LIFE final checkin tomorrow

Well, Monday is your final LIFE check-in (we'll see what happens with work). I think you will be net -20 from your starting point after 2 years. Your peak was -46.

Reflecting back on the process, I am not thrilled with the result on my behalf but that's largely a matter of my own failings, not the program. (From my last post, Jesus would probably tell me to pick my butt up out of the chair and take it outside for some non-keyboard exercise).

That's the key for me. I think I have made fundamental changes to my diet and that's been what's kept the weight off for this period - I don't feel like I'm on a diet so much as I'm just being responsible for what I eat. It's not bad deprivation, it's resisting the urge to do what thou wilst in the world.

Now if I could just do the same thing with walking/exercising I think I could get another 20-30 off. But it's time, and not just time (scheduling being the last rampart of avoiding an unpleasant task), it's inclination. Walking with the dogcast was OK but it got lonely at some point and now I have a real distaste for it. Working out early is good but when I get to work early I want to actually work in order to have a chance of being able to go home before sundown.

So it's a challenge for me. I think when this is over I am going to finally complete that project to summarize the LIFE modules and reassess what I'm doing and what I need to do.

For you, older self, this is what I learned in the LIFE program:

• Weight is nothing but biology, which is nothing but physics and chemistry, the most fair judges in the universe. They do not care if you're happy or if you're sad or if you're just doing it this once. If you eat more than you need you gain weight. If you eat less or need more than you eat you will lose weight.
  
  
• Weigh yourself regularly, in the morning. Doesn't have to be every day but if you shoot for every day you'll do better than letting six months go by and then wondering who's that bloated buffoon in the mirror. Track the numbers - CalorieKing was good but I like The Hacker's Diet trend mapping.
  
  
• Nothing good happens between midnight and 4 AM, diet or otherwise. Caffeine makes things happen between midnight aand 4 AM.
  
  
• Take responsibility for your daily calorie budget. Plan. Count calories. Calories count. You know damn well what three ounces of chicken looks like and that three bowls of crunchy corn bran is not a serving.
  
  
• Nothing wrong with a big breakfast (especially when followed up by a smaller lunch) but remember -more protein and less carbs/sugar for breakfast means fewer furtive trips to the substitute bagel lady at 10 AM.
  
  
• Body weight x 12 = number of calories you need to maintain. This stopped working for you earlier this year, unless you are seriously underestimating calorie intake. According to my measure with CalorieKing I should weigh 250 and let's just say I don't.
  
  
• 3500 calories in a pound - 7 days in a week - 500 less calories than your base requirements per day - should result in ABOUT 1 lb loss. It will usually time that 1 lb until just after you weigh in for the 7th day and then stomp off to work in a funk.
  
  
• Non-starchy vegetables (not corn, peas, potatoes, etc) are your best dietary friend. You can eat a bag of them for a penny a calorie and throw them into anything BUT...
  
  
• The more you eat - of anything - the more your body expects to eat. A few tiny meals spread out through the day gets you used to eating tiny meals.
  
  
• If you are going to skip a meal, skip dinner.
  

Your personal roadmap and New Year's Eve

I've been thinking about an issue that's come up at work, specifically the idea of a feature roadmap. We've been discussing it for the system I work on, and I started wondering..why can't we do that for ourselves?

I don't mean accomplishments like reproducing or climbing Mt. Everest or learning to self-loofah, but adding new capabilities or enhancing old ones.

You could almost make it like they used to do with new cars:

+ Lonstar, new for 2008 with a new XX-inch waistline and management analysis capability!

Or...

+ Lonstar Model 30.X will include a 5 mile run capability, new color-coordinated wardrobe and complete Java certification.

Maybe instead of setting goals to punish myself for not reaching, I could look on self-improvements as developing or adding features to my system. That would allow you to develop a roadmap, right? (channel Kathy Sierra and insert an entertaining graphic here).

And...we should get 2 New Year's every year - one on December 31 and one on the night before one's birthday. Take stock, memorialize those who have passed (sometimes I think I hear him even when I know better) and plan for those future features.

