Tag Archives: healthy living

Winter blues

It’s still 17 days away to the shortest day of the year, but we are already at the point of seeing almost no sun outside of working hours. This is a time of year that I really wished I lived somewhere closer to the equator. It’s not just a trip to the shortest day, it’s also a trip to cold, wet, and sometimes snowy days for the next couple months.

This is when routines really matter, when motivation to exercise is really low, but the exercise itself is more important than ever. This is when eating well is challenging with Christmas festivities, and time off work for the winter break becomes an easy time to break your fitness and eating routine.

I’ve tried a new routine of writing at night so as not to squeeze my morning routine, but I didn’t really develop the habit and I’m back to writing in the morning. Except on weekends. Weekends are already slower and I haven’t written my posts on a weekend morning in weeks. Thus, I know the holidays will be a challenge to maintain my habits.

It’s a really busy week ahead, and I’ll be home late most nights. It will feel like besides my morning routine, the only things on my agenda are work and sleep… and dark, rainy, gloomy skies… and the cold. Yuck.

I need to remember to find moments of joy at work and at home. I need to make sure I’m eating well and taking my vitamins. And most of all, I need to remember that before I realize it, spring will be here. Every year seems shorter, faster, and so winter will be but a distant memory soon enough… the trick is finding, no creating, memories of this winter beyond the darkness, wet, and cold.

As my coffee mug says, “What a great day it is today!”

More than subsistence

We need food to survive. We must feed ourselves. But how we do so varies considerably.

Some people eat purely for subsistence. They know they need to eat so they do. It’s a chore. Maybe they don’t care for food, maybe they are on a specific diet for weight loss,,, or weight gain like a bodybuilder, and they eat what they must to stick to their diet or a timeline.

Some people get immense pleasure from eating. Every meal is an opportunity to celebrate the joy and taste of food. Every bite is a dopamine fix, and an opportunity for enjoyment.

Some people eat for comfort. Food is a non-judgmental friend that is always there for them. They don’t just eat food, they have a loving relationship with it. Food is an entity in their lives, not just objects to be put in their mouths.

Some people don’t get enough food. Food to them is a goal, it’s not just a desire, it’s a need. I think this is where humans and animals all start their food relationships. Babies cry when they are hungry. Caveman spent the majority of their lives hunting and foraging and making weapons, all for the purpose of getting that next necessary and life sustaining meal.

Now, for much of the world food is not just about the next opportunity for subsistence, it’s the quest for something enjoyable. It’s not just a human thing, my cat will wait for me to open a can of wet food, while an endless supply of hard food is available to him. It’s not just about getting energy into our bodies, it’s the desire for an enjoyable meal. Food is a journey and not just a destination.

For that reason, I think food addictions are as challenging as any drug addiction can be. Just as food can be a friend, it can be a foe. In fact it is a horrible foe because it masquerades as a dear friend. It feeds you the illusion of comfort while all the while undermining your health and wellbeing.

Sugar can be as addictive as other more illicit white powders. It can change your gut biome, which in turn can influence your thought processes. It triggers your dopamine to spike and brings pleasure. Studies have demonstrated that mice would rather choose a sugary snack than a dose of morphine. We can have food relationships like these mice, seeking out the dopamine hit of food over drugs. Food over everything else.

Our relationship with food has so many influences, from how prone we are to addiction, to the availability of food when we were young, to the balance or imbalance of nutrients versus junk food we consume, to our pleasure we get or don’t get preparing food.

I think when we live in a world of abundant food, where food is much more than just for subsistence, we need to be conscious of our relationship to food. We need to be intentional about what we need to eat, and we need to be disciplined to reduce the foods that do not serve us well. With too much choice comes too many bad choices, and so we must cultivate a healthy diet, and a healthy relationship with food.

