Chimeric Dream

Diet Betting

2015-07-07T16:24:00+01:00

I had been doing phenomenally well for all but the last month of this bet. The past few weeks, my depression hit me hard, and I fell off the wagon big time (stopped running, ate like crap, all the good stuff). As of Sunday, I was 0.2 pounds over my goal weight, and this morning I discovered my body decided now was a good time to hold onto a bunch of water (I was 4.5 pounds over).

I just went for my first good run in weeks with a friend of mine, and I am eating light all day. I’m going to go for a nice long (and hopefully sweaty) walk this evening, get up early for my run tomorrow, and hopefully beat this goal. It sucks to know that I’ve come so far (won every round so far) and I could wind up coming short right at the end.

I plan to do another Transformer bet. With any luck, I’ll be able to better manage my tendencies to veer too far from the course. Here’s to the next 36 hours, the next 6 months, and the next 50 years of making changes, being healthy, and finding the strength to get up when I fall.

Progress

2015-04-13T20:29:00+01:00

I am slowly making progress toward my goals of being more organized, healthy, and fit. In the past couple of months, I have set (and broken) more running goals than I would have believed possible a year ago, I have started eating much healthier than I used to, and I am slowly working my way toward a routine that allows me to get things done (if at a slower pace than I really want) while still getting to bed at a reasonable hour.

I’d be lying if I said that I don’t have my bad days. There have been a number of times when I came close to missing my step goal on Fitbit or going over my daily calorie goal on MyFitnessPal. In many cases, these were because I was simply exhausted from going non-stop for a large part of the day several days in a row. In others, it’s simply the stress of having so many things going on at once that gets to me, even if most of the things I am doing right now revolve around a single goal.

So far this year, I have lost ~30 pounds, walked or ran over 1.7 million steps (about 765 miles), and managed to make or find the time to spend with my family more than ever. Most of the time, I honestly don’t know how I get it done, and I can’t deny the possibility that at some point this year I will simply pass out and sleep for a week from exhaustion. But until that day, I will keep doing what I’m doing. It’s hard, it sucks almost as much as it’s good, and somehow it seems to be working. At least for now.

Making strides

2015-03-17T23:26:00+01:00

Just a short update tonight. As most of my friends and family are aware, I have taken up running again in an attempt to lose weight (a LOT of weight, to be honest) and generally get healthier. Though my weight loss has slowed down the past few weeks, I have redoubled my efforts and begun pushing myself harder when I run, and it is starting to pay off. In each of my past three runs, I set a new personal best time for a one-mile run, all of which were under 10 minutes. Though this isn’t “fast” by many standards, I don’t think I have run a mile that fast in my adult life. Yet three times in the past four days, I managed to clock times of 9:59, 9:57, and 9:41 for a one-mile run. Not too shabby for a big guy with asthma.

2015 Goals

2015-03-09T22:04:00+01:00

It’s already a few months into the year, but I wanted to share my goals for the coming year. I readily admit that they are ambitious, but I have a great support system of friends and family who are helping me stay motivated and honest.

Most of my goals for the year revolve around mental and physical health. Between losing weight, getting in shape, and eating better, I have decided it’s time to turn things around and make some big changes.

Weight

Starting: 260 pounds Goal: 170 pounds Current: 243 pounds

Fitness

Goal: I plan to run the Kansas City Marathon in October with several friends and family members. We are not going for record-setting speeds by any means; our goal is to finish the race in under the maximum time (6 hours). At a 4.3mph pace, we could theoretically complete in under the time limit if we kept up a brisk walk.

Tracking and Habits

Fitbit and MyFitnessPal: I use these two apps for tracking my food intake along with my daily exercise. Fitbit tracks my steps, my sleep, and my daily calorie burn. I use MyFitnessPal for its food diary. MFP has an extensive food database, and it synchronizes with Fitbit, so I don’t have to enter any of my data more than once. Feel free to add me as a friend on either service if you are looking for someone to compete with and have fun with mutual motivation.

This is going to be a long year, but with any luck (plus more than a little blood and sweat) by the time the holidays come back around I will be a totally different person than I was a year ago.

Plateaus

2015-03-09T21:42:00+01:00

There are different kinds of plateaus in life. Some, such as Tibet, are populated with people from widely varying cultures and have beautiful vistas to explore. Others, such as the plateau I am currently visiting, are less literal.