So, older self, looking back on this time, what features am I adding? What features should I be adding? Do you still believe, as I do now, that you gotta keep believing and acting as if your best features - and best days - are ahead of you.

09/30 What I'm doing to get organized

So I have made a couple of posts about this goals thing, right? I've had an urge to make sense out of my scurrying and align my goals/objectives/projects/tasks myself. Maybe it's the need for a higher purpose, or to find room in my life for more important pursuits. I am not sure.

But, future self, without further ado here's what younger self has been doing as of late to organize things - I keep an outline using Natara Bonsai. I like it because it uses a PDA (which I carry with me) and the desktop, and keeps the two in synch so I can both update on my PDA but have more functionality on the desktop to edit, export, save, etc.

I used to organize my PDA by date and had a whole calendar breakdown of the year by action item. The problem with that was when I would get behind (and get behind I did, often) I would tend to wind up with this big moving train of projects I had to drag to the next day every day. It didn't work for me very well when things came up that had to go to the top of the stack (and things always come up).

So I have in the last couple of weeks reorganized things a little bit. I now have an outline with the following nodes:

• Goals



How I want to feel, what I need to accomplish in order to feel that way.




• Current tasks



Specific action items I need to complete. I try to keep this at no more than 20 but sometimes things pop on. For instance, I have to renew my car's license tabs, and I need to move forward on getting some contractor estimates so those got inserted at the top of the list. There's also production support stuff for work, but I created a sublist for that so I don't wind up getting mixed up about what's a change and what's a broken-you-gotta-fix-it-now item.

The rules for tasks are:




• Something I can accomplish without any outside intervention


• Something with a due date





After reading a few of the entries at Lifehacker and 37Signals, I am trying to keep every task in the form:

Verb the noun with the action by date.

I manage the due date using Bonsai and its interlink capability with Outlook. This is not always perfect but it's workable...so far.


• Active projects.

Projects I'm working on right now, that have a definite due date. The idea is that I ONLY work on these projects and not any of the other categories. This is tough, to be honest, but it's also the reason why I started this system in the first place.


• Pending projects.

Projects which are ready to start but are waiting for room on the active list. Again, they're more or less planned in terms of what needs to happen but I am trying to keep them on the back burner so I can focus on the active projects.


• Unplanned projects.

Catch-all; ideas, things I need to do but I have not worked out how to due them yet. I add steps, etc, and then when I feel like they're ready to start I put them into pending.


• Completed projects.

Obviously, completed projects. When I mark something done I drag it into here, and periodically archive the contents into DayNotez.

Some issues I have are:

• Recurring/ongoing stuff.

Every month I try to complete a list of maintenance tasks for the house - give the dogs their heartworm meds, check the water softener, change the furnace filter, etc. It's kind of a PITA to recreate this list every month, but I don't want to create an ongoing node because that will turn into a junk drawer.


• Maintaining focus on active projects and aggressively blocking non-active projects from my attention.

I have a really hard time saying no to requests and not jumping in to help when something goes wrong. That's just me, but it's not a positive trait because then there's other stuff that goes without attention. This is why I have started using this system, but the struggle is still there for me. Also, of course this is the real world and sometimes you have to drop what you're doing to work on something else.

Iraq

So, future self, there's no propaganda here, just a note about how it is now. The war is the lead item on every newscast. Since the election the Democrats have been emboldened to fight with Bush about the war, and there are big protests (again) today about bringing troops home.

The enemy also has a new tactic - they just showed up at an American base wearing American uniforms and speaking English and they grab soldiers, take them off and kill them.

The mood seems to be that of resignation. No one but Bush and his cronies are talking about winning (in terms of defeating al-Queda) any more; now it's about how to turn this mess over to the Iraqis, who are locked in civil war.

So there are no good options. I think that the war was a crime and an abomination and Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Chalabi should be tried and imprisoned for what they did to get us to this place. I have given up on the Catholic church for some of the stuff they did around this war, as well as blowing off friends I really cared about because I just can't accept their enthusiastic approval of what we're doing. I'm too old and fat and defective to fight so I never joined the service and can't be part of that conversation.

