CalorieCents

One of the biggest problems I have in my life is throwing myself at things with reckless abandon and then burning out very quickly. For some reason, I get satisfied with the small amount of progress and then stop everything that made me successful or I get distracted by some other shiny new project/goal. I have never learned to appreciate the process, the struggle, the journey. I’ve often asked myself why I do this and the best answer seems to be that I want to be good at everything. All my life, I think the effort to get from good to great was never worth it. Now that I’m getting older and more mature (maybe?), I srealize that being great at a few things is much more gratifying than being a jack of all trades.

In the book Mastery by George Leonard, he mentions 4 types of people: the dabbler, the obsessive, the hacker and of course the master. At different points of my life, I’ve been all except the master but I plan to change all that this year. I have an aggressive goal of losing 30 lbs by June 1, 2008. With everything I have to juggle, I will need to have razor sharp focus to get to that goal. My main motivation of losing this weight is to decrease all the risk factors that I may face in the future. My most important asset is my health. Who cares how much money I’ve saved if there is something wrong with me physically, mentally or spiritually? Nothing matters if I’m broken.

The #1 principle in personal finance is spend less than you earn. This is absolutely the most fundamental concept of getting your financial house in order. The #1 principle in losing weight is burn more calories than you consume. Now you can rephrase that anyway you want (like consume less than you burn) but I intentionally phrased it with “burn” first. In his book, Ultimate Diet Secrets, Dr. Gregory Ellis states that the focus of any weight loss plan should be on activity first. Eventually diet will have to be adjusted once a person has done everything he can to maximize calorie burning within his lifestyle. This is the approach I will be taking first.

Because of my former, glorious, athletic high school days, I often would kickoff a weight loss plan with extreme dieting, punishing workouts in the gym and thoughts of running 400 miles in 3 days. Then about 2 weeks later, I’m pigging out on ice cream, lying on my couch because I tweaked my back and realized on day 1 of running that I should have scaled back to 400 inches in 3 days. I think you get my point.

So I will be working out in the gym 2 - 3 days a week focusing by using a modified 5×5 plan (provided by Mehdi at stronglifts.com) and then embarking on a walking program and tracking my “active” calories burned by using a Caltrac. The Caltrac accurately measures calorie burn unlike step counters and calorie burners on treadmills. The use of device has been published in scientific studies so I feel comfortable about its accuracy. I won’t wear the Caltrac all day but if I leave my apartment or I leave my office building, I will be wearing it. The current goal is to burn 300 calories a day. Though I won’t be diligently watching what I eat, I won’t be frequenting buffets or eating tubs of ice cream on a whim. I’ll track my progress and report my results at the end of the month. I think I have the correct mindset going into this thing and I’m excited to see my results.

This time I’m motivated to be a Master.