Since the beginning of the year, I have lost a little under 20 pounds, but since mid-February, I have been stuck. To be fair, there have been several days when I rested more than I should have and still others when I ate less healthy food. But I have yet to have a day where I miss my Fitbit step goal or go over my daily calorie goal on MyFitnessPal. Unfortunately, it is becoming obvious that I can’t just rely on those two numbers to help me achieve my goals. I need to redouble my efforts toward fitness and eating well.

With any luck, I can get back on track and get through this wall I am up against. I am not changing my goals for the year, but I’ll need to change things up if I want to reach them.

Learning

2015-03-04T21:28:00+00:00

Over the past year or so, I have learned a great deal. I have learned about myself. I have learned about my friends and family. I have learned about babies, parenting, and life.

Prior to last August, my wife and I took the usual birthing/parenting classes generally required of new parents. In that class, I learned quite a bit more than I expected (and certainly some things I could have gone without), but one of the most interesting factoids that I took away is that babies are pretty much indestructible. Sure, they are tiny and soft and all that, but apparently you have to do some serious stuff to injure a baby. They’ll bump their heads, fall over, and get into all kinds of shenanigans, but when it comes down to it, babies just shake it off and keep going.

After our son was born, I quickly discovered one of the big differences between life without a baby and life with a newborn. Where before we would have conversations about where to eat, what movie to see, or how our days were going, now our conversations were about poop, breast feeding, and poop. Yay.

I also learned that postpartum depression isn’t just for moms. I know they tried to drill that into us during the classes, but it’s one thing to know something and quite another to really know it. After going back to work at the end of my paternity leave, I enjoyed a slow downward spiral fueled by sleep deprivation, frustration with the slow pace at which I was acquiring the knowledge I needed to do my job well, and the standard stress and frustration that comes with being a new parent. I have to say that I didn’t enjoy it. I learned that accepting the fact that I was suffering from “depression” was extraordinarily difficult. A large part of me felt that I didn’t have the right to feel the way I did when my life was so much better than many others’.

Over the holiday season, I learned that losing weight and keeping it off is basically impossible if you aren’t exercising much (not to mention suffering from a pretty severe case of “Fuck the world. Just let me sleep for the next year.”). I gained back pretty much all the weight I lost over the previous few months.

At the beginning of 2015, I learned that sometimes a small spark can light a big fire. Something triggered in my brain, and I decided I’d simply had enough. I was tired of feeling like crap every time I looked in the mirror. I was tired of being exhausted all the time. And most of all, I was tired of feeling like my weight was just a big (really big, in my mind) yo-yo. I started walking every day and have met or exceeded my daily step goal (first 10,000 steps, currently 11,000) every day since January 5th.

Since the beginning of the year, I learned that my friends and family want many of the same things for themselves that I want. We all want to get healthier. We all want that blend of mutual support, friendly jibes, and lighthearted competition that keeps life interesting. I learned that it is this type of competition that pushes me further every day. I should have known that gamifying things would be a successful way for me to stay motivated, but I learned that, too. I learned that although exercising regularly and eating better are very difficult, once I have a good streak going (59 days as of today), the risk of breaking said streak becomes almost a big a motivator as anything else.

I have learned a lot over the past year. I have learned happy things and sad things and things that make me question why the hell people do any of a large number of things.

I have learned that learning is hard.

Habits, lifestyle, and staying motivated

2015-02-27T23:51:00+00:00

Anyone who knows me more than five minutes knows that I am never one to do something half-way. I tend to “over attempt”, as I sometimes enjoy saying. Historically, this has led me into situations where I have so many things going on that it’s impossible to accomplish everything, and I wind up getting carried away in a current of stress, frustration, and anger at myself.

"I had a dream that Dad was tied to a log and was careening out of control down a raging river of death!"

This year is no different… and yet, it’s completely different. This year, I am changing my habits, changing my lifestyle, and finding new ways to keep motivated. My goals for the year are ambitious; they may even be among the most difficult goals I have ever set for myself. I want to lose 80-100 pounds, I plan to participate in my first marathon, and I want to go the full year without missing my daily step goal on Fitbit or going over my daily calorie goals on MyFitnessPal. I want to get to a point where eating healthy is my new normal and not something I’m doing to lose weight. I want to hack my life and make it better.

HAAAAAACK!

