Results

I don’t scale

April 14, 2019

No matter where your adventure takes you, most of what is truly meaningful is still to be found revolving around the mundane stuff you did before you embarked on your adventure. The stuff that’ll be still be going on long after you and I are both dead, long after our contribution to the world is forgotten.But often, one needs to have that big adventure before truly appreciating this. Going full circle. Exactly.

~ Hugh MacLeod

slip:4a937.

I like this idea because it means that today, things are as bad as it can get.

I’m already super-busy, super-stressed, super-anxious, super-self-critical and super-distracted. I’m pretty sure that finishing another project—just. one. more!—is not going to magically fulfill me. Somehow this lesson is easy to understand but hard to know… hard to integrate.

But “scale”? That’s something I really understand. I understand what happens with something that can scale, and something that cannot scale. So if humans—i.e., me—don’t scale, why do I keep trying to make me scale?

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Defy mother nature

April 1, 2019

We come out of the box tuned for self-preservation and conformity. Not self-expression, not self-actualization, not happiness. But that’s what we want. Our genes want rock-solid, redundant systems for survival, nothing more. We want to have fun and feel good about our lives. Not the same thing!

~ David Cain from, http://www.raptitude.com/2012/02/defy-mother-nature/

I’m uncertain.

I feel certain that I understand how to enjoy life. No mystery to me there.

The problem is balancing responsibilities. I’ve chosen this, I’ve taken on that, …sure, I swerve off the road—regularly—with things like stress-eating, rage, depression. But again, no mystery to me why that happens. I can tell from the center-line of the road when I’m heading for the ditch.

If I had a pithy solution to write here, I wouldn’t need to blog to sort out my thoughts, now would I?

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What’s a dog for?

March 4, 2019

In a chapter on reconciling the inevitable pain we invite into our lives when we commit to love a being biologically destined to die before we do and the boundless joy of choosing to love anyway, Homans cites John Updike’s heartbreaking poem “Another Dog’s Death”

~ Maria Papova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/12/06/whats-a-dog-for-john-homans/

I’m definitely a dog-person.

Updike’s poem is totes-amazeballs.

(Weren’t expecting that where you?)

My little town used to have a Barkery. That’s not a typo. Someone came up with a bunch of super-healthy and super-tasty recipes. She couldn’t sell them for human consumption, but I’ll just say that the dogs didn’t get every treat I bought there. Suuper tasty and no sugar. Her peanut butter ones—made with peanuts from scratch I think—were da’ bomb.

Anytime I was going somewhere where the dog had an owner I wanted to visit, I’d put those peanut butter dog treats from the Barkery . . . randomly in a few pockets. Dogs ‘d be like, “oh *sniff* hello there *sniff* *sniff* new huma—*sniff* *sniff* *sniff* excuse me sir, but are you aware THAT YOU SMELL LIKE PEANUTBUTTERHOLYSHITBESTDAYEVAAAAAR!”

I am actually going to make a point here.

You know what’s more awesome than dogs? Getting to be immersed in the sheer joy that dog’s experience. No complications. No todo lists. No stress nor worry. Just, best. day. EVAR!

Now, go read Maria’s post.

How to be mindful

September 15, 2018

Slowly add mindfulness bells. A mindfulness bell can be anything in your environment. Thich Nhat Hanh suggested using traffic lights as a mindfulness bell — when you see one, instead of getting caught up in the stress of driving, allow yourself to become present. You can slowly find other mindfulness bells — your daughter’s face, opening your computer, having your first cup of coffee, hearing a train going by.

~ Leo Babauta from, https://zenhabits.net/always/

Finding ways to trigger making conscious decisions is the key to increasing the amount of time you are mindful. The possibilities are endless!

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Origin story

May 6, 2018

“I should lose weight. Specifically, I should lose some of this fat. …actually, a lot of this fat.”

Since I began my health tracking grids I had been regularly tracking my weight, building the habit of stepping on the scale every day. I’ve read several opinions that this is a bad idea. Because one’s weight can fluctuate significantly day-to-day, daily weighing can lead to “fear of the scale” and stress. I disagree. After stepping on the scale every day for about 10 years, it is now simply something I do. The scale shows me a number and I write it down.

