Genesis of Mindful Pursuit of Fitness

You might call it an attack of middle-aged angst or a desire to improve my lot in life, but over the past few years I came to the realization that the only person responsible for my health is me. I can't blame the condition of my health and fitness on society, on my family, on genetics, or on my wife. If I want to be fit and healthy, I'd have to take it upon myself to do so no matter the environment. Along the way I stumbled upon the concept of mindfulness and decided to pursue the path to fitness in a mindful (as opposed to mindless) way.

So here I am writing about my current and past travels along the road to my current and desired future state of health and fitness.

As an introduction of my fitness path here are two pictures of myself and an explanation of the thought process that caused the differences between the two.

The above picture was taken in Germany in 2006. (I love German Bier and German food!). At this time I weighed 220 lbs (at 5'10") and it was the heaviest I've been my whole life. Although I enjoyed the trip I was disgusted at how I felt and looked. Round pumpkin head and I was already growing out of 40 inch waist pants and a gut that started to look like my father and uncles, all of whom suffered multiple heart failure incidents.

So, upon returning from that trip, I set about finding out how to loose weight. During my research I stumbled upon a site that fit my temperament - The Hacker's Diet. Being an engineer, this approach fit how I approach life and helped me understand how to tackle the problem of weight management. My reading of his approach lead to my remembering two simple things, "Fad diets and gimmick nutritional plans obscure this simple yet essential fact of weight control: if you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight; if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight" and (my paraphrasing) any system can be managed with feedback. So the system he employs is a spreadsheet with daily tracking of weight, one line tracking the very noisy daily weight, and another line tracking the weighted moving average. The latter, smooths out the noise and, importantly, provides a direction. If your weight is on the whole decreasing, the slope of the weighted average descends. If, in the hard to interpret noise, your weight is increasing overall, the weighted average ascends. Simplified to the extreme, down, good, up, bad!

And after six months of hacking a diet via my own spreadsheet, which I will explain in a later post, I lost 40 lbs. At 180 lbs I never felt better! The above picture was taken 2 years later on a Fall trip to Germany, but the weight at this time crept up to perhaps 185. Still, the only time I felt physically healthier was after completing U.S. Army basic training in 1978.