There’s no denying the fact that I love gaming. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone (though I have to admit, it was for me) that gamification is turning out to be a massive source of motivation and positive reinforcement for me when it comes to changing my habits and my lifestyle. I have joined a six-month DietBet, which essentially forces you to put your money where your goals are. The challenge is to lose 10% of your body weight (in my case, about 27 pounds) in six months. Each month has its own intermediate goal, and I am hoping to keep up a 2 pound/week pace for the duration of the challenge (putting me down ~50 pounds by the end). I have also started taking advantage of the social aspects of Fitbit and MyFitnessPal. I have used both of these on and off for the past several years, but I always treated them as solo adventures. Now, I have friends and family who help motivate me through direct competitive challenges and mutual encouragement. One of the last big pieces of the puzzle, and the most literal example of gamification, is the website HabitRPG. This site turns your habits, daily tasks, and to-do items into a literal game. You have a character (and can group together in a party with friends), and you gain experience, levels, and gold by completing your tasks and positive habits every day. Negative habits (such as eating junk food or skipping a workout) damage your character. On top of being a fun way to get things done, HabitRPG is open source, so I have been helping out with code and fixes for the site (something I listed among the items in my recent bucket list post).

Guess which one is me.

I have no delusions that what I am doing this year is ambitious. Some people (you know who you are, and I love you for it) would say I am crazy for trying to do so much. They are probably right, but something feels different this time around. I know I am setting a large number of goals for myself this year. But they all feed into one another in a way that makes it impossible to cut any one or two items out of the bunch. In the past, I have tried to to so many things that I wound up spreading myself too thin. That would inevitably lead to becoming overwhelmed and unable to focus on any one thing, eventually resulting in my stress level reaching a point that I wind up dropping the ball on everything. This year I am setting a lot of goals for myself. But this time around, they all work in harmony. In order to keep up with my DietBet, I need to pay attention to my calorie intake as well as exercise regularly. By exercising, I keep up with my step goal every day. On top of this, my work’s insurance plan has incentives to be healthy; if I keep up with the things I already want to do, I set myself up to get extra money deposited in my HSA account. On top of the fact that my goals reinforce each other, the fact that I am taking advantage of the social aspect of all of these sites as well as joining friends and co-workers. If ever I find myself lacking motivation, there’s always someone there to encourage me.

You lazy $*%@! My grandmother gets 50,000 steps on her Fitbit every day.

The last couple months of 2014 were full of ups and downs (more of that in a later post, perhaps), but I have to say that the first two months of 2015 have been totally different. I am more motivated than I have been in a long time. I am more optimistic about the future. And most of all, I am happier than I have been in a long time. Every day, my son does something new to melt my heart. I am looking forward to a year of changing my life for the better and accomplishing some of the most ambitious goals I have ever set for myself. With the help of my friends and family, by this time next year I will be nigh unrecognizable. I don’t expect it to be easy, but this is one game that I don’t intend to lose.

You got the thing!

Bucket List

2015-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

I started this list not long after making my 30 by 30 list as a way to keep track of the things that I wanted to do over the next year. The first list was hard enough to make in one sitting that I knew I wouldn’t be able to come up with a specific number of things easily. I decided to pick a more long-term time frame than a single year. Leaving the list open-ended and with room to expand gives me the opportunity to enjoy new experiences rather than worry about how many items I have left to cross off before my next birthday.

The results of my musings are below. Enjoy!

Relationships

Build our own house
Complete our family
Go an entire weekend without using a computer
Go on a cruise for my 5 year anniversary and every 5th anniversary after
Go on a weekend trip with friends
Host a murder mystery dinner
Meet someone famous
Meet a sitting head of state

Cuisine

Eat at a Michelin 3-star restaurant
Find a dish that I like that contains a vegetable I don’t like (e.g. broccoli)
Make mozzarella cheese from scratch
Eat a meal cooked by a celebrity chef
Eat in a pitch black restaurant

Creating & Entertainment

Be a playtester for a game
Be an extra in a movie
Blog regularly enough to realistically call myself a “blogger”
Build a book scanner
Build a fire pit
Build a home forge
Build a pottery wheel
Build a swing set for the kids
Create a piece of art and sell it
Create a video game
Get a 3D printer and make something with it
Learn to draw
Publish World of Pannotia as an RPG campaign setting
Start an a cappella group
Write a book
Write a symphony
Write or arrange enough songs for a solo EP (a cappella or otherwise)
Participate in (and finish) a NaNoWriMo
Try out to be on a reality/talent show (e.g. The Voice, America’s Got Talent, etc)
Invent something and patent it

