Every year for the past 5 or so years my friends and I have adopted a rather strict set of rules to follow every January, and we called it Health Month.  Here’s the old Facebook page and a rather hotly-debated Livejournal post from a couple years ago about it all. Sounds familiar, right?

I’ve been thinking of ways to “gamify” Health Month for a couple years.  It was the Livejournal post above in fact that made me realize that the rigidity of the rules was, while a great simplifier, also a fatal flaw of the whole endeavor.  Thus, the more flexible and personal rule-selection process of healthmonth.com was born (slowly, over a couple years).

This year, I’ve decided to get most of my health month inspiration from Tim Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Body, which I gobbled up on a plane the day it was released.

For those interested in following, here’s my plan.

Beginning of the month:

1. Get starting weight
2. Get starting body fat percentage with calipers (too poor to go use the $250 DEXA scan at the moment)
3. Measure my waist, arms, legs, etc to get a baseline
4. Take “before” pictures (front and side).  Look as fat and gross as possible.

Wake up ritual:

1. Weigh myself
2. 1 hard boiled egg (5g protein)
3. Protein powder shake (20g protein)
4. 4 glasses of water
5. Coffee with cinnamon or green tea
6. Multivitamin
7. AGG (alpha-lipoic acid, green tea flavanols, garlic extract)
8. Fish oil (omega 3s)
9. Vitamin D

Exercise Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday after breakfast (consider checking out CrossFit)

Lunch and dinner:

1. Try to repeat the same simple, cheap meals as much as possible
2. No white carbs (including brown rice)
3. Don’t drink calories (no milk, soy milk, soft drinks, or fruit juice. 1 coffee & 1 glass of red wine per day is okay)
4. Nothing with lactose or added sugar
5. AGG supplements (alpha-lipoic acid, green tea flavanols, garlic extract)
6. Take a picture of everything I eat or drink (post to new Posterous blog)
7. 20 air squats or push ups right before and 60 minutes after meal

Cheat day: Break any/all of the diet rules every Friday.

Before bed:

1. Glass of red wine (optional)
2. Policosanol (good for cholesterol)

End of the month:

1. Get ending weight
2. Get ending body fat percentage
3. Measure my waist, arms, legs, etc, subtract the starting total
4. Take “after” pictures (doubt there will be any difference but why not?)

To see this translated into Health Month rules, check out my profile page.

What’s my goal with all of this?  I just looked back and realized I weigh 15 lbs more than I did last year!  That’s not cool.  So, I want to lose some weight, of course, because that’s definitely not muscle that I gained.  20 lbs by the middle of 2011 is my goal, though I can gain some of that back if I do it via muscle (hence the body fat tracking).  Gain 10 lbs of muscle, lose 20 lbs of fat… that also works and seems like a fair trade for a rather specific set of rules.

Back in 2003 I did this experiment with myself called Mecember where I attempted to gain 5 lbs and then lose 5 lbs, just to give myself a tangible sense of the amount of “work” it would take to go in either direction.  It was a great exercise, and pretty much won me over as a dedicated self-tracker.  From it, I realized on a very deep level that the more I understand the link between what I eat, drink, do, etc and how I feel, how healthy I am, etc the better.  It’s time for a little reminder, I think.

The only way to really figure out health is to test out the theories on yourself.  How best to “play” health is a highly personal adventure, and endlessly fascinating to me.  I’m excited to see what I learn from this next round.

Prompt: Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? (Author: Alice Bradley)

I’m actually in a multi-year letting go process of some soured relationships from the past.  It’s proving more difficult than I thought.  I don’t think about this person for weeks or maybe months at a time, and yet when I do all of the previous mindsets come back. I guess the brain is good at that… freezing mindsets related to relationships and then unfreezing them when necessary.  It’s why I can visit a friend I haven’t seen in 10 years and feel like nothing has changed.  And so maybe that bodes poorly for my ability to “heal” or even to forgive and forget regardless of the amount of time that passes.

And yet, I do feel like I’m letting go on some nano-scale.  Like maybe how the body replaces one cell at a time until the whole body is new cells every 7 years.  Nothing faster or more productive than that, though.

