Trying Out Before Buying In

Over 42 miles run and 2100 reps I can honestly say this was a tough workout plan to stick to. The first few days were rough, but it’s gotten easier surprisingly quick. There is definitely a lacking in this regimen, but as a way to get back in general shape, I’m enjoying it.

Pushing Through the Tough Times

At the start of last month, I wrapped up a long standing training goal of running a marathon. Afterward, I took some time off and needed something to get me back into fitness. I decided this would be a great time to try out this long standing idea in my head, to follow the workout plan from the anime series, One Punch Man. That is 100 push ups, 100 sit ups, 100 squats, and a 10 kilometer run every day.

The second and third day were definitely the worst. My muscles were still recovering from the prior days, and I just had to push through to hit my goal. By day four, it started getting easier. I feel that each day that passes now, the full set is a bit easier.

I find this is a simple routine that doesn’t take much time at all, and I’ve often enjoyed daily habits, because forcing myself to go out and do something each day helps to stay committed. Having something as silly as an anime to base my workouts off of makes me laugh when I think about it, but overall it’s been a fun time so far.

Won’t Deny the Flaws

While I do like this routine, there is some areas that can’t be ignored. For one, the exercises involved don’t involve a lot of muscle groups at all. I’m considering making some adjustments as I get later into the trial, but for now, I’m going to stick to the plan as is.

Working out every day can have its benefits, but there is also a complication that I’ve thought about from time to time, avoiding injury. I do think the routine is light enough to where I am not at a great risk, but it’s a fear that stuck with me from an old injury. It is something I’ve learned from, and should I sense something is wrong, I’ll probably just take a day off.

One week down and so far so good. We’ll see if things keep up over time, but for now, this has been a fun start.

Shaking off sickness to wrap up the posts before getting into the next trial. For some, philosophy may be a blow off class they took in high school or college. Others may see it as ancient guys in robes arguing about pointless nonsense. For a different group, myself included, it’s all about how we look at the world and make decisions in it. The primary philosophy I practice in my life is stoicism.

It’s All About the Response

The key I’ve found in reading about stoicism is a pretty simple concept. There is next to nothing we can control in out lives except our reaction to an event. One of the most famous stoic philosophers, Epictetus, was actually a slave who had next to no control over his actions and decisions. He couldn’t decide his lot in life, as many of us cannot, but we can choose how to think about it.

While I’ve been lucky to have a lot of opportunity in my life, I can’t say I haven’t had some difficult days. There have been plenty of times that having this philosophy in mind has helped. A specific example that comes to mind involves my previous job. We had a system that experienced a ton of technical errors. Time and time again I had to send out emails explaining we were having another issue. One day, we had an issue after we thought it was resolved. When my co-worker told me as I walked it, I almost lost my temper and erupted. After catching myself, I sat down at my desk, sent out the notice, and worked to resolve the problem.

As someone who grew up losing his temper or getting over emotional over the smallest things, I can’t imagine where I would be without following this philosophy.

Practical Positivity

Stoicism offers an answer to how and why to choose the response, but what does that really mean? For me, it involves switching my emotions to a positive one. There are of course exceptions to this practice, but I feel there’s no point in getting caught up in the day to day crap that used to take up so much space in my mind. I’m talking about things like bad drivers, missing an alarm and running late, a rude comment, or whatever other annoyance may occur that day.

Whenever something like this happens, I’ll typically accept what is true about whatever happened, possibly make a joke or comment about it, then move on. If I get cut off while driving, assuming we both get out safely, I’ll say to the driver, well to myself really, “I hope wherever you’re going is as fun as your driving makes it seem to me.” I’ll laugh at how ridiculous my comment was, and then keep driving. It’s only slightly different if I’m stuck behind someone going extremely slow on a one lane highway. I’ll say something like, “thanks for making sure we both get to our destination safely,”

When this approach started, I couldn’t say, but I now find myself doing this for everything. Sometimes, I find myself holding back from laughing out loud because of whatever stupid comment I have in mind.

Whether you have a name for what you think or not, everyone follows some philosophy. These are some of the core beliefs I follow for the most part. It’s far from perfect, but it’s not like there’s an award for best philosophy. Whatever you believe, make sure it’s adding value to your life, and if not, a philosophy can always be changed to make life better.

Next Time, Return to Form

I’m excited for the next trial I’ll be doing. I’ve had this one in mind for some time, but waited until now to do so. The idea is to follow a fitness routine that is the punchline of a joke. It comes from the anime series One Punch Man. In it the titular hero can defeat any opponent with a single punch. He got to this point by following a strict routine of 100 push ups, 100 sit ups, 100 squats, and a 10 kilometer run every day. Season 2 just started up and the weather is promising, so it seemed there was no better time to start!

