Since I can remember, I’ve been interested in basketball and national politics. In the past couple of years, though, my interest in national politics has waned as it has increasingly become more WWE than policy. My interest in sports have widened to include football, too.
Sports have become an almost unbelievable celebration of human ability. The athletes are stronger, more agile, and capable of achieving things that just don’t seem possible. And most of them do it as part of a larger team effort.
I’m particularly enamored with basketball and football – the NBA, WNBA, and the NFL. (If Oregon was playing in the CFB championship, I might add college football, as well.) Yes, I absolutely deplore the injuries in and head injuries in the NFL, and I’m not sure those can be fixed. Still, the athleticism is just too good to turn away.
But *what* is it about sports that interests me so much now? I’ve been asking myself this question for weeks, and I think I know now.
Action on the various sports fields is the closest thing we have to a meritocracy – the most level playing fields. If you’re on the field, you’re absolutely one of the best in the world. This is especially true when contrasted against other fields.
If you put an unqualified white man in a position of power in any other field than sports, there are hundreds of years of bias and bigotry there to prop up every dumb thing he does. The support systems there to make sure everything work out OK for that white man are almost inconceivably strong. In the United States, every single dumb white guy is held up by 400 years of unearned gravitas and 334 million people going about their days to make him look good. It’s the ultimate Ponzi scheme.
If you put that same unqualified white man on the basketball court or the football field, we would know within 30 seconds what was happening. He would parade around for 10 seconds to wild applause before the whistle blew, and then it would go comically and even horrifically wrong immediately after that.
His lack of qualifications would be completely exposed, he would suffer utter humiliation, and it’s likely he’d be maimed for life if not altogether killed by his true superiors on the field. He’d go from celebrated to canceled forever – all within 30 seconds.
Today, I’ll celebrate someone who knew this best – Martin Luther King, Jr. He knew that black men and women just needed an equal chance at greatness. Sports have been an area where that has been shown true because there’s absolutely no room for unqualified white men any longer.
On this same day, we’ll place an unqualified white man in the ultimate position of power. His only qualification is that he has fooled so many of my fellow Americans. It’s absolutely certain he will fail spectacularly, but it’s also completely certain a giant swath of exceedingly ignorant and racist people will never be able to admit that.
If only the arena he is operating in would have such swift and total defeat in store for him as it would on the field of sport.
Instead of resolutions each year, I set out on a 100 Day Challenge that starts 100 days before my birthday, April 18. I’ll turn 54 that day, and I always want it to be a day I’m proud of instead of sad about.
For my health goals, I’ve set myself up well for the past year, and I’m starting 6 pounds lighter than I did for this challenge last year. But the bigger achievement last year is that I finally figured out how to do resistance training while still maintaining and even losing weight. I was able to put on more lean mass and lose fat at the same time.
For this, my goal is less weight-based this time than in the past. Instead, I’m going for a sub-15% fat mass level. I did a DEXA scan in late August, and it showed I weighed 188 with an 18% body fat mass. I’d estimate I’m a little over that after some holiday gluttony. Let’s call it 19-20%.
So I need to lose approximately 8-10 pounds of fat in 100 days while still maintaining my lean body mass. I saw glimpses of being able to do this in October, when I was able to lose a little over a pound before I started on vacations on holiday eating.
A Breakthrough – More Resistance Without More Fat
Here’s how it went down in the correlation of resistance minutes I did (blue line) compared to the pounds of fat (orange line) I had. In general, as soon as picked up a dumbbell and did some pushups, I’d start gaining fat back. The fat would lag the resistance by about a month.
In 2022, I put on 8 pounds of fat without doing much more resistance. In 2023, it was down to 4 pounds with more resistance. In 2024, I actually maintained the same amount of fat while doing a lot more resistance training.
The key was very simple. I started tracking my macros and calories every day, and I made sure to consume an average of 180-190 grams of protein per day.
The main difficulty I’ll need to overcome is that I was consuming over 3000 calories per day to achieve that level. I’m figuring I’ll need to consume the same 180 grams of protein while only taking in 2800 calories per day.