One day I started reading more about physiology. How your body composition changes. How a strength building session increases muscle mass (duh) and that can make your weight increase in the short term. Suddenly, the scale going up can be a good thing.

…and then I wondered, “how much should I optimally weigh?”

http://healthcorrelator.blogspot.com/2016/10/virtual-paleo-summit-video-what-is-your.html

At the time I began this “waist/weight ratio project,” I weighed about 230 pounds and the “male, 5 feet 11 inches tall” medical guideline is . . . 175 pounds. What?! I would be ecstatic if I weighted 220. I’m not sure what I would do if I weighed even 215— I’d probably fall down in a stiff breeze.

So how exactly should one “optimize” weight? Why should I select any specific weight target? Why 175 (as medically recommended,) or 220 (college body!). What if my weight isn’t changing as I make healthy improvements– how do I track that? I began to think perhaps I should optimize health markers: Blood sugar regulation, inflammation markers, and triglycerides, and that is far more complicated than “step on the scale.”

Waist-to-weight ratio

One day, I read the following article. It’s deceptively short, but quite complicated and subtle. You should go read this very carefully before continuing.

http://healthcorrelator.blogspot.com/search/label/waist-to-weight%20ratio

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Calm

April 11, 2018

You have a million things to do an not enough time to do it all? Not a big deal: pick the things you can do, and get to work. That’s all you can do anyway, so it’s not worth adding some stress to the already difficult situation. Have a huge task to do that is going to be very difficult? No big deal. Just take the first step. Just get moving. You’ll deal with the difficulty.

~ Leo Babauta from, https://zenhabits.net/becalm/

Frenetic activity. Fits of rage. Tidal waves of guilt. Mountains of frustration. Spasms of activity. Rivers of self-doubt. Occasional moments of calm. Thank you Leo!

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No instruction manual

March 20, 2018

The fact that you can’t remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn’t mean that you’re not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It’s all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, that part of you thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you’ve given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you’ve created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can’t do them both at once, and that (apparently significant) part of you psyche will continue to hold you accountable.

~ David Allen from, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

…yes another quote from the GTD book.

In the first half of my life — say to age 40 — I made a HUGE MISTAKE: I presumed that I had a reasonable understanding of how my brain worked. I don’t mean at a physiology level; I still don’t really understand that. I mean at a day-to-day-doing-stuff, when-I-do-this-then-this-happens, this-is-how-one-lives sort of level. Like how I thought I knew how to use my brain to decide what to eat, what to work on, what to read, what to do with my time . . .

Now why on earth did i think I had any idea?

Seriously: You think of “me” as this “self-thing” located behind your eyes, but that “you” is just “running” in/on your brain. So have you ever tried different ways of running your life? How do you know reading some such book will or won’t change your life? Maybe you should experiment with everything. Try something radical: Pay attention to the results. You’re ALREADY following lots of advice — my advice, your mother’s advice, the TV ads’ advice, your doctor’s advice — but have you ever bothered to figure out what the results are? Then make a deliberate change intended to move you toward a specific goal. Observe results. Then make another change. Then another. And another.

I mean, it’s not like your entire life depends on the choices you … oh wait. *lightbulb*

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Growing old

March 11, 2018

Along with the pathologies there were the ill-advised adventures. “I’m going to be a great person by…um…exercising an hour a day, from now on, all the time, and eventually becoming really buff.” Lasted a month. Then “I’m going to be a great person by…um…learning to speak ten languages, one at a time.” Lasted until first encounter with the Finnish case system. “I’m going to become a great person by…” The problem with all of these were that none of these were things I actually wanted to do (cf Randall Munroe, “Never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.”)

~ Scott Alexander from, http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/08/growing-old/

I’ve said before that this year [2018] will be a year of “Hell yes!”, or “no” for me.