The positive thing about this is that we need not sacrifice taste, there are many foods that are both good for us and tasty. What we must sacrifice are choice and time: Limit choices of bad foods at our disposal, and find the time to make healthier meals that are not as convenient as takeout or premade and prepackaged… All the while being tempted and triggered by our desires to eat sweet, fast, and easy to access calories that don’t add any value to our wellbeing.

We can enjoy food that is also good for us, and we can define our relationship to food around healthy options, but it takes effort, will power, and time. Bon appétit.

Getting outside

I went for my Coquitlam Crunch walk this morning at 8am. Last night it poured rain and it was unexpectedly wonderful to have a dry walk with clear skies, and it didn’t even drizzle until we were done our walk and in the warmth of a coffee shop. I went for a hot tub afterwards and while misty rain fell it certainly didn’t rain on my experience.

Getting outside is so important this time of year. It can be really hard when I’m driving to work in gloomy darkness and driving home in nighttime darkness. When I spend all sunlit hours at work, the desire to be outside is far less than on summer days when it can still be bright out after 9pm.

So it’s wonderful to have a reason to be outside during the weekend. I also need to remind myself that I can go on evening walks with my wife mid-week and neither darkness nor rain need stop us. The lack of sunlight and added likelihood of rain are not conspiring against us, it’s just the way things are this time of year on this part of our globe.

So, whether it’s a walk, or a hot tub, or even sweeping leaves off the driveway, it’s good to remember the value of getting outside. We don’t need to stay cooped up indoors just because the days are shorter and wetter.

(Re)stacking habits

I used to wake up, write a blog post, meditate for 10 minutes, and work out, all before getting in the shower around 6:45-7am. I used the Atomic Habits strategy of stacking my habits one-after-the-other so that I reduced a lot of friction in my mornings. I’d start writing and the rest of the stacked habits just happened one after the other.

A couple things happened to change this. I have been spending more time writing, stopped meditating, and started spending more time stretching. However, it was the writing time that was the big change since both the meditation and stretching were both 10 minutes long. What I’ve noticed is that my workouts and stretching are getting shorter.

So, I need to unstack my current habits. I need to write most or all of my posts at night, then I can start my morning with meditation, cardio, stretch, then a strength routine dedicated to one or two muscles, which is my usual routine. Essentially I’m not really unstacking my habits, I’m re-stacking them in a way that they give me the outcomes I want without compromising any of them at the expense of others… I just changed the title of this post from ‘Unstacking habits’ to ‘(Re)stacking habits’… Because stacking works, but it needs to work for all the habits, not just some of them.

As a good friend said, I won’t know how well this works until I try it for at least a couple weeks, because a few days aren’t long enough for a pattern to be formed, for a habit to truly become a habit. Let’s see how this goes. If I remember, I’ll give a progress report some time later this month.

Practice not information or knowing

I have weekly conversations with my uncle. Most days we talk about geometry, but today our conversation was more wide-ranging. One topic we discussed was meditation. My uncle is a practiced meditator and I am on a journey to a really meditative state that seems elusive to me.

I’m better at naming the experience rather than just embodying the experience. I understand the journey, I haven’t truly travelled it like he has. And the fundamental difference is practice.

I don’t spend enough time practicing. I have travelled the part of the journey from being angry every time my mind drifts or focuses on a thought to understanding that this is a natural part of meditation. However, I have not travelled the next part where I’ve truly experience the letting go, and feeling fully in a meditative state. I’ve knocked on the door, but haven’t stepped in.

What’s preventing me? Practice. Making time, and giving myself time to meditate. Instead of a 10 minute guided meditation that is really 4-6 minutes meditating with a little lesson, I need to give myself more time. I have to practice for longer than the point where all I’m doing is bringing myself back from distractions, back from wondering and wandering thoughts.

I know what I need to do. I’m not lacking information, I’m just lacking time, the time to practice. Until then while I can name the experience I will not truly embody the experience.

