Mizblog

It’s been 8 weeks now, and I’ve dropped a grand total of 18 lbs.

It wasn’t easy, but then again it wasn’t that hard. I had a few key realizations that made everything click.

1. First, I was worried that for whatever reason, my wife and daughter might never come back from Nepal. (They did come back, but a month later than planned.) I feared some unimaginable disaster. So I started taking the possibility seriously, instead of having it this formless looming dread that was keeping me from sleeping and driving me to suppress it by eating too much.

   What would I really do if my family never came back?

   Hmm. I guess I’d have to start another family.

   How would I do that?

   Hmm. I guess I’d have to lose weight and get fit, so I could feel confident enough about myself to attract another mate.

   Well, why wouldn’t you lose weight and exercise right now?

   Hmm. Good idea!

2. Second, I realized that my body was in the shape it was because it had adapted over several years to the environment I had subjected it to. Whatever environment you’re in, your body will adapt to it or it will break. All I had to do in order to get in shape was to change my body’s environment. I started doing very light exercises every morning, and keeping track of the various (easy) exercises in a spreadsheet.

   I used the Hacker’s Diet exercise plan to get started. Actually, I had done this diet and exercise plan (sort of) ten years ago, and it worked while I did it. It made me realize the importance of knowing what you’re eating.

3. Third, it’s easy to keep track of what you eat when you only eat packaged foods. They print the calories right there on the package.
4. Fourth, you don’t have to exercise so hard that you’re sore the next day, especially if you’re not used to exercising at all. Remember the adaptation thing I mentioned earlier? Well, it turns out that there’s a big difference between not exercising at all, and exercising just a little bit every day. Also, after your body adapts to a light exercise plan, it’s pretty easy to do a couple more of one or two of the exercises. Increasing or maintaining the effort every day adds up over weeks, until they’re amazing compared to where you started. And it isn’t very hard on any particular day.
5. Fifth, I realized that even if I woke up in a bad mood or feeling like I didn’t have any energy, I could still do the same exercises I had done the day before. In my spreadsheet I kept track of my mood and energy that I felt when I woke up for the day. Except on the very worst days, there’s no correlation between these mood/energy self assessments and the amount of exercise I was able to do. Waking up feeling weak or depressed is no longer a valid excuse!
6. Sixth, I found it’s much easier to control how much I eat when I consume smaller meals (300-500 calories, vs. my usual 600-1200 calories) if I know what and when I’m going to eat next. Spacing small meals out every 3 hours keeps me from getting too full or too hungry.
7. Seventh, I realized that exercising in the evening was not going to work consistently for me. It was too dependent on my day, and too easy to skip out on. First thing in the morning exercise really is key.
8. Eighth, I started taking allergy meds every single night. They helped me sleep, helped me breathe, and elevated my mood significantly.

So all this change got me moving. I started playing pickup roller hockey, and enrolled in Krav Maga, and except for injuries (and perhaps illness, though I haven’t faced one in 8 weeks) I exercise every single morning before work.

And I’m feeling really good!

I just finished reading Albert Camus – The Stranger, and I can’t help but identify with the main character. The biggest difference between him and me is that he doesn’t seem to think of much past tomorrow, except that all week he looks forward to being with his girlfriend on Sundays. I put a whole lot more effort trying to peer into the future: planning and scheming, working toward goals. Mersault was a simpleton. An idiot.

And yet if you really dig down and think about things from a relativist viewpoint, who’s to say he’s wrong when he asserts that no life is worth living? We all die and then people forget us. What’s the point? For me it all just comes back to survival. We’re here because that’s what we do, because we’re alive. If it wasn’t what our ancestors did, we wouldn’t be here to worry about it.

I did receive one surprise insight from this book – the justice system is geared to weed out socially maladapted limbic systems. People are so interested in the emotional displays of accused criminals because the limbic system is what we’ve evolved to allow us to function in a community setting. A messed up limbic system makes one unable to function as a cog in the machine, and has to be discarded or repaired or maybe just beat back into shape.

I just had the most stressful day I can remember since leaving the navy.

Yesterday we put in an offer on a house in Thousand Oaks. Nice neighborhood, clean house in good repair with an awesome floor plan. We underbid by $29k but I bet we could have gone lower. Anyway, we’ve got a clause in the offer stating that if the house appraises for under the offer price, we’ll buy it for the appraisal value. Nice, huh?

Anyway, Sangeeta’s been really nervous about the whole house buying process, and I hate to admit that it’s starting to affect me. I spent the day second guessing myself and wondering if I did right.

So I spent the morning scrambling to gather and send paperwork for loans and such. I was supposed to get it all in by 10:30am. I got the first wave in by then. Supplements followed until noon.

Then I found out that my domain name had expired. mizerai.com was off the Internet. Crap, something else to rush and fix.