Life goes by in a blur. The older I get — I won’t dare say “wiser” anywhere in this post — the more it seems to me, that maybe, just possibly, you know maybe I should consider that the problem could just possibly MAYBE be that I’m the IDIOT WHO TOOK ON ALL THIS CRAP THAT’S STRESSING ME OUT.

:^P

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The ideal day

January 15, 2018

The ideal day is not one which is completely fixed — neither fixed-the-same every day, nor fixed-the-same week after week. The ideal day is one in which I know my goals at various levels– daily, weekly, yearly. etc.. A day where I feel no worry about making progress, because I know I’m making progress. A day where I am presented with challenges I feel that I have chosen. A day where I get to work on things which are interesting to me, and useful to others. A day where surprises are interesting and add value, (as opposed to causing me to react by feeling stress, panic and existential crises.)

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§1 – Introduction

May 10, 2017

(Part 1 of 5 in series, Travel Gear)

This series covers all the physical things I’ve discovered which make light-weight traveling easier and more fun. (My thoughts on the philosophy, etiquette, and mindset of traveling are in a separate series.) This series of posts is only meant to give you ideas; I certainly don’t expect you use the exact same solutions. For me, the challenge was not to pack as light as possible, but to pack as light as is reasonable.

I’ve read countless articles on travel, written by everyone from ultra-light hikers to seasoned business travelers. Sometimes, I stumbled over useful ideas and then figured out how to apply them. At other times I went searching for a solution to some specific problem I was having. Over the years, I’ve come up with a collection of items, and related tips and tricks, that I find extremely useful.

It’s obviously important to know what to pack, and to be able to pack well. But I believe the most important part of traveling “light” is developing two habits: unpacking and reviewing. Unpacking ensures I’m always ready, and reviewing ensures I’m always improving. The next two parts of this series will go into these two habits.

Why

But first, why travel lightweight? Why not simply grab the largest bag I have, stuff it with everything I might need, and head out the door? Why spend time and money fiddling with travel gear and solutions? I found my answers to those questions by sorting out the following: I’m most free when I have just the clothes on my back, but I will be unhappy, stressed, or in physical danger when I don’t have whatever-it-is that I happen to need. So at the most basic level, packing light is simply the balance of freedom versus preparedness.

There is also a deeper mental level to that balance. Do I feel free and relaxed, or am I worried? For me, it turns out that simply packing more things does not make me feel more prepared or relaxed. Rather, it’s the idea that I know I am prepared which enables me to be comfortable.

Clearly, the less I have to carry, the easier physically are my travels: In a packed car, my bag can fit on my lap. On a bus, it fits in the over-head, where it’s handy through the trip. On a plane, I can travel with just a carry-on-bag, saving me time and money on checked baggage. It’s also easier to not unpack — to just live out of the bag at my destination. It’s quicker to settle down in the evening, and quicker to pack out in the morning. It’s even easier to keep track of my stuff the less of it there is.

Certainly, there are lots of challenges and trade-offs with traveling light. It is not all champagne and roses. But by investing the time to solve problems and get better at the process, I’m able to have a lot more fun. So my challenge was to pack as light as I can, and still have everything I need.

My first task was then to figure out, “What exactly do I need?”

How

The more I dug into these ideas, the more I realized that the only way to know I was prepared — to truly feel prepared — was to thoroughly examine what I was packing and carrying. I wound up asking myself a litany of questions and exploring the answers and solutions: Why am I uncomfortable right now? What could I have brought that I could use right now? I never used this thing-i-packed, so why did I bring it? I’m exhausted after carrying my pack all day; Why does it weigh 30 pounds?

This process of examining all my worries, habits, and situations led me to search for solutions. My habits of unpacking and reviewing, which I mentioned at the beginning, are the result of all this questioning and refining of my travel gear.

Along the way, I learned to not pack based on fear or uncertainty; To not pack anticipating everything that might go wrong. Instead, I learned to prepare only for the scenarios that matter — safety items, spare cash, medication. I also learned to feel comfortable in knowing what I could obtain at my destination if things didn’t go according to plan. This became a sort of “anti-packing,” where I learned what not to pack.