The last few posts I made were focused on habits I have been keeping for some time, but hadn’t wrote about. I was working on continuing this for today, but everything I was writing just felt uninspired. With that in mind, I am going to take a week or two off just to get back in the swing of things. I just returned from a long vacation, got sick on the return and my head has been a mess since.

With that said, I plan on coming back by May 1st at the latest, but if I’m feeling up to it perhaps even next week. Look forward to starting a trial soon, just not exactly sure what it’ll be yet.

For about 10 months now, I haven’t been using any product when I shower. That is no soap or shampoo, just water. Being appalled by the idea isn’t surprising and understandable. For me, doing so stands as one of the better decisions I’ve made. It’s simplified a lot of things, and my hair and skin feel the healthiest they’ve been in years.

A Clean Start

Since I shaved my head last year, I wanted to give this whole no product thing a try. I started with the no hair product and figured I´d go all in after a bit. The idea behind not using these products is that they impact the body´s natural production of oils by stripping them away so frequently. This causes the body to overproduce oil, needing more use of product to keep things in control.

With a bald head, I was able to let my hair grow back naturally, and let the transition from shampoo and conditioner use go by. From the reading that inspired this change, the negative impact can still be seen for a month or two after stopping use. Luckily, I had no hair for that whole period.

You Haven’t Thought of the Smell

Now comes the part that we’ve all been thinking since the first paragraph, “how bad to you smell?” From what I’ve been able to inquire, not really at all.

When I started this whole experiment out, I figured someone would call me out on stinking up the room if I was unbearable to be around. After months of not hearing anything, I thought maybe people didn’t want to hurt my feelings or something, so I decided to ask them.

The answer I got was a resounding, I don´t think so. It’s difficult to try and recall a lack of something. One friend made a comment that after working out I did, but others were shocked at the revelation.

Should You Try This Too?

Do I recommend this? I think it´s worth a try for just about anyone. The first few weeks will likely be the most difficult, but afterwards it eliminates a handful of things to think about.

Travel, for one, becomes quite a bit easier without having to pack a bunch of product into a little bag that needs to be separated out. That´s if travel size bottles will even work for the trip.

Showering becomes a simple process that focuses on washing away dirt, sweat, and other filth, instead of lazily lathering some soap around and calling it good.

This may not be for everyone, but like so many things on this blog, I think most things in life are worth a try. This also isn’t something I have deep rooted beliefs in. Should evidence come up that makes this not worth it, I’d change back to my old ways. For now, I’ll continue on.

This is one of my favorite routines and it started out of nothing. I can’t recall a specific inspiration or why I started. One day I just went out for a walk when I was having trouble sleeping, and it stuck. While this habit did take a hit in the winter, I’ve started up again with spring weather upon us once again. This time offers me an opportunity to just think. I throw on some music and go for a an hour long route that I came up with over time. I let my mind go off the leash into whatever it desires in the moment. This helps me wind down significantly before bed, getting out all of the thoughts bouncing around.

Bedtime But Bright-Eyed

I wouldn’t go as far as saying I suffer from insomnia, talking to friends who do experience this I know not to, but I have had restless nights of sleep. I could lay in bed for three or four hours without even feeling a hint of sleepiness. A rare occurrence, but a frustrating one at that. Anyone who knows that trying to fall asleep makes falling asleep even more difficult. This walk became the first pillar in my nightly routine. After walking, I brush my teeth, set my alarm, and go to bed.

No more stirring about restlessly as my mind jumps from topic to topic with no natural transition. I certainly have nights where it takes a few minutes to get comfortable enough to fall asleep but nothing near the restlessness of the past. Just the other day, I found myself awake in the middle of the night, around 2:30 AM and couldn’t fall back asleep. I decided, I might as well get a walk in and see if it helped. Of course, upon returning to bed, I was out before I knew it.

A Free Mind is a Creative Mind

Curing restlessness is only one of the benefits I’ve seen from long walks. They also open up my mind for a lot of creative thinking. I have been able to come up with a number of solutions to problems I was facing or build up the courage to address something due to these walks.

There are definitely some moments when I think, “what the hell am I thinking about right now?” As the weirdest crap stirs around my head. Most of the garbage needs to be processed in order to get to the gold underneath. I have managed to come up with a lot of interesting ideas while on these walks. I don’t want to share the specifics here, but a project I’ve been working on and off for a few months was the product of one of these walks.

Many great thinkers from Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius to the visionary behind Apple Steve Jobs famously used walks as moments to think and generate new ideas.

While certainly not a cure all, walking is good exercise for the body and mind. Adding it to a evening routine has helped me significantly. Maybe walking at night isn’t ideal for you, but getting a long walk in at some point during the day

Switching up the journaling approach this week was certainly helpful in a number of ways. Putting together a plan the night before and morning of each day laid a general structure to the day ahead. Also, getting my mind out of the past was a key to trying to make better decisions in general.