That said, for whatever reasons, the fact is that we invaded that country and destroyed its government. We dawdled and mismanaged and allowed the forces of chaos to sprout there. If we just leave, or talk about leaving to the point where everyone just assumes we're going to leave, we leave the civilians - the ones the peace protestors claim to be so concerned about - to the tender mercies of people like those who ran the torture house discovered by the MN NG. A lot of Iraqis have put their lives on the line - literally their lives - to help us and if we disengage and leave them, well, "The Killing Fields" pretty much summed the next part of that story up.

We are not obligated to keep putting brave kids in the meat grinder for an incompetent execution of a war based on a lie. But we are morally obligated to take responsibility for what we did, what we created over there and I'm getting worried that a lot of the perennial peace organizations are making hay with the "Out Now!" line to promulgate their own influence without concern or regard for the situation for the people we were ostensibly saving.

I don't know how it will turn out. I hope we find a way, either with our military or someone else's help, to stablize the country and give those people their lives back without creating an al-Queda state, an Iranian satellite or Taliban Afghanistan with easy access to the oil fields.

Another note for you - the yellow ribbons are gone from all the SUVs now and have been for a long time. They started disappearing around the time of Abu Ghraib. There's a poem Mark Bowden reprinted in his Black Hawk Down series, go find it.

What happened, future self? How did we get out of this one? Whichever way it went down, we should be ashamed, and the people who should be most ashamed are likely to feel no shame at all. They never do. Maybe it's how they get to be those kind of people in the first place.

Note to Older Self - The Diet Thing

So, older self, let's talk about the diet thing for a minute. You are sitting somewhere in the future and you're either fatter or thinner than me as I write this (262.0). I would like to get to 249 this year.

Do you remember this time (LIFE, March 2006 - January 2007 and beyond) as the beginning of something great or just a false dawn? My motto these days is "these are tomorrow's good old days." I am sick of nostalgia because those times were not perfect, and so I am trying to do things now so I will enjoy having done them later. Like the LIFE thing.

Remember the mirror at Italianni's and how that felt. Remember it and if you don't I'll remind you. You caught yourself in the mirror and you didn't recognize you for a minute, you just saw a ridiculously fat guy who looked like a freak. Then you recognized the freak was you.

Now you're doing the thing and you weigh yourself every day and you try to act like your food intake is coming from a budget of calories, not that you're tired or you're sad or that it tastes good or that your mind is racing on some ridiculous idea and the eating like chewing your nails but with food.

Did you give up on that? Was it easier to go back? These days you tell yourself that the chocolate/fat/sugar/salt tastes good for about 10 seconds, but being able to buy clothes off the rack that doesn't have some integer XL multiplier tastes good for ever and ever.

Did that work? Did any of it stick? I hope to God it did. I hope, I hope, I hope. Because I am kind of doing this for me, but mainly I am doing it for you. And I hope you will do it for your future self.

You are not doing as well on the activity part but I am trying to blame that on the winter. It's cold, dammit. I am hoping to start a weightlifting program that I can actually follow. How did that go? Did you accomplish anything, and stick with what you accomplished?

Did you quit on me? I can believe you did, and I can believe you didn't. Please don't let me down, future self. For this one thing, this one time, don't let me down.

I don't care if you don't get back to 190 or whatever unrealistic thing. I'd like to get into the 230s but that's a bonus. I will never be disappointed in you unless you just totally give up and go back to the old stuff. That's all. If you keep trying, really trying, even if you're not successful I will be proud of you.

But remember this, because it's pretty obvious to me right now - it's not all at once. You fail or succeed a little bit at a time and like Einstein said it's the compound interest that's the miracle. Watch the scale. The scale is objective. It doesn't care if you're lonely or sad or Mommy didn't love you enough or whatever. It doesn't care. The laws of physics do not make an exception for you.

Calories

Weight is driven by physics and chemistry. They don't care about how sad you are or if you're tired or if your back hurts.

That heart attack/stroke/TIA you're now having is a demonstrable outcome of the choices I am making today and tomorrow. You could have prevented them by just doing a little more, trying a little harder, making do with some pain today to avoid the pain tomorrow.