Eventually, I wound up with “systems”, or “kits”, for just about everything. A sleep system, in one stuff sack, that has everything I need to sleep on a bare floor. A bathroom kit, in one zipper-bag, which has everything I need for bathing, shaving, etc. A medical/urgent kit (the “m’urgency” kit) that has what I frequently use, plus what I feel is sufficient for common urgencies.

The more I tuned my gear and systems, the easier packing became. These days, I don’t grab my toothbrush out of the bathroom, find my razor, and wonder what soap may be at my destination; I pick up the small, black, zipper-bag that is my bathroom kit. If I might be sleeping on the floor I grab my sleep system. I always grab the m’urgency kit. I grab the clothes I want, and a stuff sack to pack them. I add in various other things, (described in coming posts,) grab my favorite backpack, stuff the contents, and go!

An exercise

If you really want to get a feel for how much your packing improves, try doing a “test packing” as a starting point for future reference. Note the time, and go pack for a 5 day, 4 night Parkour trip. Let’s presume mild weather, sleeping indoors but on a bare hardwood floor. Let’s say you will be training 3 of the days. Pretend you have no idea what the host conditions are, but assume you have access to a bathroom, shower, wifi and whatever electricity outlets you are used to. (Dealing with not-your-usual electrical systems is a post in this series.) When you are ready to walk out your door, note the time again. Now weigh your stuff and write down the time it took to pack, the weight, and maybe some notes about how you’d feel carrying all that stuff while trying to board a bus, a plane or hop in a car.

Now, as you put everything away, imagine dropping all that on the floor at your host. What if they have to move it while you’re out for the day? Is their dog/cat/toddler going to get into your stuff? Maybe also note your worries: I don’t have a sleeping bag or pad for sleeping on a floor! How do I dry my hair? Look at all these clothes! What if this trip had been to a place with weather extremes, say, you had to train outdoors in freezing temps? What if you knew you’d be video recorded during one of your training days? What if your destination had different electrical power? What if someone threw, or sat on, your bag?! What if… What if…

Recall the two habits I mentioned: unpack and review? You have just done your first unpack and review after an imaginary trip!

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More load on the arch

January 4, 2017

Despite of all this seeming weight, a certain part of ourselves remains unmoored. We don’t lack for tasks, but we do lack meaningful ones. We haven’t made any goals since college. We don’t experience the tension that emerges in “the gap between what one is and what one should become,” because the gap simply doesn’t exist – at a certain point we stopped aiming for anything above paying the bills and checking off to-dos.

We think we want rest and relaxation – the absence of all labor and responsibility – but what we really crave is the presence of meaningful work and interests. We don’t want a complete lack of tension, but a different variety of it.

We don’t need less stress, but more of the right kind.

~ Brett Mckay from, http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/11/27/more-load-on-the-arch/

This piece is a clear manifesto that coincides with my efforts of the past couple years: “Load the arch intentionally!”

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Polyphenols, hormesis and disease: Part II

November 8, 2016

(Part 11 of 12 in series, Stephan Guyenet's "Whole Health Source")

I think that overall, the evidence suggests that polyphenol-rich foods are healthy in moderation, and eating them on a regular basis is generally a good idea. Certain other plant chemicals, such as suforaphane found in cruciferous vegetables, and allicin found in garlic, exhibit similar effects and may also act by hormesis. Some of the best-studied polyphenol-rich foods are tea (particularly green tea), blueberries, extra-virgin olive oil, red wine, citrus fruits, hibiscus tea, soy, dark chocolate, coffee, turmeric and other herbs and spices, and a number of traditional medicinal herbs. A good rule of thumb is to “eat the rainbow”, choosing foods with a variety of colors.