Everett went on vacation today, leaving an experiment with a buggy program. Phil asked if someone could take a look and see about fixing it. Uh, yeah, I guess he meant me. That makes three concurrent projects, plus the real estate situation.

On the way to the lab I narrowly avoided two accidents. First, an old lady crashed her car into another car, then careened through a fire hydrant and into a wall/tree. Water was shooting higher than the buildings on the street. I was in the parking lot behind the wall.

Then at UCLA I pushed a pedestrian with my car. He was cutting in front of me so he wouldn’t have to walk all the way to the intersection/crosswalk to cross the street. Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t expecting that and didn’t see him until I had threatened to run him over. He warded off my bumper with his hands, and gave my mouthed apology a couple of over the shoulder dirty looks.

By this point, the adrenaline had gone sour in my blood, and I was shaky. I got to the lab and found out I’d be lunching by myself, and then heading over to a meeting by myself. Who would think that a business meeting with two attractive women would be stressful? Well, now I know. At least the meeting went well.

On the way to the meeting, Jerry called me from Krav Maga Worldwide about my introductory lesson scheduled for tonight. Well, my wrist is still giving me shocks of pain occasionally (hockey injury from last week), but Jerry said we could just tape it up if it was a problem. Oh, and I should wear something I wouldn’t mind getting sweaty. Great. My gym clothes were still at home. I left after the meeting.

Once home, it all crashed down on me. I canceled the lesson and just laid down for an hour. I’m now struggling to stay up until 9pm. I made it through okay but now I feel like I’ve been beaten down. Hope it’s not as hot tonight, so we can all get some good sleep!

1. Avoiding pain above all else is a dead end road that ends in failure (and, of course, pain).
2. Food won’t fix the bad feelings.
3. Change is hard, and it takes time, but it’s the only way things will get better.
4. Money should be a measure of how much you’ve contributed to everyone else’s lives, instead how much you’ve contributed to wealthy people’s lives.
5. My worth as a person is not affected by the casual behavior of strangers.
6. You can tell when a watermelon is ripe by the reduction of contrast between its stripes.
7. The only thing that matters is results.

I wish I had come up with this theory.

Bizarre theory suggests time may be running out

I had a dream this morning that I was Batman in the filming of his next movie. The studio thought it would be a good idea to let people vote for their favorite scene, and the way they’d do it is by putting patches with scene pictures on all the villains, so when you punched them in a patch it counted as a vote for that scene.

I was fighting Cat Woman. I was chasing her in the Bat Jet when she shot a grappling hook that caught me. The wire that attached it to the ground then acted as a conductor, channeling lightning through the Bat Jet. Cat Woman taunted me by saying “Hey, didn’t you vote for this scene?” and pointing to her glowing Bat-Jet-lightning patch, which was where I’d punched her earlier.

After I got out of that pinch, she started throwing those ropes with heavy balls on either end. I need to find the name of those things. Anyway, she was trying to entangle me, but I evaded all her attacks, moved into close combat range, and one by one locked her hands behind her back. She was so intent on attacking me that she didn’t defend against my wrestling techniques until it was too late.

Then I woke up.

• Blanket.
• Heavy flashlight.
• Hand warmers.
• Six bottles of water.
• Six packs of beef jerky.
• Atlas.
• Reflectors.
• Gloves.
• Socks.
• Bandages.
• Neosporin.
• Benadryl.
• Motrin.
• Hard candy.
• Telescoping magnet.
• Screwdriver.
• Channel-locks.
• Crescent wrench.
• Ski hat.
• Bandanna.

Joel recently sent me a bucket list, which was a series of experiences that he was sent and was supposed to check off the ones he had done. I won’t reproduce it all here, but suffice it to say I found it pointless. Many of the items on the list were things I never want to experience (Be chased up a tree by a rhino) so I guess it’s just a yardstick for measuring your life against the person who made the list.

So I decided to make my own list, and of course the first thing I did was to quickly categorize the experiences. Here are the categories I came up with:

• Creativity and Hobbies
• Athletics
• Linguistics
• Social Activities
• Monument Visits
• Adventures
• Animal Interactions
• Books & Movies
• Education
• Meet Celebrities
• Become a Celebrity By…
• Social Contribution
• Things that require a lot of money
• Family
• Real Estate
• Spirituality
• Survival

I’m going to make my own list rather than see how well I fit someone else’s list.

“I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” — Arthur P. Dent

Does it really take 21 days to create a habit?

I’m cooking chili. Just got a call from my boss, telling me we just got 99.9% certain funding from the US Army for a medical training program. Almost ready to shampoo my living room carpet.

I think I’m finally starting to settle into the single life. It’s been really rough, since I’m used to having my adorable wife and daughter keeping me company all the time, but I’m adaptable and I’m adapting. Sure I’m still lonesome a lot, but I’m having an easier time dealing with it lately. At least until it gets dark and quiet, and the screen savers start showing me slideshows of family pictures…