Laying the Future Foundation

By shifting my focus forward, I found myself creating rough outlines for the day. Days hardly turned out as initially planned, but having some structure to fall back on helped when I would start to feel overwhelmed. Knowing what to bring my attention to at a given time allowed me to focus on what was most important in the given moment.

Each night, I wrote down a couple of sentences about how the day went and then shift focus to tomorrow. I created a list of things I wanted to do or think about for the day helped me to get over whatever happened today and get excited for tomorrow.

Admittedly, life frequently got in the way of my perfect plan most days. I would wake up late, or some other distraction would come up. Following what I wrote down verbatim wasn’t really the intention. Planning something was. Writing down a plan was a way to think about tomorrow, and not the day that is already over with.

Putting the Past Behind

The past can be a useful tool to learn from, but getting lost in it can be dangerous. When I started journaling again for this trial, I found myself focusing on the day that just passed.

The future is like the past of course, and too much focus on either can lead one down a slippery slope. Learning from the past and planning for the future are useful practices for anyone, but in reality it’s the present that requires all of our attention.

Keeping a journal is something I want to continue, even if it’s just a few words per day. Speaking of the future, for the next few weeks I’ll be changing things up a little bit. I won’t be starting a new ongoing trial. Instead, I’ll be writing about some other experiments I’ve done that don’t have their own posts yet.

Lately, most of my journaling and insight in general comes from hindsight. While it has it’s place, relying too much on hindsight leads to me frequently missing out on what’s happening around the corner. Focusing too much on the past, can leave little room to appreciate the present or plan for the future.

Hindsight Habits

My approach to journaling this time around boils down to wait until last minute of the day and then write down my thoughts. It’s definitely helped me to capture my feelings at the end of the day to wind down before bed, but it doesn’t capture the moments I’m writing about. Writing down my thoughts at the end of the day means I’m always looking back.

This tendency to write solely on the past causes me to miss out on the future ahead. With my current routines, I hardly ever take time to make plans for the future, both near and far. Sure there are events like vacations and goals, but the difficult part is the day to day that ultimately make up those things. As of now, the only foresight based activity I partake in is a weekly breakfast with friends. There we set goals for the week to come. Otherwise, all of my habits look back.

In Moderation

Looking back on events can be a great way to learn and develop, but a problem arises when everything is done retrospectively. Learning from the past is probably one of humanity’s greatest strengths, but so is planning ahead.

For the rest of this trial, I’m going to change up a little bit about how I approach the daily journal. Instead of journaling only at night, I’m going to write down my thoughts and plans for the day ahead. At the end of the day, I can look back on what was already written and see if I was successful or not. This forces me to start applying foresight in my routine.

This is the first time I’m revisiting a previously done trial, a daily journal, and it’s for a pretty specific reason. Prior to starting to journal again, I was dealing with quite a lot of stress, anxiety, and depression. Having a daily outlet of my thoughts helps to better sort and understand them.

Emotional Release

For most of my life, I’ve often held emotions at bay until I could no longer do so. The result was often a scene, a meltdown. As I’ve grown older, I may know how to avoid creating a scene, but I still struggle with emotional expression. On a given day, I can bounce from one end of the emotional spectrum to another in my mind, while on the surface trying to appear disconnected from any given feeling. I don’t believe this is a good thing.

Prior to starting to journal again, I would get lost in thoughts. The negative ones somehow have a way of clouding out everything else. Sitting down for a few minutes each night has helped me to get things under control. Writing down whatever comes to mind has cleared the fog. Negative thoughts don’t have the same hold, and the good aspects of a situation come to mind easier.

Getting Serious

I feel compelled to preface the following story. If you feel that you experience thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the suicide hotline at 1-800-273-8255. Regardless of your thoughts in that moment, any act against yourself can have a destructive blow to the people around you.

Drafting up my thoughts on this, I can’t help but remember a time a few years ago that I wrote a suicide note. By the time this idea crossed my mind, the event that sparked the deep depression and self-loathing I was feeling was well behind me. For some reason, I was committed to writing. What I found was the event that triggered those feelings, was really just the surface-level. Deep rooted emotions I had carried with me for years were dug up. Seeing the words on the paper, I was able to see a physical representation of those feelings and work through them.

I kept the note with me for a while. It was a reminder that things on the surface were usually not what they seemed. Eventually, I tossed it, putting that experience behind me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had that type of emotion lurking in my mind, but the lesson of that day has stuck with me.

This post took me a lot of re-writes due to the difficulty of this subject matter. It’s a scary thing that these thoughts can impact anyone. I once again urge anyone who finds themselves drawing close to hurting themselves to call the suicide hotline at 1-800-273-8255 and, if able, seek out help from a professional. I am definitely not qualified to offer advice or solutions, but the above is just one experience I thought was relevant.

