Tag Archives: routines

Healthy Living Goals Reflection for 2024

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It started January 1st, 2019. I was almost 30 pounds overweight and I decided that I’d had enough of working out, getting busy and lazy and not working out, and yo-yo-ing between these two states… while progressively getting further out of shape.

In my 1 year video reflection, back in late December 2019, I was able to share that I’d basically lost the 30 pounds and was back on track for staying healthy. Now, years later, I’ve put back on about 12 pounds, but a completely healthy 12 pounds. I’ve added almost an inch to my biceps, I have great definition on my (still skinny) legs, and my shoulders/traps are probably where I see my biggest gains.

Here are my key stats this year:

Workouts – defined as a minimum of 20 minutes cardio and some weights (unless it’s a Coquitlam Crunch day when I don’t usually go weights).

Meditation – At least 10 minutes, usually 15 or 20 minutes guided meditation on the Balance App.

Daily-Ink – Daily writing on this blog.

Writing/Creating – Intended to be for writing beyond my blog regularly but mostly just tracking conversations with my uncle.

Workouts: 326 days or 89%

Meditation: 313 days or 85%

Daily-Ink: 366 days or 100%

Writing/Creating: 53 days or 14.5%

Reflections:

Workouts: I’m actually setting a goal to work out less in 2025. I’ve made some good gains and think they can be better if I gave myself more rest. This is especially true for my legs. I think working out cardio 10-12+ days in a row is limiting my leg recovery time needed to see them grow a bit more. Lack of rest might be why my legs are a lot stronger but still skinny. For upper body, many of my workouts are just a single muscle focus, and so I usually get enough rest between hard sets for specific muscle groups.

Meditation: These could have been qualitatively better this year. It’s not an issue of volume but definitely one fit quality. In 2024 I found that writing was taking me a bit longer in the morning, and so a lot of times I ended up doing a walking meditation on the treadmill to make up the time. That said I’m not convinced that those meditations were necessarily moving me towards my meditation goals as much as dedicated time would.

Daily-Ink: I’ll keep my blog going another year. And while I’ve basically maintained daily writing for 5 and a half years, I still want to track it.

Writing/Creativity: The largest area for growth is in being creative. I’m going to do a couple things to improve this. First, I won’t be counting conversations with my uncle, even when we are recording them. What I will count is video editing of the videos he and I record, as well as writing not related to by blog. A goal related to this is less social media time… Reducing distractions and focusing on creativity. My writing/creativity goal will be a minimum of two days per week, 104 days a year, or basically doubling last year’s total while not counting the vast majority of days I would have tracked last year. I won’t meet my uncle less often, I just won’t be counting these Zoom visits as part of my creativity goal.

Ultimately I want to see two outcomes this year that will result from my tracking above:

  1. Gain 7-8 pounds of muscle. This is a big jump for me. In my 30’s and 40’s I had a hard time maintaining a weight of about 153 pounds. If I worked out consistently for several months I’d get my weight to 155 but struggled to put good weight on beyond that. When I stopped working out I’d drop a few pounds and sit closer to 150. By December 2018, at age 51, I’d (unintentionally and without awareness) let myself go and weighed just under 185 pounds, with all of that extra weight being unhealthy. After year one of my healthy living goals (reflection shared again here) I was back down to around 155. Now I fluctuate around 167-169 pounds and would like to bring that to 175 pounds. Basically, it took me about 5 years to gain 12 pounds of muscle and I want to add 8 more this year. Increased protein and more dedicated weight training will get me there if I maintain my positive habits and get a bit more rest between (harder/smarter) workouts.
  2. More creativity. I think 2 days a week of doing something creative is realistic and attainable. Reducing social media distractions will be key. I’m going to automate my blog going into social media, and add time limits to all socials for Monday to Friday as a starting point. I’ll see how that works and re-evaluate my success after a month.

