Just finished my second indoor cycling session of the new year. I really need to realize that the high I get from exercise needs to replace the high I get from food… not supplement it!
20 virtual km, set a couple personal records, and loving my new setup.
Anyone else on Zwift? That’s the software I’m using to connect to my smart trainer and track all my activity.
My day of rest was good and I’m taking another ont tomorrow (one a week). This past week I set two new records: 100 reps of sit-ups in a single set (!!!) and 800 reps total for the week. The 100 reps was really hard and I felt awful afterwards. I also did another 150 reps day. However, I’ve added crunches to the traditional sit-ups, and I’m just calling them all “sit-ups”. So now, I will do 100 proper sit-ups per day and start working on increasing my crunches. I’ve also lost a bit of weight, about 7 lbs, mostly due to eating only one meal per day due to…
The Baha’i Fast has been great this year. It’s a little harder than last year, truth be told, probably because of my week off of work. I find it hard to ignore hunger and tiredness when I don’t actually have to do anything during the day. The part I’m having a hard time with is really getting some good prayer time in. There are distractions, but also I’m just having a hard time remembering. I have, however, been trying to spend time with each member of my family during this week. I have to do something with Ocean and Justice still. I went for dinner with Melanie, dinner with Haifa, and a movie with Verity (Captain America – good, but not great, btw).
I’ve tried doing a bit of pottery/ceramic art, but I feel like I haven’t got the hang of it right now. I tried an experiment for making tentacle sculptures, but it didn’t work out so well. And this evening I started a new “vase”, but it’s too early to say if it will work out.
I finished reading “Great North Road” by Peter F Hamilton. Fantastic sci-fi/detective/creature novel. Some really touching moments. Nice long read too, and completely self-contained. No sequel to wait for. No really unique ideas, but extremely well-written and enjoyable. I highly recommend it!
Today I was sick. I woke up with a bad sore throat. Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i Faith, has provided a number of exemptions to fasting. Specifically, if one is sick, one is exempt. So today, I decided that I would drink water, but I would continue to avoid food between sunrise and sunset.
I broke the fast in the evening with a nice meal out with my daughter Haifa. We went to an Ethiopian restaurant here in London called Addis Ababa. The food was great! It was also plentiful… when I’m fasting, my stomach seems to shrink very quickly and I’m not able to eat meals nearly as large as before. Which is good. Haifa and I had a very short visit, we didn’t linger, but it was still really nice to go out with her.
Melanie and I had a good discussion about addiction and other aspects of mental health. I realized very young that I had a strong tendency to addictive behaviour… I can certainly place that realization back to at least age 12. I also realize that a huge part of avoiding major problems with addiction is my inspiration from the Baha’i Faith: both the community and the writings. I recently went out with some friends for dinner and one of them asked me if I had ever had alcohol… nope. I’ve also never tried smoking, or any other substances… wait for it… except for food. That’s the one addiction I struggle with. Like most people, I’m not completely emotionally healthy so, for example, when I’m travelling for work, and lonely, I eat. A lot. Anyway, Melanie shared the idea from Gabor Mate that we can sometimes consciously replace addictions with more healthy ones. I hope my sit-ups goals can become a more healthy addiction than food and eventually replace it.
In other news, I finished building the second set of book shelves for our mini pottery studio. Just some cheap Ikea Billy shelves to put all our forthcoming pottery on! I’m super happy about my upcoming week off. I’m hoping to make two or three new pieces by the end of the week.
First day of the Baha’i Fast was tough… but I got through it. Lots of service to my family including shopping, chauffeuring, and cheffing. Went to the market in the morning, didn’t snack (like I normally do). Went to Costco and the Chinese grocery store in the afternoon. Took my family to pottery in the morning, and took Ocean to sleep over at a friends in the afternoon. Made dinner (with Melanie’s help) in the evening: fruit smoothie, turkey and onions, and yucca fries. I also took a nap and did some pottery stuff at home, and built the LEGO set Melanie got me for Ayyam-i-Ha.
My eating plan is simple: eat between sundown and two hours after sundown, eat healthy and no sugar/sugary foods, drink lots of water throughout the evening and early morning. Sunrise, say some prayers. I’m also continuing my sit-ups goal… not sure if it will be sustainable… but…
Today I set a new personal record for continuous reps of sit-ups: 70. I did it listening to “bury a friend” by Billie Eilish.
So I’ve made some good progress on my goal to 50000 sit-ups by time I’m fifty years old. I’ve been thinking a lot about other goals and I will have several more… but for now, I can announce my second 50 goal: to lose 50 pounds by time I am 50 years old. I weighed 238lbs this morning and losing 50 would get me to 188lbs. This is a little higher than my ideal weight of about 170, but would still be an enormous improvement. My current weight is the highest it has ever been. So, as I work my way down, I hope to find ways to make it completely sustainable. I also know that I can lose fifty pounds much faster than the three years until I am fifty, but by making it a long term goal, I can also aim for sustainability. I will start by doing some things that have been successful in the past:
For exercise, I know that cycling and swimming are good. But bad weather can kibosh those so I will also get back to using the elliptical. I’ll start tracking that exercise and reporting it here too.