Hmm… looks like I’m going to be doing as many of these as I can, but probably not all of them.

Quick responses for the couple I missed.

Day 2 (“What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?”)

Everything contributes to writing (particularly private writing).  If it doesn’t, then I write it out until it does.

Day 3 (“Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail.”)

That would have to be Kellianne’s labor and the birth of our son, Niko, of course.  I did write it up in vivid detail already, but I think Kellianne’s version is a lot better.

Day 4 (“How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?”)

Venturing into the unknown is really the only way to cultivate a sense of wonder.  Wonder is the process of processing something new and beautiful and unique.  It’s only prerequisite is having the confidence to leave your familiar territory, and to go and seek something out in the uncharted territory of life.  Einstein said, “I don’t any special talent. I am just passionately curious.”  Of course, passionate curiosity is a talent.  We are born with it but it will whither on the vine unless we support it and exercise it over the years.  I would say that I probably score high on the curiosity factor compared to others, but I think most of it has to do with lack of fear.  We are all curious, but we are all also scared.  I feel like a series of really difficult experiences in my life (father’s death, divorce, closing a business, almost going bankrupt) has taught me that difficulty is not the problem.  The only way to truly fail is to abandon your sense of self, your family, and your friends.  Always behaving with good intentions, on the other hand, may lead to sadness, loss, and poverty, but the experiences gained will be worth more than those things that were lost.

Knowing that, it’s possible to double down on wonder, the unknown, and to really go after things that you think are valuable.  To make fewer compromises, at least when it comes to the big picture and your intentions.  This applies to both starting a family and starting a new business, as well as maintaining and growing relationships and friendships.

Anyway, so my answer.  I cultivate a sense of wonder by systematically reducing fear.  Pushing back at “the resistance“.  A great book that I’ve mentioned many times before, The War of Art, had a definite impact on my mindset this year.

I’m doing this. Gwen Bell, the organizer, came up to Seattle a bit ago and we really melded minds.  So I helped her put some of the form stuff together for this.  I really want to reflect on this year.  It just so happens that I’m feeling a little crazy right now, and feel like I don’t have any time to do anything, other than stress and spin in circles, but I think some of it might just be too much going on that hasn’t been sorted out in my head.

Prompt: One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

2010 – I came up with a couple cheesy words… and cheesy word that I like best to encapsulate 2010 is “roots”.

This year, with the birth of Niko, I had a series of flashbacks/personal reflections on my own childhood, my parents, etc.  I thought a lot about how I became who I am, and how I can give Niko that same opportunity that I had to really be supported and loved for who I was.  Not a lot of people had that, I realize, and it’s an amazing thing to have had.

I even went so far as to contemplate deeper topics like the origin of life, and the universe, and everything.  Watching pregnancy and childbirth is a mystical experience… it’s like realizing that you’re in a much stranger movie than you originally thought.  The universe is WEIRD and we’re all a part of it… our roots are in the fantastically strange.

And, of course, work wise, I’ve had a long career-crisis of sorts that has lead me to re-think (for the dozenth time maybe) what I really want and need out of work.  Why do I feel so compelled to work on the things I do?  Why do I have this optimism that it will all work itself out?  Am I ignoring some hidden truth that is right in front of me about our own doomedness, or can the opportunities in front of me really be as amazing as I think?  I’ve always wondered if I’m in some giant self-created deception of myself.  And I’ve always talked myself out of it (except for once, in high school, but that’s another story).  I really do believe the root instinct in me is true… that by working on what I love, and having good intentions, and always course-correcting when I get off track on some distraction, that one can work themselves into a situation that can’t fail.  One where doing the work, regardless of how it unfolds, is the reward in itself.

2011 – When I think about being a year from now and reflecting on the year, I think the word I want to choose to represent the year is “leap”.  Of course, I probably always want to leap way ahead each year.  There’s so much to do.  Raise Niko.  Teach him how to walk, talk, explore the world.  Build a company around Health Month.  Raise money.  Hire.  Build a culture.  Find a better home for the family.  Move.  Stabilize our living situation.  Calm down. Get healthier. Stay sane.  In other words, a giant leap from where we are today.  Luckily, my legs are feeling pretty spring-y.