019. While this is already a consistent daily habit, I think it’s great to have one goal on my calendar where I have a continuous streak running.

4. More writing/creating: My goal will be to write, or edit videos (a project with my uncle), or doing something creative, 3 times a week for at least an hour. Most if not all of this will be on the weekends, but I also plan on making more time for myself daily.

How will I find more time in my week? I plan on being on my phone less. A lot less. I haven’t always been great with my phone habits but I think it got worse in 2023. I’m going to cut my scrolling. I’m going to start writing blog posts on my laptop rather than phone. I’m going to schedule time when my phone is on the counter rather than on me.

I rarely watch TV, I don’t watch sports, I think I can meet my above goals by sticking to current habits and just using my time better. I’m writing this (admittedly on my phone) on New Year’s Eve. I tried before, but unsuccessfully, to write at night rather than in the morning, so that I have more time for things like meditation and stretching when I wake up.

So there you have it. I do have a few physical goals beyond regular workouts. But having just spent 6 and a half months getting my left arm (almost) back to full strength, because my herniated disc pinched a nerve that seriously impinged the strength of most exercises I did with that arm… I consider these goals secondary, and may cautiously change these if they push me too hard.

These goals include:

  • 30 pull-ups (I did 15 today for my first set and 10 on a second set). When I first had this goal it was also along with the goal of 60 pushups… I did that one morning last month. 💪😀👍
  • Bench 225 lbs (two 45 plates on each side of the bar). This is something I did (albeit not for full sets) at the start of the year, but I have a way to go to get back there, and even further to be doing full sets at that weight.
  • A 30 second unassisted handstand. I have had this (unattained) goal for a number of years. I was on a roll until a minor shoulder injury, then never got back to trying.

Again, these are goals that may change but I wanted to put them ‘out there’. My fully committed goals are the 4 numbered ones above. I’m truly excited about what 2024 has in store!

Goodbye 2023

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I’m glad to see you go! 4 months of pain from a herniated disc and dealing with my father’s death at the same time is not something I enjoyed. I also didn’t do my yearly healthy living calendar this year and basically stopped meditating.

So I’ll buy a new calendar today, I’ll refocus my healthy living goals… and I’ll look forward to 2024.

2023 can kiss my derrière:)

I’m thinking positive thoughts and planning to have a healthy, productive year ahead. May 2024 be a great year for you too!

Uncertainty and doubt

I had a dream last night. In it someone I care about was asking my why I even bother writing my daily blog? She called it boring and a waste of time. In all honesty, this being said in my dream bugged me more than if the person in my dream actually said it in person. It bothered me because I am the author of my dreams, not the people I see in them.

So essentially I was casting doubt on myself. That’s harsh.

Why bother? Why make the effort? Who do I think I am, that anyone would care to read what I have to say? These are the internal voices of uncertainty and doubt. These are questions that tear me down rather than build me up.

These are the pangs that prevent people from sharing their ideas, their writing, their art, their creative expression, and even their love.

“I’m not good enough.”

“Other people are so much better.”

“I’m not creative enough.”

“I have nothing of value to say.”

It’s easier to silence the naysayers than it is to silence your own inner voice. I can handle all kinds of feedback. I can learn from the harshest of criticism. A perfect example is an angry, yelling coach never upset me, I just took the feedback.

But that inside voice… that nagging self-doubt, that self-uncertainty, that is something I do not always battle well with. It holds me back. It keeps me from speaking up, from stepping up, from confidently sharing my thoughts and opinions.

Why is it that the internal battles we face are so much harder than the outside ones?

What helps me is consistency. It’s developing habits where I can push through the uncertainty and doubt. It’s creating small accomplishments that lead me to successful outcomes. No, I’m not going to be the athlete I was in my 20’s ever again… but I’m fitter now than I ever was in my 30’s and 40’s, and I suffer less back pain than I did in my 20’s. Oh, and no one workout got me where I am today.

In fact it wasn’t the good workouts that got me here, it was the days that I didn’t want to work out, the times I had to talk myself into just going through the motions that made me get to this point. I’m floundering a bit right now with working out, but I still get my butt on my stationary bike or treadmill every day. I still don’t let myself miss 2 days in a row, and rarely let myself miss 3 days in a week.

Some days I might hit the publish button on my blog and think ‘that’s not a great post’. But I still hit the button, I still make the effort. I still read over my work and try to edit it. And I still get mad at myself when I see a typo or wrong word published. The same critic that tries to stop me can also be my friend. It doesn’t just shut me down, it adds an element of high expectations towards all my final work.

And that’s why my dream this morning hurt me a bit. It was my inner voice being a gremlin, trying to find fault with myself, my work, my creativity. Uncertainty and doubt are not usually our friends, they are the bedfellows of procrastination and excuses. They are the enemies of confidence and productivity. And while they may lay dormant for a while, they can creep up on us when we least expect it. Like in our dreams…

But I’m awake now. It’s time to hit the publish button. It’s time to get on the treadmill. There is work to be done and I’ll just tuck the uncertainty and doubt away.