4-day work weeks

An interesting article, ‘Employees are so sick of the five-day workweek that most would take a pay cut to make a four-day week happen‘, by Ryan Hogg, states: “In the battle for a four-day workweek employees seem ready to put their money where their mouth is—they’ll take a pay cut if it means having an extra day of free time.”

At a time when inflation and cost of living is extremely high, people would rather sacrifice money for time. This isn’t about a lack of ambition or drive, it’s about wanting balance. It’s about prioritizing wellbeing over profit.

The article continued: “Last year, the U.K. piloted the world’s biggest-ever four-day week trial, made up of more than 60 companies and nearly 3,000 employees. Most businesses maintained or improved their productivity, while the trial also revealed that quit rates among staff plummeted.

Of the businesses involved in the survey, the majority chose to continue with the scheme.“

It can work.

I read another article, which I can’t find to source right now, and it was mentioning how many big companies are struggling with high absenteeism, with employees taking more sick time than they ever have before. Employees are taking days off in far greater quantities than my generation and our parent’s generation ever did, and these absences are costing companies far more than expected. Apparently this isn’t just an issue if people being sicker, but rather employees taking more time for ‘mental health days’. Essentially just taking a break from the grind of a 5- day work week. A shorter week could work to reduce this.

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I think the 4-day week could work for schools too. Add one hour to each of the 4 remaining school days and you’ve got 2/3’s of the missing school day covered. Add 30 more daily minutes of collaborative/prep time and teachers would be working the same hours, and embedding some needed prep time to their schedules. Same hours of work, close to the same number of hours of class, and so not even a reason to reduce pay.

Doing this, students and teachers would have 4-day weeks and 3-day weekends. I wonder what that would do to student absenteeism? I wonder how well students would perform? This year our senior PE classes start an hour early, and we haven’t noticed an issue with students struggling through a longer school day.

It could be piloted in a high school, but probably not the younger grades because it would be challenging to arrange for child care/supervision on the weekday that students don’t have school. I’d be happy to volunteer my school to try it out… I wonder what teachers, students, and parents would think of this?

Staying consistent

There have been a lot of reasons why my fitness routine has been challenging this year. It seem that I haven’t had a full month where there has been anything routine about my daily routine. I was just back in Toronto for my dad’s memorial and in 8 days I slept in 5 different places. I also ended the trip with a cold and spent the weekend recovering. I’m still not 100%, but I’m not coughing and I’ll wear a mask and get back to work this morning.

That said, I slept in a bit and I’m writing this as I pedal on my stationary bike at about 80% of my normal speed. The way I feel, I don’t think I’d go any faster if I wasn’t tapping these words into my phone. Just 3 days ago I was using speech-to-text to do my writing on an elliptical… This is not a normal thing to try and simultaneously hit two of my daily goals at once, but I’m making it work at a time when doing otherwise would make things harder for me.

It would be easy to skip something. It would take no effort on a day like this to give myself a pass. But I already did that Saturday and Sunday when I felt like crap. I haven’t skipped 3 days of exercise in over 3 years, and I’m not going to start now. So I’m muscling through, sweating far more than usual, while my output is lower than usual. But here is the point I didn’t know this post would be about that I realize now: It’s the days you just show up and totally don’t want to that matter the most.

Consistency isn’t about your regular routine. Your regular routine is a habit, it’s hard to make but once you’ve made it the effort is actually quite low. Consistency is getting you butt in gear and active, doing what needs to be done, when you really don’t want to. When you really aren’t up to it or in the mood or think you have time for it. Or when your routine gets disrupted and you have to go out of your way to follow through. Like being on an elliptical at a hotel at 9:30pm when my alarm is set for 3am, or sweating buckets on my stationary bike at the tail end of a cold, and simultaneously writing these words. This is harder than my normal workout. This is the grunt work. This is what it takes to be consistent.

We aren’t demonstrating consistency when everything is going smoothly, we have to demonstrate it when there is a disruption and and we still follow through.