~ Stephan Guyenet from, http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/02/polyphenols-hormesis-and-disease-part.html

This is part 2 of the best series on polyphenols I have ever found. I bet they don’t work the way you think they work… and they’re NOT antioxidants, except in your digestive tract, where they actually help prevent YOUR OWN GUT from creating trans fats …and they’re actually a toxic stressor… oh, just click already :P

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Intermittent fasting: A beginner’s guide

November 7, 2016

Beyond vanity, the reported health effects of an intelligently designed Intermittent Fasting program read like a laundry list of live longer, live better benefits including: reduced blood lipids, blood pressure, markers of inflammation, oxidative stress, and cancer. Increased cell turnover and repair, fat burning, growth hormone release, and metabolic rate. And improved appetite control, blood sugar control, cardiovascular function, and neuronal plasticity.

~ John Berardi from, http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/01/25/intermittent-fasting/

This is a terrific overview. It’s writen by a physician and is intended to get you thinking about how you eat; As opposed to trying to talk you into trying it.

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10,000 repetitions

September 25, 2015

(Part 2 of 36 in series, 10,000 Reps Project)

Today (Friday, Sept 25) was day number 66, and without realizing it, I did pushup number 999.

Way back in June, I read about someone who was going to “celebrate” their 30th birthday with a year-long challenge: They were going to try to complete 30,000 pushups in one year.

That would be 82.19 pushups per day, every day. (81.97 if it’s a leap year.) That’s crazy. That’s crazy like repetitive-stress-injury crazy. Especially since their point was that they were out of shape and wanted to get into shape.

Celebrate: n., to torture oneself?

I chuckled, and sipped my coffee. But the wheels were turning. With my 44th birthday approaching, I briefly considered 44,000 as a goal. Briefly. Very briefly. But then I was thinking: …well, I can do 10 pushups, easy. So doing just 30 per day wouldn’t be too crazy, and that should get me to about 10,000 in a year. (Calculator’ing happens.) Actually, about 27 pushups per day would get me to a nice round 10k in a year.

And over the next few weeks the idea grew.

It seemed clear that completing 10,000 pushups would be eminently possible without injury. Maybe I should try doing 10,000 repetitions of something I currently suck at? That would force me to get from “I can do zero of these,” to a competent 30-or-so per day. This started to sound more interesting and useful. It would be like a race, but a long-term race with me pitted against the calendar.

(It also fits very well with my Oath.)

Eventually I settled on five exercises which would be a serious challenge, AND would yield major improvements:

1. pushups
2. squats
3. pullups
4. bar-to-bar precisions
5. handstands (10k seconds in a handstand)

I’m not going to describe the exercises in detail. I’m not going to brag about how great I’ve gotten at them. (Which is, “not very.” But I’m still working on them.)

I decided up front that I would do whatever it took to reach the goal. To me, that means, doing enough to get stronger, but not hurting myself. It means continuously thinking about the form of the exercise and striving to do them well. But I do NOT fixate on perfection. Build it. Refine it. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

What I really want to share is HOW MUCH FUN THIS IS!

Every time I do one of the exercises I am acutely aware of how much I’ve improved. Early on, I had little variations to everything to make it possible; I’d do 3 crappy, negative versions of a pull-up (climb up, and fight the fall for as long as possible) and happily mark “3” completed in my spreadsheet. Now I do sets of three reasonably good pull-ups and I think, “boo-YEAH! Pull-ups! Who’s ‘da man?!” I can’t wait to see what it’s like to crank out a clean set of 10 in a row.

Did you say spreadsheet?

Yes I did. Of course I went to the trouble of making a full-geek spreadsheet. It has a row for all 365 days. I enter the reps completed and it has columns for the cumulative number completed, the number remaining to reach the goal, and it does the math to tell me the rate-per-day that I’d have to continue at to reach the goal. (So if I do 10 pull-ups and it says the required rate is 27 per day, I know I’m digging a hole. If I do 40 pushups and it says the rate is 30, I know I just banked 10 for a day off.)

Well, here’s what day 66 looks like. I entered 42 under pushups and 999 popped out. What a neat surprise! :D

10k-reps-spreadsheet

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Restricting your eating times

July 4, 2015

The reasons for these health benefits relate to the fact that the human body appears to be designed to thrive in a cycle of “feast and famine.” By imitating the ancestral conditions of cyclical nourishment, your body enters into a state of optimal functioning. Three major mechanisms by which fasting benefits your health include:

Increased insulin sensitivity and mitochondrial energy efficiency. […] Reduced oxidative stress. […] Increased capacity to resist stress, disease and aging.