For the first time, I am repeating a trial I’ve done in the past, a daily journal. There are a number of reasons that I wanted to try this again, but today I wanted to dig into a concept I’ve seen frequently, creating a record of a certain time in life.

An Autobiography of Sorts

A creator I follow recently discussed some disappointment he had that there was no concrete record of certain points in his life. For him specifically, no videos he could look back on. This made me think of when I read the biography of Ben Franklin. So much of what we know about him comes from his journals. His autobiography captures how he reflected on his life, but his journal gives us the moment. A journal for anyone can capture the instant far clearer than retrospection.

Something I’ve thought of doing recently, was to try and write up an autobiography for the first 25 years of my life. I don’t know if I’ll go thru with it, how much work it would be, if I would ever release it, or the answers to a variety of other questions. I like the idea of trying to capture what my 25 year old self thinks about his life so far. Keeping a journal going forward, can hopefully help a future me remember what these times were like.

Journal Format Doesn’t Matter

The last time I tried journaling, I mostly focused on trying a variety of different methods, but so far I’ve been purely writing free form thoughts as they come from my mind. Not focusing on a format or structure has allowed me to express the exact thoughts passing thru my mind at the moment.

This has helped me to process what I think were the biggest parts of my day and the emotions that I still need to process. Rather than let them boil around in my head too long, getting them on paper makes them feel more concrete and tangible.

Next week, I will dive deeper into this emotional expression, another major reason I am giving journaling a try once again.

This has certainly been an interesting trial in food. Forcing myself to pay attention to what’s actually in the food I eat was eye opening. With a few metrics this time around, I think there was a positive impact of this trial. That in mind, I want to keep up that progress, which makes a plan going forward more difficult. I have a few approaches in mind and I’ll likely be doing some smaller experiments to see what approach I like best.

Final Thoughts

Taking note of how much food has added sugar is a bit disappointing. I plan to continue avoiding most of these foods. I do want to continue the habit of giving ingredients a brief look to see if there’s anything that seems like it shouldn’t belong, and that goes beyond just sugar.

Restricting what I could use in the kitchen led to a lot of great dishes. Though some frustration was definitely caused by things like soy sauce having high fructose corn syrup added. Seeing sugar added to something that didn’t seem to need it is what frustrated me most. My solution became to make my own homemade version without sugar. Often, my homemade version tasted better than what I remembered the original being.

In the end, avoiding processed foods guarantees that I’ll know exactly what is in the food I eat.

Let’s See Some Results

Something I have not done in some time is to try and crunch some numbers that the trial may have influenced. For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking my weight daily and measuring the circumference around my belly – there’s probably a more professional term for that.

Compared to the start, I am down nearly 10 lbs and dropped about 1.5-2 inches around my stomach. It wasn’t until the third week did I really see a consistent drop. Prior to that, I saw some big fluctuations from day to day.

This sounds good and dandy, but the complicated part is pinning this to the trial itself. I wish I could say I had 28 days to adjust this one aspect of my life, but of course that is not the case. Last month, I started training for a marathon in the middle of January, and I don’t think that impact can be ignored.

In terms of diet though, I didn’t really change much. When it came to macro-nutrients, no particular amounts were established per meal/day/etc. My plan was to continue eating similarly to how I had been before, sans sugar.

I feel comfortable saying that I lost weight due to cutting sugar out of my diet, but I can’t confidently say to what extent.

Future Plans

Going forward, I want to treat sugar similarly to alcohol. A little bit every so often isn’t so bad, a lot rarely won’t kill me, but a lot frequently or even a little constantly leads to a bad place. Treats shouldn’t be part of the everyday, but saved for celebrations and special occasions. Just last night, another team was celebrating a birthday at trivia I attend. Our team was offered some cake, and with my trial rules, I declined. In the future, something like this would probably get a pass.

Other ideas I have for handling sugar are to establish a cheat day and only eat home made sweets. Cheat days are part of many diets for a reason, they help to allow for a single period of exceptions. It can be hard to say no over and over, but allowing oneself to enjoy treats on occasion makes sticking to a stricter diet every other day easier. Treating sugar in this way is just formalizing the occasional element I mentioned before.

Homemade is an element I like the idea of, but don’t know how well I can put it into practice. My thinking is that if I eat only what is homemade, I can control the exact ingredients and understand what I’m eating. As someone who’s managed to screw up sugar cookies – TWICE – I don’t know how easily I can pull this one off.

In Conclusion

This concludes my strict no added sugar diet. There were definitely times when I ate something I didn’t realized had sugar. I think the key is to move on and make the right choice with the new information next time. I saw some improvement in a couple of metrics I was looking at, and even have some plans to hopefully keep that improvement going forward.

Speaking of plans going forward! My next trial will be revisiting one from the past – keeping a daily journal.