Finally, one more goal unrelated to my tracking will be a reading goal. Watching that December 2018 reflection video again I was shocked that I listened to 26 books that year. I think this year’s count was 6, with 3 partial reads to finish, although I did listen to a lot more podcasts. I want to improve my book count. I think this will also help with my creativity.

One final reflection: Overall I’m pretty damn proud of my 2024 stats above. Yes I have some ambitious goals ahead of me, and I’m always pushing to improve… but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I’ve been on a 6 year journey from an overweight and unhealthy 51 year old to a 57 year old who hasn’t been this healthy and strong since I was an athlete in my 20’s.

My ultimate goal is a great healthspan to go with my lifespan. I want to be able to do things in 20 years that most 77 year olds can’t imagine doing. I want to be hiking, traveling, and living a vibrant, healthy life well into my senior years. I think I’m on the right path.

Motivation versus Routines

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It’s definitely the holidays for me. The time is 10:19pm and I’m just starting my writing. I haven’t meditated yet, (and missed the last couple days), and haven’t worked out yet either. Why? I’m off of my routines and my morning habits are not getting done to start my day.

Although it was not a busy day, I did get some important errands done, and don’t feel like I wasted the day… but here I am feeling very little motivation to get a workout in. I will, but it feels like effort.

That’s the difference between good habits and routines versus motivation. When I have my routines set, writing just gets done. Workouts get done. Meditation gets done. Zero motivation needed.

But let my routines slip and suddenly everything gets harder to get started. And getting started is the hardest part. Some days I feel like crap and just go through the motions simply because that’s part of my routine. Some of those days continue to feel hard, but sometime the act of getting started is all I need to turn the day, or at least my mood, around.

Routines help me get started. No motivation required. And now it’s time to finish this and get started on my workout. I think I’ll do a walking meditation on my treadmill and that’s one less thing to have to motivate myself to do. The best thing I’ve ever done for my health and wellbeing has been the strict routines I’ve created to get my healthy living goals done. I just need to rethink how I maintain these routines over my holidays.

Routines vs rut-tines

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Ok, let me start by acknowledging that rut-tine is not a word. It’s a play on the word ‘rut’.

Rut: An uninspired routine or pattern of behavior that one continues unthinkingly or because change is difficult.

Routines are so important. When you routinize a habit the habit becomes easy. There is no need for motivation when your habit has become routine. Case-in-point: I will meditate and exercise as soon as I finish writing this. No effort required, this is my routine and that’s what I do next. Minimal effort required to start the process.

But just like it takes no effort to maintain my healthy habits, routines can serve bad habits just as easily. For example, I generally don’t snack after dinner Sunday to Thursday night. No treats, no beverages, just dinner and then bed without any other food. I developed the habit of not eating after dinner precisely because when I do, it’s almost never a healthy snack. However, I have a weakness for chocolate covered almonds and almost every night for the past couple weeks I’ve taken a handful of these delicious treats after dinner. And this has led me to other more unhealthy snacks as well.

Essentially I fell into a rut-tine, an unintentional routine that is less than ideal. I don’t even realize I’m doing it until I’m sitting on the couch with a handful of chocolate almonds or a bowl of chips. But this is a minor thing, I’ll run out of chocolate almonds and I’ll soon return to my disciplined routine of not snacking 5 days a week.

However this got me thinking… What routines and habits of mind do I have that are more rut-tine than routine? How many little mental scripts do I have that I would be better off not having? How have I routinized bad habits that are either mentally or physically unhealthy or unhelpful?

Because it’s easy to stay in a rut once that rut is part of what we do daily. And we need to recognize that we are in a rut or the rut-tine just takes over and we say rutted. We need to identify the difference between a good routine and a rut-tine, and then change the latter into the former.

A rest day

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One of the best parts of getting older is that unlike when I was half my age, I actually listen to my body. Four days ago I did my Norwegian Protocol cardio workout and really pushed hard. I also did a bicep workout. Three days ago I did a hard incline walk with a 34lb weighted vest. Then I did pull-ups and step ups with the vest still on.