In October, I was only at 5-8% carbs per day, so I won’t be able to go lower than that. The sacrifice will be on the fat side, and that’s usually not what one wants to do on keto. For me, besides the mental health benefits, the main thing that makes keto easy has been that I’m just not that hungry.
Keto Macro Goals
My macros will have to run at:
Protein: 700 – 750 calories per day. (25-27%.)
Carbs: 150 – 200 calories per day. (5-7%.)
Fat: 1900 calories per day. (66-70%.)
It might be tricky to maintain that. If I get hungry, I’ll have to extend the amount of time I give myself to achieve the 8-10 pound fat loss from 100 days to perhaps 200 days.
What I’ll be trying is to have a little less butter each day. That may sound easy, but I honestly just love it. I’ve averaged somewhere around 1.5 – 1.75 ounces per day. I’ll cut that down to under 1 per day and see how it goes. Cutting down on cashews should help, too. Instead of 1 ounce, I’ll go down to less than 0.5 ounces. Overall, that’s over 200 calories less per day, and it should do the trick if I can maintain it.
Alcohol
The other 100ish calories will come from consuming less alcohol. We’re on the heels of a very strong statement by the surgeon general that any amount of alcohol increases our chances of various cancers. I do enjoy alcohol, but I’m finding it much less appealing overall, and definitely don’t want to increase my chances of cancer.
In 2010, at the age of 70, my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I wouldn’t consider her a heavy drinker, but she would have 2-3 drinks every Friday and Saturday. My dad made her 1-2 very large martinis or Manhattans those nights. Was it the cause of her cancer? That’s completely unclear. Did it contribute to her cancer? I think we could say “yes” to that.
She died just 4 months later.
2025 is the year I cut down from an average of 1 drink per day to less than half a drink per day. I started tracking it in 2017, when I was drinking at least 2 per day. When I look at pictures of those “2” drinks, it was likely closer to 3 or 4, as the wine glasses were very big and they were filled with far more than 5 ounces.
Last year was definitely my best year at 0.87 drinks per day (with a much more honest accounting of what a drink consists of). Still, let’s be even more honest and call it 1 per day like I said above. I consume mostly tequila and a little beer now. Beer is easy to count. My shots of tequila, however, are probably a skosh more than the recommended 1.5 ounces.
As usual, that was a pretty long accounting of how I’ll go about my food in particular in this new year.
Exercise in 2025
My exercise will remain about the same. I’ll try to maintain an average of over 20 minutes per day of resistance exercise. That breaks down to doing resistance every other day for me. I do a push day of around 50-60 minutes, a pull day of 50-60 minutes, a core day of 40-50 minutes, and a leg day of just around 15-20 minutes.
I could use a better leg day routine, but I really struggle with hamstring cramping. I think some Bulgarian split squats, some weighted lunges, and maybe even some RDLs will be helpful. (My form needs a lot of work on the RDLs!)
For the past year, I’ve been doing 3 sets of each exercise, and almost always 10 reps per set. This year, I’ll do something like 10-7-4 and use heavier weights to see if I can break past a plateau in muscle growth. Hitting my protein goals will obviously be key to this as well.
I’ll keep doing my walking, treadmill walking, and once a week or so I’ll do treadmill running. My goal before had been to run a 6-minute mile. Now, I’d be happy to do a 7-minute mile. That will require more sprint work, and that requires me to trust the treadmills not to go from 10 mph to 0 mph within one second, which happens more than it should. It’s a bit scary. I haven’t tried it on the new treadmills at the gym yet.
Conclusion
I’ve been excited to start this new 100 Day Challenge since mid-November, so I’m glad the day is finally here. 2025 will present a ton of external challenges, so I’m hoping my health goals can stay on track and help offset those.
In the past couple of weeks and months, right around the time I hit 53, I’ve realized I need to make a couple of changes in my growth mindset.
In case you haven’t heard of it, a growth mindset is the firm belief that learning, effort, and persistence will create improvements in all areas of life.
“In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.”
Carol Dweck
I still want to make progress. I still have goals. When and how I achieve those, however, could probably use a gentler timeline.
