a keen life

Dear Self,

So, I guess you’ve been falling a bit short of your exercise goals? You’ve been tired ever since you stayed out late at the Opera last Tuesday, sabotaging your sleep for Wednesday Yoga. A tiny sleep deficit combined with a little run of hot weather toward the end of the week resulted in Crazy! Schedule! Crankiness! No exercise since Yoga six days ago, now that you think about it!

Isn’t it funny how a tiny change can throw you off so easily?

On the plus side, your plan of delegating some meals to your sweetie worked really well — you had some yummy meals that were fairly nutritionally balanced, and you didn’t have to use a single neuron to think them up, since someone else was in charge. Brilliantly executed plan!

What happened with exercise, though? Wow. First off, props for avoiding the sun and painful sunburns, but also, hey, the sun won’t kill you! Sunblock is effective for short periods of time! Here is your complaint summary for the last six days of no exercise:

1. Too hot!
2. No clothes!

Solutions: buy sunscreen, and invest in some new workout gear. I know you would like to believe you don’t need either one, but waiting for your old sunscreen to magically appear from the messy bathroom is not really productive. Also, pretending you like your old ratty workout clothes is not a good way to love yourself!

Here’s the thing: you need to get what you need to get the job done. If you want to exercise every day, you can’t deprive yourself of 2 necessary ingredients (sunblock, clothes) and then whine endlessly about why you’re not exercising! This is going to require a small amount of shopping. Recognize that this is also going to require not feeling comfortable the first time you step outside to walk or bike in your new clothes. It’s okay not to feel comfortable! (Most people don’t care, and the other people are stupid, so ignore them. )

Also, sometimes you’re not going to be able to breeze home from a perfectly productive day of work with a magical burst of energy and waltz out the door for your hour-long walk like a bird on the wing. Sometimes, you’re going to be a bit cranky, but you’ll learn to do it anyway. You’re in it for the feeling you get when you give yourself what you need. You’ll feel better if you take a walk! The television will not explode with interesting content while it waits for you, and dinner can wait another hour.

Get this — you are not a hostage to your routines if your routines aren’t working for you! I know, crazy. You can make your life better by deliberately deciding what you need, and then going out there to get it for yourself.

Okay — now do it!

Love,

Your self.

Some days I feel I am moving mental mountains just to face reality.

Here’s a good example: for the last couple weeks I have being going up and down a pound without any real loss. Just hanging out around 211 or 212, then 211 again, then maybe 213, no big deal.

However! My bodyfat percentage has definitely gone down, from 44% to 42.5% since I started using the Physics Diet tracker last week. That is a loss of 3.28 pounds of fat!

I am having to FORCE myself to accept this as a victory. My instinct is to write it off as a glitch in the inaccurate scale. But hey, wait a damn minute. That’s a fancy scale! I spent $60 on it at Amazon! Not only that, but I have spent the last six weeks dragging my sleepy ass out of bed every morning and doing absurd little exercises for core strength. I have been building muscle, and feeling stronger! (But, but! A tiny voice protests inside my head. I’m only halfway convinced that this body is capable of change!)

Hey, self, you know what? You are doing good stuff and here is a result: measurable lost fat and gained muscle. Voila! You rock. Let’s rock it harder, and go for that walk after work you’ve got planned.

Pep talks aside, I have to point out here how useful Physics Diet really is. This is not just a chart — there is some seriously nerdtastic math hanging out in the background that creates a moving average that you can focus on. As they say, this cuts out the “noise” of otherwise small up-and-down movements over time. Instead of a simple trend, you have the Bigger Picture laid out nice and easy for you to see, in a simple black line that cuts through the noisy jags of change.

I love it and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Without the moving average of the Physics Diet chart, I might think I’m going nowhere fast. But thanks to paying attention to the trend of the numbers, and the important background numbers of bodyfat percentages, I can see change where before I might have seen just a hazy flat line.

The moral of this story is: Never underestimate the power of a visual aid! In my case, it really is moving mountains.