Two days ago I did a really challenging leg workout out then had some knee aches through the day. Yesterday I did a light 20 minute stationary bike ride to get the blood flow to my legs and hopefully reduce the lactic acid buildup from the leg workout. Then I did a hard chest workout.

Today I know I need a break. Sure I spread out my workouts and don’t overdo any one area, except maybe going a bit too hard on legs. Sure I have areas like my back or abs that I could focus on today while giving my other muscles a rest. But I can tell I need a rest day… my body is telling me so.

Younger me would have felt guilty taking the day off. Younger me would have pushed through, not realizing that my very healthy knees almost never bother me and maybe a rest day is in order. Younger me would probably have worked out today and dealt with any pain as a result, as if it’s nothing to worry about, until it was too painful to continue.

But not today. Today I rest. It’s a wonderful rest day! And I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

Avoidance is easy

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I’m back in the loop of struggling to write. It makes me truly appreciate the challenges of authors who do this for a living. Sometimes the words flow and it’s like a poetic dance between thought and expression. Words, and even full ideas almost magically appear on the page, leaving me uncertain of where they came from.

Other times I stare at the blank page, or worse, I avoid the blank page. I seek distraction and call it inspiration. I am looking in all the wrong places. I am literally uninspired.

When I feel like this avoidance is easy. The ‘simple’ work of developing an idea into a piece of writing is not simple, it’s hard. Really hard. Avoiding the effort of thought when the thoughts are not coming becomes a losing game. Maybe I’ll look here for ideas, there for motivation, or over here for… yet another distraction even though I don’t want to call it that. And that’s game over. Time not so well wasted.

Avoiding the blank page is easy, but it’s not productive. How many things do we do that are the equivalent of this avoidance? For some it’s avoidance of a hard conversation, for others it’s a big task, for yet others it’s the minutiae that needs to get done but feels monotonous. Some people find solace that different ‘stuff’ gets done when they procrastinate, but does that really result in a positive experience?

How much time do we spend in a state of busyness rather than dealing with business? Avoiding the real task by doing other things, or worse yet doing something that’s merely a distraction. Some things get automated, habits get ritualized, and the work just gets done. But sometimes the struggle is real. The action avoidance becomes the easy task and the work doesn’t become the work, but actually just getting down to work. Because once you start the work gets done.

Consistency is built on the hard days

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I barely slept last night. This doesn’t happen often, but if you search my blog for the word insomnia, you’ll see that periodically I struggle with sleep. This time I question if it wasn’t at least partially initiated by my own perseverating thoughts after I had a rougher than usual nights sleep two nights ago. I felt like this was coming on, and couldn’t shake the thought. Did I unintentionally will a night of almost no sleep into existence or was I just feeling it build in my body? I don’t know.

In my years as an educator, most of my absences have been related to back pain, but this morning after staring at the ceiling as the room brightened, I decided that with the lack of sleep the night before compounding a sleepless night, I would would take the day off. Today I had two long naps. The first one was broken, fighting my monkey-mind and restless body, and the second one longer and much more like real sleep. Tonight I’ll catch up on work, and then intentionally go to sleep a little later than usual… hopefully feeling tired and sleeping through the night.

That’s a long introduction to make a simple point. It would have been easy to skip my workout today. But I didn’t. In fact, I think I would attribute my longer, better nap to getting the feelings of restlessness out of my body. I spent 30 minutes with a weighted vest, on an incline, on my treadmill. It was hard enough that I went slower than I normally do and on less of an incline. I didn’t enjoy it, but I did it. I also did a humorous attempt at a meditation where my internal dialogue was so loud, and so lacking in concentration that squirrel brain would be a complimentary description. But I did it. Now I’m spending too much time rewriting my words here, making me realize I should make dinner before attempting to tackle anything related to work… but I’m writing, and I will do some work catch-up before tomorrow.