I’ve always thought of what I want to achieve in terms of a calendar year. For my physical goals, I’ve adopted the habit of being very strict with my diet for the first 100 days of the year. And I did that with success again this year.
After that first 100 days of losing weight (and most likely some muscle), I start to bulk up by lifting heavier weights and eating more. I do that until mid-autumn. And at the end of the year, I give myself a break to enjoy the holidays.
Being honest, though, that “break” I take is less a choice and more a necessity to recover from injuries and exhaustion. By the end of 2023, I had tennis elbow, a mysterious bicep strain, and near constant inflammation throughout my elbow joint.
These maladies improved a bit throughout my winter break from resistance training, but I wouldn’t call myself 100% healed, and I actually had more healing after I slowly started to do lighter resistance training.
About a month ago, I resumed heavier resistance training. My appetite skyrocketed, and I started consuming up to 3500 calories per day while never quite feeling satiated.
Then it hit me, what if I just progressed more slowly and tried to hit some goals for my gains by next summer. Or even 2 summer from now.
Immediately, I felt a weight had lifted from me, and not just that extra 10 pounds of iron I’d try to do to exhaustion during my sets. It *felt* right to go about it more slowly.
If I don’t get exhausted, I can maintain my efforts throughout the year. If I don’t get injured, I can just slowly get stronger and more fit. If I’m not hungry all the time, it’s just a nicer experience throughout each day.
And, of course, I need to track it and want to see how the charts “respond” to this change. So here’s the “blip”, right at the very end, in my usual upswing in weight.
I feel like I caught myself right before it was too late.
In 2022, (after recovering from a self-inflicted sickness/allergy), I went from 183 all the way back up to 200.
In 2023, I went from 187 to 197.
So far, in 2024, I went from 186 only to 187, and it’s falling again. I’m expecting to get below 197 even with some gains in lean mass.
When I take a step back, it does feel strange that I won’t be trying to maximize all the physical gains before I’m 54 or 55. That does officially sound old.
But I’m seeing a ton of people who have already made it to 55 and beyond in great shape. I’ll strive consistently and slowly instead of going all out with the greatest velocity.
Really, it’s all about how I feel, and I feel great overall. I’d just like to continue feeling great, avoid injuries and illness, and maintain and improve upon what I’ve already accomplished. That’s how I’ve redefined my own growth mindset.
Winter is a great time for me to pursue my health goals. I’m almost always in control of it since we rarely travel and I mostly leave the house for exercise or groceries.
That hasn’t been the case this year, as we’ve already had two trips where it was difficult to do a keto diet and also impossible to exercise the way I do normally. So out of what should be about a month of keto, I’m missing 6 days.
Still, it’s been a month, so it’s good to review. Just like last year, my first proper 100-day keto diet, the weight has come off quickly. It seems it’s about 3 pounds of water weight, and then another 3-4 pounds of fat and lean tissue. My 7-day weight average was at a high of 197.6, and that average is now at just over 190.
The travel interruptions have made it difficult to get a good rhythm for more than 2 weeks so far, and that means I’ve been trying to gain ketosis 3 different times already. Since that’s the hardest part for me – queue the keto “flu” – it’s not been nearly as easy as last year.
Just this week, though, I’ve started to experience some of the “lightness of being” and “brightness of outlook” that I had for a couple months last year, and I’m looking forward to more of that.
Calories In / Calories Out
I estimated I wanted to arrive right around 2500 calories consumed per day for this beginning part of the keto journey. For the past 8 days, I’m a bit above that at 2650.
My calories out have been at 3100 through yesterday. That should equate to about a pound per week of weight loss, which is in keeping with what I did last year.
Just like I’ve started to see the lightness and brightness in just the past few days, I’ve also seen my appetite lessened. For me, not feeling hungry is the absolute key to trimming down
I’m only looking to lose about 5 more pounds, and I think that will happen within the next month, putting me about one month ahead of the 100-day challenge.
Dry-ish January
In all the 6+ years of recording my alcohol consumption on a daily basis, I’d never once had a 7 day stretch with zero alcohol. I’d honestly never given that a thought, but the recent coverage of alcohol having only negative impacts on health made me think I should give it a try.