~ Jeff Roberts from, http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/02/05/why-restricting-your-eating-time-period-to-8-hours-will-transform-your-health-fitness/

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Boosting your adaptive reserves

May 2, 2015

Heart rate variability turns out to be a generalized, deep measure of health. That’s because higher HRV is a strong indicator of resilience to stress, while low HRV is a sign of reduced capacity to tolerate stress. And at the deepest level, health is resilience, and diseases in various ways compromise resilience.

~ Todd Becker from, http://gettingstronger.org/2014/07/track-your-hrv-to-boost-adaptive-reserves/

This is a REALLY good article on understanding heart rate variability. Turns out, the MORE your heart rate varies — in terms of the variation of the timing from one beat to the next — the more that indicates good cardiovascular health. I found that idea to be counter-intuitive. I would have guessed, wrongly, that the more regular the heart beats were, the better.

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Michael R. Eades blog

February 1, 2015

(Part 1 of 25 in series, M. Eades' Blog)

What, who?

I recently (2015) discovered Dr. Eades blog. (I had not heard of his books.) His blog contains a wealth of medical science explained in layman’s terms. The first few articles I read convinced me to start at the beginning of his “blog archive” and try to read HIS ENTIRE BLOG. I quickly learned: He has a lot of personal and current events posts which I’m not interested in, and there’s way way too much get through in short order.

(more…)

What does “honest” mean in Kinokawa Aikido

May 9, 2014

When we opened the new dojo in Allentown, I sat down to try to write a short description of what distinguishes Kinokawa Aikido. I wanted to avoid pretentiously explaining “what makes it better,” because starting down that path will instantly close off the minds of certain readers. Instead, I wanted to lay out the hallmarks of Kinokawa so that readers could get a sense of the style at a glance.

There is a bit more at Aikido on the dojo’s web site. But here is the part about honesty:

A second hallmark of Kinokawa Aikido is that is honest — in the sense of being interested in honestly exploring Aikido as a high intensity [physical and mental], combat effective, applicable to your daily life, sort of practice. In fairness, practitioners of hard type martial arts will generally not consider any sort of Aikido as combat effective or workable in a real world scenario. (Obviously, we disagree with such a prejudged assessment.) But setting aside the judgement (does Aikido work, or not, in real application?), it is the goal of honestly exploring those concepts, within the framework of Aikido, which is a critical feature of Kinokawa.

…and here are some similar thoughts from Tom Collings, from Responding to Aggression – Part 2:

… The rule of thumb in military and police training, established through exhaustive battlefield and police critical incident research is: “if it takes long to learn, it probably won’t work under stress.” Yet, as black belt martial artists we take great pride in the techniques that took us many years to master, and it would be unthinkable at the dojo to teach only what is easily learned. Who would that impress? The other rule is: “practice what you will need to perform.” That means our training must very closely match what we will confront.

Do those of us in the aiki arts really believe that assaults commonly occur by someone running up reaching for our wrist, or striking at us from above their head as if holding a sword? I guess we do because we devote most of our valuable training time to these scenarios. If it is obvious that modern day assaults are very different from these classical style attacks why do we not modify our curriculum more in line with what we will actually confront?

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Are you tough?

March 10, 2014

Everything is harder, or rather, I should say everything is more complex. The result is that I learn how to tolerate stress, both mental and physical, and how to adapt to make something work despite the fact that the environment is not cooperating. I deal with it or fail. When I’m out there, it doesn’t matter that I can deadlift 3x my bodyweight on a bar, because that doesn’t change the fact that a rock is completely off-balance and seems to be actively trying to roll onto my toes. And that doesn’t change the fact that I’m picking it up and carrying it up the mountain anyway.

That is the definition of tough.

~ Brett McKay from, http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/10/03/you-may-be-strong-but-are-you-tough/

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