The hard work of being consistent comes from actively doing what needs to be done when there is nothing consistent happening around you.

I’m going to make that into a poster and put it on my home gym wall.

Who I used to be

One of the funniest ‘athletes getting older’ stories I know is one of a former national water polo player who was somewhere around 60 years old and playing in a game against an enthusiastic teenager. The old guy swam into the hole (centre position) and the you scrappy kid was all over him. The ball came into the hole and the overactive kid fouls the old guy… a normal thing in the game of water polo, but the kid was a bit aggressive. After the foul the old guy looks back at the kid and says, “Hey, don’t you know who I used to be?”

It’s fair to say that I used to be an athlete. I played water polo at a high enough level, and trained hard enough to say so. And while I’m pretty fit now, and probably in better shape than 70-80% of people my age, I am not an athlete. I don’t say that disparagingly, but I don’t play any sports, and I’m very much past my prime. Where this comes into play is in my inability to really push myself.

I see it specifically in training certain muscles. I struggle to go past 80% effort. That’s the challenge point for me. If I really like an exercise, I remember how to push hard, but if I don’t like it, I struggle. I’ve lost that ‘athlete’s edge’ where I can push through the discomfort and really give my maximum effort at will.

That’s why I say I used to be an athlete. It’s not about the fitness, it’s not about feeling positive about how well I take care of myself (I do). It’s about the lack of ability to really push myself to a point past the threshold of discomfort that athletes can do every workout.

Maybe I’m just out of practice, and I need to have a sport as a reason to train? Maybe it’s that I’m more externally motivated and I need a team relying on me? Perhaps if I joined a gym and was surrounded by people I’d push myself more than I can training at home alone.

In any case, I know who I am now and who I used to be, and I’m good with that. I might have been an athlete, but now I’m a guy who wants to still be fit and healthy in 25 years. I don’t want to run a marathon, and I’m too crappy a swimmer and not willing to do the work to get back in the pool and play water polo again… but I am going to push where I can, be smart about how much weight I move around so I don’t hurt myself… and every now and then push to my max and remember who I used to be.

Evening walk

When I arrived home yesterday I felt pretty wiped out. I could tell that I was not going to do much for the evening. A long day followed by dinner and just about nothing else. Then my wife suggested a walk.

We had a great walk. We bumped into people we knew and had a wonderful conversation, and we came back home feeling refreshed.

I take a lot of walks with my wife and also with a good friend. And yet I am still in awe of how much they can change my disposition; how they can alter my mood.

There is something special about walking with someone you care about. Last week I walked with my daughter and it was the most we talked in months. That’s mostly because I was on holidays away from her the entire summer, but it was still a great conversation we had, and would not have had if she didn’t suggest the walk.

Need some time to connect or reconnect with someone? Skip the coffee shop or pub and go for a walk.

Hard to build routines back

I should have written this an hour ago. I was up, but I kept myself distracted. I should have worked out already, but I haven’t started. I’m probably going to do my meditation on my exercise bike to reclaim some time.

It doesn’t really matter today, because I can stroll into work at 8:30am and still spend a full day there. Only my secretaries will be in the building and my first meeting is at 11am. So it’s not like this wasted time hurt my schedule. But it hurts.

It hurts because it’s going to take a while before my routine is automated again. It hurts because it’s me pushing off things that are good for me. If this was next week, I’d have to skip my workout right now.

However the nice thing is that it’s not next week. It’s not like I have to scramble or miss anything. I’m just acknowledging that routines take time to develop and redevelop. It’s not easy leaving my routines for a full summer then jumping right back into them. But once I get my routine going again it feeds itself.

I feel the benefits of getting a whole list of things done for myself before I even start my workday. Writing, meditating, stretching, and working out, all done before I even shower to start my day. The only hard part is now, it’s when the pattern isn’t set and I actually have to make an effort to do it. By early next week it will just be what I do when I wake up: Routine initiated.

Today it was a slog.