Health & Sports

Hit my target weight and/or waist size (somewhere around 160-175 lbs. and 32”-34”, respectively)
Learn to play golf well enough to not look silly
Participate in a half-ironman
Participate in an Ironman
Run 5 miles without stopping
Run 30 miles
Run a marathon
Run a sub-8-minute mile
Sky dive
Study a martial art
Win my age division in a race

Learning & Professional Development

Earn a certification in something totally unrelated to my profession
Get a Master’s Degree
Learn a new language
No less than every other year, learn a new programming language well enough to add it to my resume
Make a non-trivial contribution to an open source project
Submit a proposal to speak at a tech conference
Build and sell a successful business
Work for Mozilla

Travel & Adventure

Attend the Olympics
Be a part of a flash mob
Become certified for scuba diving
Drive a race car over 150mph
Fire an automatic weapon
Fly a plane
Fly first class somewhere
Fly in a private jet
Get a tattoo
Go on a trans-oceanic cruise
Go on an Alaskan cruise
Go parasailing
Go skiing on real mountains
Go skinny dipping
Go to a Comicon in full costume
Go to an ice bar
Go white water rafting
Hike up an active volcano and look in
Ride a bullet/hypersonic train
Ride an elephant
Ride in a helicopter
Ride in a hot air balloon
See a performance at the Sydney Opera House
See the aurora borealis or aurora australis
Spend the night in an igloo
Stay in an ice hotel
Stay in an underwater hotel
Swim with dolphins
Swim with sharks
Take a zip line tour
Visit all 7 continents
Visit Dubai
Visit Europe
Visit the “Four Corners”
Visit the Colosseum in Rome
Visit the Eiffel Tower
Visit the Great Wall of China
Visit the Louvre
Visit the pyramids at Giza
Visit the Statue of Liberty
Visit the world’s largest swimming pool in Chile
Go cliff diving
Learn to eat/breathe fire
Walk on hot coals
Go snowboarding
Swim with dolphins
Swim with sharks
Swim with stingrays
Explore a cave
Visit space
Dine with the captain on a cruise
Set a Guinness world record
Watch every “Best Picture” Oscar Winning movie
Watch the IMDb Top 250 movies
Attend the Oscars
Attend a movie premier
Go on an unplanned RV trip across the country

Finance & Luxury

Earn a salary of $150,000 or more in a year
Become a millionaire
Eliminate all my debt
Own a boat

Environment & Conservation

Go a full year without buying gasoline
Reduce my electric bill to $0 for a month
Buy a “zero-emission” car

A lifetime ago

2014-08-06T22:58:00+01:00

A lifetime ago, I started my first “real” job as a programmer.

Now, I am two months into a job working as a software engineer at a great company.

A lifetime ago, I was recently single after having been in and out of relationships for as far back as I could remember.

Now, I am approaching my second wedding anniversary and eagerly awaiting the birth of my first child in the very near future.

A lifetime ago, I was unable to enroll in classes because I owed the university money that I couldn’t afford to pay back.

Now, I am a recent college graduate with a bachelor of science in computer science and a minor in music.

A lifetime ago, I was a little over halfway through a 13-year tour of all the finest (and some less-than-fine) apartment complexes in Lawrence.

Now, I am settling into a newly purchased house and trying to navigate the craziness that being a homeowner entails.

A lifetime ago, I had all these ideas about where I would go and what I would do.

Now, everything is completely different than I had imagined in almost every way. Few, if any, things are worse than I expected them to be. A great many things are better. But the vast majority is simply different than I thought it would be.

Who knows where I will be a lifetime from now?

It’s about time

2013-10-13T23:01:00+01:00

So here I am, trying to get back on the horse. I keep thinking of things I want to say on the blog, but somehow life just kept getting in the way. Since I posted last, a TON has happened. I got married, I lost family members, I dropped classes due to stress, I considered dropping out of school entirely, I have traveled to both coasts of the country in less than six months, I redesigned my website (again), I got a promotion at work, I was the best man in a friend’s wedding, several of my close friends have had beautiful babies, and a whole crapload more.

Perhaps, just maybe, I will write about some of these things in more detail later. For now, this is just a quick post to remind myself what blogging feels like so I can start getting back into it.

Enjoy, and I’ll see you later.