All this to say that doing my usual routines today has been challenging. And not very rewarding. But there is one key reward that I’m getting out of this and that’s consistency. I’m continuing my habits despite it not being easy to do today. My body and my brain are not allowing me to be at my best, but I’m not allowing me to use that as an excuse. Actually, two good things happened today. First of all, I did get a few hours of solid sleep that have me on a recovery path after a sleepless night last night. Secondly, I maintained my habits. Because the hardest days are the days that really matter. I didn’t need a break from my habits today, I needed to do them despite how hard they were to do. That’s what make them habits and not just things I like to do.

Mental motivation around maintenance

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Good day or bad day, I work out an average 6 days a week. One day is usually just the 5km loop up the Coquitlam Crunch with a buddy, and the other 5 (or 6) days usually involve weights. I start with 20-30 minutes cardio, 1 day a week doing the Norwegian Protocol. Then I stretch for a few minutes, then I try to work one muscle group to fatigue.

That might look like 3 minutes of leg raises and crunches. A double set of fly and bench press. A tricep or bicep set, pull-ups, or weighted step-ups. But only one of these. So my full workout from cardio to stretching to weights usually takes about 50 minutes if I do 30 of cardio.

It’s not a hard routine, and while I’m working one set of muscles to fatigue, I don’t usually feel all that sore afterwards and it’s easy to work a different set of muscles the next day.

All this to say that I have a good routine, that I mostly enjoy (other than the Norwegian Protocol which kinda sucks every time). I get up, write, meditate, and start my workout. If I write for too long, I listen to a guided meditation while doing my cardio. I almost never miss a work day workout, my gaps tend to be on weekends or holidays.

So the habit is engrained, and I don’t need motivation to do my routine. I wake up and just start my routine, and don’t stop until it’s done. Easy.

What I do struggle with sometimes is how hard I push myself. For the last few days my ‘work one muscle group to fatigue’ sets have not been a push to fatigue. Mentally, I just can’t get myself to that place. Every set I do, I quit when my muscles should be pushed further.

For example, yesterday I was doing bicep curls with a slightly lighter weight than I usually use, and yet I wasn’t able to get many reps in. I would think, ‘I’ve got at least two more reps in me’, I’d do one and just decide that I would stop. Physically I could have done more. And even if I couldn’t, the half rep more trying would have meant that I took the muscle to fatigue. But I quit. I didn’t truly complete the set. I couldn’t mentally get myself to push hard enough.

And of course I beat myself up about it. Especially since I’ve felt like this for a few days. The reality is that it’s damn hard to push to fatigue every day. Especially when I’m not doing this to be a bodybuilder. I’m not on a mission to bulk up. I don’t have a race or a sport I’m training for. I’m just trying to be a bit fitter than I was yesterday.

So I’m at a point now where I’m in maintenance mode. I’m not taking a break, I’m not slacking in my routine, but I’m cruising a bit on my overall effort. And yet, despite recognizing all this, I’m still hard on myself when I can’t push to 100% for just a few minutes in the day.

I believe it would be healthier for me to think of this as a regular cycle of maintenance rather than a failure to push myself. I understand this intellectually. Yet I struggle. I feel like I’m letting myself down. I feel like I’m getting old and forgetting how to push as hard as I could before.

It’s an internal battle that I think I should have figured out by now. Sharing it ‘out loud’ feels a little embarrassing, because it feels like I’m seeking empathy or condolences or a pep talk, but I don’t want or need that. What I need is to be easier on myself as I cycle through this, knowing that the ability to push myself hard will come back.

The challenge is that I fear being easy on myself. I fear that this easing up can become more frequent… That maintainance mode can easily become my default mode. And deep down I want to keep this fear. Because that fear will reduce the amount of time that I spend in maintenance mode, and the fear reminds me that I know how to push myself. I’d rather be upset at myself and strive for improvement, than be more self-forgiving and also more likely to accept mediocrity and maintenance as my default.

It’s time to put on my weighted vest and get on my treadmill, and listen to a guided meditation. I have a routine I have to keep.

The slow road

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In the last 8-10 months I’ve seen some really positive results with my overall fitness. If I think about what I’m doing differently to see these results, there isn’t a lot that’s new. Rather it has been tiny shifts that I’ve made after years of building positive habits.