(Photo is me today as I post this. I’m not going to share a full-body image. I think those are kinda gross. As my weight improves, it will be easily visible in my face. )
I’ve discovered a simple and delicious alternative to wheat/sugar-filled sandwiches: lettuce wraps. Now this might not be earth-shaking to many of you further along this path than I, but it’s new to me. I make a lettuce wrap with ham, cheese, and artichoke hearts (or something similarly flavorful), and no sauces and it’s great!!! Filling and perfect after a bike ride to school. An apple rounds it out as a meal.
On Thursday evening (Oct. 11) I went to Barrie to give a talk. I was invited by Krista Birkbeck to speak to the Agile North meetup. I’ve been committed to this talk for a loooong time, but I wasn’t sure what to speak about until the night before. On Thursday morning I quickly put together a presentation on Agile Leadership – Luck, Love and Truthfulness (the link goes to my staff page at berteig.com where I have listed recent presentations and their decks in pdf format). I really appreciate everyone who attended. There were about 12 people including Krista and the discussion and interaction was fantastic. One of the most interesting questions that was discussed was “can you choose to love someone?” One of my own realizations was the inverse of the idea from “Skin In The Game” by Taleb: if you try your hand at something enough times, you will eventually “succeed”, and that includes leadership, agile coaching, etc. as long as trying doesn’t also have a chance of being removed from the game (being killed or blacklisted). I look forward to sharing the presentation again sometime in the future. Here’s a pic that Krista took at the session:
If you are interested in more of the content of the talk, you can always buy my book: “I Am Not A Great Leader – A Short Primer on Leading to Real Agility” which again you can find on my berteig.com profile page.
I’ve been eating badly. So, time to smarten up. I’m going to work on eating more veggies and fruits (any would be good, but hopefully quite a lot), and removing most of the sugar and processed white things from my diet. I’m not going to do it super-strict, but my intention is that most days I will be on-track. I would like to lose between 7 and 10 kilos (I’m about 106kg right now). Continuing to cycle regularly should help, but at some point the weather will get bad enough that I’ll have to replace that with something else… hopefully swimming on campus. I’m hoping to lose this weight by mid-December. So two months. I’ll track progress here. Tomorrow I will weigh myself in the morning and provide daily updates here.
Finally, here is my updated personal Kanban board. Main differences include that I’ve finished publishing Jerry’s book and I added my food/weight project.
There is an extremely interesting article up on kuro5hin called Temporal Symbolism in Human Communication. I recommend it particularly to any writers and to those interested in the Baha’i principle of an international auxiliary language.
Thanks to those who emailed me about language learning materials (namely, Ross… do you have a homepage I can link to?)!!!
This past Christmas/New Year’s break, while visiting my family in Fort McMurray, my dad had an insight about my character. He noticed how much I enjoy food. He noted that, in essense, this pleasure is a very sensual delight. Finally, he suggested that if I was concerned about how much I was eating, I might try including more of the arts in my life. So. I have made a small effort in that regard. Particularly with music. I have started to listen to music a little more, I have set up my piano and I regularly sit down at it, and I have started composing with buzz. In the meantime, I have continued to think on this insight. It turns out that it is a little more dark an issue than just a natural inclination to the sensual… I believe I use food as psychological respite, similar in perhaps a small way to the drinking of an alcoholic. Now due to my fantastic metabolism, I am not having a serious weight problem. Nevertheless, I realized that I “use” food when I am lonely or otherwise feeling down. It is something that I turn to instead of to a real solution. At the very least, I should seriously consider saying more prayers. And writing here helps too 🙂
My mom got me a great present for my birthday. I forgot to mention it because it was sent by mail and arrived quite late. She got me “The Idiot” (US$, CA$) by Dostoevsky (google search). I’m now serveral chapters into it and enjoying it very much. The main significance of this work to me is that it is the source of my name. The main character, Prince Mishkin, is the one after whom I am named.
Last Tuesday night I started with a Ruhi book 1 study circle in Jersey City. I am quite happy about it. I last did book 1 back in 1993 or so in a retreat with four other young guys. We became known as the Five Boy Institute. Alexei, Sky Glabush, Dean Kalyan and Cory April were the other attendees. There were three notable aspects of that winter weekend retreat at a cabin. The first, that the water, or some food was bad and we all ended up with multiple trips to the outhouse the one night we stayed over. The second, we didn’t really know how to use the enormous wood-burning stove and we ended up with an indoor temperature of somewhere around 45C (113F). And finally, we had one seriously spiritual weekend with many rounds of the “Fire Tablet” and serious study of the writings.