This January, I’ve hit zero on the 7-day scale twice. I’m glad it didn’t feel all that difficult, and I think I’ll keep my consumption a lot lower than in the past. I do enjoy having 2 or maybe 3 drinks on weekend nights, but I find I’m paying a much higher price for those in terms of mental acuity and well being. As I’m coming up on 53, it doesn’t feel like I can spare days to hangovers anymore.
Speaking of mental acuity, it does seem like keto has had a somewhat negative impact on my sharpness so far. I’ll write about the effect of keto on my chess rating next.
I was going to call this post “My 2024 Physical Goals”, but it just doesn’t feel right to me to call them goals. I’m just going to do what I know I need to do, and I’ll achieve what I want to achieve. There’s no striving necessary.
Anyway, here they are through April 18, 2024, my 53rd birthday.
I think I like my weight best at right around 190. My 28-day average weight is 196 right now, and I don’t feel just the right way.
I’ll track my calories and need to be eating an average of 200 less calories less than I have recently. The thing that’s going to make this 200 calorie deficit a little harder to get to is that I haven’t tracked them recently and don’t really know my starting point. I’m going to assume it’s been a bit over 2700 on average, so I’ll settle in at 2500 for a bit and see how it goes.
I’d like to drink a lot less than I have recently. When I was doing keto last year, my cravings for alcohol fell a lot, and I’ll expect the same thing this year. Hopefully, starting tomorrow, I’ll do a solid week with 0 alcohol and see how it goes. If I slip up during my practice week, no big deal. Anything less than 1 per day on average will be a win compared to this last week.
Besides my weight, I’ll focus on 3 things for the first 100 days:
Developing a stretching and movement routine.
Being able to run a 6:30 mile on a treadmill. (By the end of the year, I want to do a 6:00 minute mile, but it seems better to give this a little more time than 100 days.)
Taking a small break from heavy resistance training for recovery. I’ll up the core work as a replacement.
My legs are beginning the year in good shape. I also have a strong core, chest, and back. My arms, though, are a disaster. I need to see a doctor about my left arm, which shakes uncontrollably when trying to drink coffee especially.
My right arm needs a lot of help. I started last year with shoulder issues. I ended it with my shoulder being slightly better, but I developed tennis elbow, generalized inflammation, and a twinge in my bicep. I’ll schedule several massages for this, and I need to try acupuncture for the tendonitis based on a friend’s recommendation.
That seems like all the major stuff. I think I’ll accomplish my weight goal relatively quickly if I stick to keto. The other stuff will need some time and practice.
2023 turned into a great year for me, and I’m not quite finished celebrating. We have our annual New Year’s Day party for close friends and neighbors, so there will be one last hurrah before I start practicing for 2024.
With a birthday on the 108th day of the year, I “practice” what I want my habits to be for the first 8 days, and then I’ll be off and running for 100 days of “game time” effort until my birthday. I don’t need any resolutions with this. Just a few things I’ll do a little bit better each year.
Near the end of last year, when I was in-between celebratory holidays, I had what was a very strange thought for me for the first time in my life.
I felt in complete control of my body and had the certainty I could accomplish what I wanted to without anything that would be considered “effort” or willpower or motivation. Instead of needing to get “fired up”, I’ll just start doing it again, and I’ll get the results I want by my birthday.
Yes, there will be times when I’ll have to remind myself not to do a few things. I’ll make some mistakes, too. But overall, I’ll just cruise right to where I want to be.
For someone who has had lifelong depression and has “struggled” with weight loss and maintenance for the better part of always, that’s an amazing thought and feeling.
I credit the keto diet I used strictly to begin last year for this winning mindset. Throughout the rest of the year, I experimented with some different variations of it – with more protein specifically – and also had good results throughout the year.
Toward the end of the year, I definitely “let go” a bit and enjoyed some different foods I hadn’t had for the rest of the year. But during these last 5 weeks of the year, I didn’t feel like I was giving in to cravings, I didn’t get any extra delight out of them, and I don’t feel like I’ll miss them. I did it mostly for social reasons, and I had a nice time with family and friends without worrying about what I was doing.
