For the past few weeks Jesse and I have been adjusting our behaviors around exercise and eating. We are making use of the Lean Body 90 program by Dan Go. I signed up for it at launch, which means I paid around half what it goes for now. It's early days, but I'm pretty sure I'd recommend it at the current price as well.
As part of this high protein eating program, we've been trying Huel Black as an alternative to our carnivorous primary way of adding proteins, which is meat, meat, meat. Our eating still feels awfully meaty, but it's nice to have at least one meal per day where (a) we aren't eating meat and (b) we aren't having to think about what to eat. I doubt Huel is saving anyone money, but it does take some decision stress off of the mind.
At first sip Huel was a pretty "this isn't bad" experience, followed with a "I kind of have to force this down" feeling. After a week or two, though, I didn't mind at all a chilled version of the shakes. In fact when we visited Houston last week we did not travel with Huel and both of us said "I miss my shake" mid visit. I mean I still find it best with a glass of water or coffee on the side, but not bad! Is it actually healthy? I'm not sure, but it's probably better than the alternative.
While for the first time in my life I have finally noticed how different I feel on the days when I have good eating habits vs days when I have poor eating habits, I haven't gotten there with weight training yet. I have to believe the habit will form at some point. This program is not incredibly intense, nor very time consuming. Hopefully it nets results! It is sticking a bit, though, as I noticed that my next hotel stay has an exercise facility and for some reason that fact feels good.
My friend Mike shared something with me that is also a great input into my current goal of gaining strength in the second half of my life. The most important part of a workout when you're 45 or older is to avoid injuries. At this age, injuries are an incredible setback because our recovery is slower and our strength loss is faster. Oh, and that time away from exercise is kryptonite to habit formation. Avoiding injuries is an important priority to keep in mind when I hit an exercise and I "feel it in my knee." Also, there is an idea that if it hurts in a joint I’m probably doing the movement incorrectly. I should stop and at minimum adjust.
Experimenting with My Online Presence
I've decided to try some different places to blog and keep my occasionally-updated commonplace book. I'll be blogging at Bear Blog and commonplacing using Obsidian Publish, which is an available feature of the Obsidian note-taking app.
I've always preferred to control my own website deployment, but over the years I've found it weirdly stressful to work with my less-than-perfect implementations. My experiment is one that believes I will give more grace to other people's tools than my own thereby releasing some anxiety. We'll see!
As always, bjhess.com will direct you to the various places.
Announcing
I and some friends have started a movie forum/group. If you’re interested to talk movies every week or two, let me know if you’d like to join. We’d love to have more folks involved such that the conversation gets going and gets interesting! Here’s the intro post.
Disclosure: The group is hosted on forum software that we are writing at Good Enough.
Ephemera
An ode to the airport bathroom
A place
Where your paper towel
Goes in the urinal
Did you walk back from the sink
Just to do that?
And in real time
A man pees
While checking Twitter
But yet could not figure out
How to juggle his phone
And wash his hands
Goodbye, PHX
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I have a lot of good memories of the ol’ Netflix queue.
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I got to push the big red button. #loldesign
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My default setting is to ideals. Ironically, it’s not “good enough.” I can set ideal decision making aside at work, which makes me seemingly double down on idealism in my personal life.
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FIRST robotics championships, Houston.
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Click through for more ephemera.