Tag Archives: weight

3485/500000 and 10th Day of the Baha’i Fast

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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!

Sabbatical Day 44 – Leadership and Food

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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:

Mishkin Talking about Leadership

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.