That’s over now. I’ll still enjoy myself, but I’ll do it without the carbs and with quite a bit less alcohol. Close to none actually.
We’re now a few weeks into 2022, and I have to say, it could have started better without the omicron variant of COVID. At least it’s not 2021 or 2020 anymore.
For the most part, I think this will be a great year, but there’s a long way to go for that happen.
This year, I’m already very close to the physical health goals I set out to achieve, and that’s the main thing I’m happy about right now. It’s January, though, and I’m never all that happy in January…or February or March either.
That brings me to what I want to share more about in 2022: depression and mental health. I’ve now been managing chronic clinical depression for almost 35 years. I’ve very rarely shared anything about it with anyone.
The reason I’ve decided to do so now is that I finally feel as though I’ve figured it out. That doesn’t mean I don’t have it, I won’t get it, or that I’m not suffering from the ravages of it all time. It’s just that I now have the information I lacked before to know why it happens to me, and maybe this information will be useful to others, as well
To get things started, I’ll say this. There’s absolutely no outside reason for me to suffer from depression. I had a good childhood. My parents were good to me. I had everything laid out in front of me in perfect order. I’m a white male American, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not offensive to talk to, be around, or look at from what I can tell.
I also have great internal drive and strong motivation to learn new things. By the time I was 15, I was a nationally ranked chess player while playing 3 sports.
I can’t say I was exactly *happy* at that age. I’m not sure anybody is at that age, but I was doing ok in the grand scheme
But when I was 16, depression just full on attacked me right out of the blue. I was mostly able to cope with it, but my trajectory in life was altered terribly. By the time I was 18, I really fell apart.
Like I mentioned, there was no good reason for it. Nothing “happened” to me.
Only in the past couple of years have I learned the cause of my depression is almost certainly the overproduction of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. I figured out around 15 years ago that acetylcholine has other negative affects on me, all of which I’ll talk about in future posts. But I missed the bombshell research papers in 2012 that linked acetylcholine and depression until late in 2019.
Suddenly, it all made sense. I’d figured it out. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s gone or subsided in anyway. There’s no surgery to reduce acetylcholine, and the state of medicine for it is severely lacking.
So I’ll talk about understanding it and also living with it. And I’ll talk about how it makes me a bit different on the inside. I’ve looked at it from just about every angle, and I’ve come to know that I’m definitely not the only one who suffers from this particular variation of depression. So maybe I can help others with it, and maybe I can help some caregivers understand better how it’s affecting their loved ones.
That’s it for now, but I promise I’ll be back with more. More about why I faint, why I sweat so much, why I have a great memory, why I exercise every day, why my dreams are so vivid, and why my left hand is starting to shake so much I can’t drink my coffee with it.
So, welcome 2022. Get your act together! We’re going to be busy!
It’s January 2, 2020. Have you broken your New Year’s resolutions yet?
I’d bet about half the people who make resolutions don’t even make it to Day 3. And that’s absolutely fine as long as they don’t give up or feel badly about themselves at this point.
For me, I start thinking about things I want to change or do better in December. I give a couple of them a try throughout the month. For Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, I try to keep them in mind just a bit, which helps to curb the excesses that normally happen at this time of year.
January for me is all about “practicing” resolutions in the form of habit-making behavior. For simple ones that don’t require much cognitive load, I’ll try to do them every day but don’t punish myself if I miss every now and again. That worked well for the habit of making my bed every morning, and now it’s hard to *not* make my bed.
For the more complicated ones that require my body to cooperate, I’m much more lax about the process. I’ll do them for a couple of days and then probably miss a couple. Then I’ll up it to a few more consecutive days. About 3 weeks into this process, I’m usually ready to go for it every day. By the beginning of February, I’m in full-swing.
My philosophy on making lasting changes is to keep the changes as small as possible on a day-to-day basis.
This is especially helpful during and after the holiday season. Most of us eat and drink too much in December. It seems our bodies quickly adapt to too much of anything. Trying to completely reverse course to nearly nothing to eat and drink on exactly January 1 is next to impossible because our bodies go into panic mode almost immediately. If you haven’t noticed, your body will almost always win over whatever will power you thought you’d saved up by not using it during December.