The journey started in January 2019. If I want to think about the positive results I’ve been seeing lately it stems from that long ago. People tend to want to see really fast results, and then one of two things happen: Either the unrealistic goals go unrealized (it’s probably unlikely you’ll drop 25 pounds in 2 months). Or the target is hit the first time then when the results are not repeated, it becomes disappointing, (you hit the 25 pound target but in another 2 months you only drop 5 more pounds and get discouraged).

Build good habits and consistent results are a natural byproduct. Then small tweaks really make a positive difference. I added 10 minutes to my cardio routine, and started doing the Norwegian Protocol once a week. This has improved my cardio (which I can see in my effort output increasing when I do the protocol). I also added a weighted vest to my incline walks on the treadmill, which I’m sure has helped improve my cardiovascular stamina.

I have also focused more on pushing myself to fatigue when I do weights, because I am trying to be more efficient in the morning since I have 10 less minutes to workout because of my added cardio. So, I’m not adding gym time, I’m just being more effective. Doing cardio, stretching, and training one muscle group really hard still only takes about 45-50 minutes, but that time is focused.

I couldn’t do this with a 2 month goal. If I was worried about instant results, if I had unrealistic ambitions when I started this journey more than 5 years ago, I probably wouldn’t still be doing what I’m doing. Now I’m not saying having goals and targets isn’t good. I know weight or muscle size targets can be fantastic motivators. What I am saying is that being willing to develop good habits shifts those goals to more long term ambitions.

I want to be as healthy as I am now in 20 years. To do that I need to keep improving, knowing full well that my body will not be able to sustain itself in the same way in 2 decades… into my late 70’s. So I’ll keep the small, positive changes going, with a focus on being consistent, and injury free.

Increasing my healthspan, not just my lifespan is my goal. And while improvements will be slow, the slow road is far more likely to get me to the results I desire, rather than creating big targets that are hard to accomplish and then taking psychological hits when I don’t hit my goals. I think too often we seek changes in our bodies that are either too great or too hard to sustain. A long term goal of a positive healthspan keeps me going at a pace and effort that I know I can maintain for a very long time.

Alone time

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I just had a few days with a lot of alone time. I enjoyed it, but was really not focussed on anything I hoped to do. It reminded me of how much I rely on my habits and routines to keep me ‘in check’. I don’t necessarily use free time well, I get distracted and I’m easily entertained.

I never get lonely, and can spend time on my own without being bored or needing company… but I also need goals and tasks or I can just get lost in my own world. A perfect example is today I learned about Ed Witten, and then I spent almost two hours watching videos, most of which explained things beyond my full comprehension, but I was both engaged and lost… and again I was fully entertained.

It’s the power of being an introvert… even when I’m on my own, I never feel alone.

Holidays and routines

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Exercise, writing, meditation, diet… even vitamins… my schedule and routines are completely out of whack, and I’m feeling the struggle. I don’t mind a few days off, but I’ve been off of a regular schedule for over a month now and it’s getting to me. My back is achy, I have less energy, and I’m not sleeping well.

I often talk about this, and I get comments like, ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’ But the reality is that it’s not about me beating myself up or not giving myself a break. Rather it’s that I get huge benefits out of maintaining my routines, and I am not as energetic and vital when I let things slip.

Furthermore, when I lose my routines on holidays, I spiral a bit and end up missing things that are well within my ability to schedule. For example, I’ve only meditated twice in the last week, but I’ve definitely had at least 10 if not 20 minutes each day that I could have used to meditate. Also, I’m writing this when I should already be sleeping.

So, once again I’m sharing my complaints, but neither for sympathy nor for comments about not being so hard on myself. Rather I’m sharing because outwardly discussing this, putting it ‘out there’ is a way I hold myself accountable. And so I’m just saying that I need to do better… and tomorrow I’ll make things better.

This is my way of manifesting the behaviours I want for myself. And I’ll feel better both physically and mentally.