But if we just ease back to normal eating and drinking and then try to do a little less over the course of 30 days, our bodies don’t panic. We don’t have to do battle with our evolutionary instincts. Our bodies will agree to work with us instead.
Once we’re rolling at the end of January and into February, it’s simple to keep going at that point. And I promise you, what you can accomplish over the course of 11 months is far more powerful than what you can do just in January.
If you find this helpful or have any questions about it, feel free to leave a comment.
It’s Day 7 of my #500DaysTo50 project, and right on time, Vishy Anand, one of my chess heroes, turns 50 years old today.
I’m sure I first heard of Anand when he was 14 and I was 13. Back then, I thought I was on the path of becoming a grandmaster player, and I figured I had plenty of time to catch up to him on my way to greatness. 36 years later, it’s obvious I’ll never be as good as he was at 13 years old!
That’s one of the strange things about aging. Prior hopes and dreams simply must die – or at least be scaled back to reality. I still enjoy chess immensely, and I can be among the top 1-2% of all rated players in the world. But statistically, someone like Anand would beat me 100% of the time for up to 1,000 games in a row. That’s a big difference!
I first realized I didn’t have that special thing that makes for greatness when I had to chance to play 3 tandem games with Peter Svidler in 1989 as part of the run-up to the Goodwill Games. I was 17, and he was 12.
We easily won the first two games. In the third game, I couldn’t see the right way to conduct an attack, and we drew that one. Young Svidler was extremely upset. In perfect English, he went through a series of moves that I hadn’t even considered. He just saw the game in a different way. He had a genius for that it that I just didn’t have.
I do remember being mostly OK with that, even though it was clear at that moment becoming a grandmaster was just never going to happen.
Getting back to the present, Anand at 50 does give “old guys” like me great hope for our own future. Chess is a sport – yes, a sport! – for the young. He is one of only two World Top 20 players over 40 years old, and it’s just now becoming apparent he probably won’t be competing for the World Championship again.
If he can remain *that good* at 50, we can all still hope to achieve our own amazing progress at more advanced ages.
Here we are on Day 3 of #500DaysTo50. I’ve been trying at this “career thing” for over 25 years now. If I’m asked the “what do you do” question now, I’m answering that “I’m an entrepreneurial web developer and online marketer”.
That’s largely in keeping with how I’ve made my career. I formed my first company in 1996, my first successful company in 1999, and I’ve pieced together a bunch of other things since then based on my interests.
One thing that has been an absolute constant for me is learning new things. And I realize a lot of that learning has been based on fixing gaps that were exposed in embarrassing ways.
While running an online marketing agency, I didn’t have any real coding skills. One of our offerings was helping companies make sure their new websites were going to work well for SEO and SEM efforts. While we were great at that, we weren’t qualified to look through the actual PHP code our subcontracting agencies built for the websites. When our client’s site was due to go live, it turned out almost zero work had been done on the site, and we were able to launch exactly one page of the site.
I swore I’d never let that happen again, and I learned PHP and the LAMP stack to be able to make sure I could be better prepared. I now develop WordPress sites for clients as a result. They do very well with the search engines due to my previous experience.
Along the same line, in a business development meeting, I once said, “You can just give us access to your database, and we can build the sites automatically for you.” The CEO of the other company rightly replied, “Well, we’ll never give you access to our database, but we have an API.”
I almost shut down my company at that point, but I chose instead to learn more about MYSQL and other databases and how APIs operate.
But maybe I should have simply hired people who knew a lot more than I did to cover those weaknesses I had. I’ve spent about 5 years re-tooling instead, as I’ve always been disappointed that I couldn’t code. That’s meant a lot of financial sacrifices. Nobody I know would consider them smart career moves.
But that’s how I work, and I can’t see myself stopping. It’s a Sunday morning, and I’m going through a course on ReactJS for a couple of big projects I have thrown myself into. I have others helping along the way, and I’m able to make a few small contributions as I get up to speed.
It’s entirely possible my fear of public embarrassment has shaped my career in completely unreasonable ways. My hope is that the payoff in the end will be huge to make up for the lost time. We’ll see…
