Posts Tagged ‘planning’
4 Hour Body or The Next Crazy Idea
I’m losing weight.
For as long as I can remember, I have been (within 700g of) 78kg. It’s really frustrating. For me.
A couple of months back we tried not eating any grains for an entire month. We both lost weight. We both had more energy and we both think that it was easier to not fly off the handle during that month. I found out about it via Tim Ferriss’ blog and was very happy that we tried it out. Only problem was; we just sort of tried it out; we didn’t measure anything and tried to stick to the plan, but weren’t too phased when we didn’t. Well, Emma did spend a bit of time feeling guilty, but that’s her favourite past-time.
So I have been very interested in Tim’s new book The 4 Hour Body. Great read, I highly recommend it for people who want to see things differently.
So, I’m doing a new experiment:
The Slow Carb Diet
- Avoid “white” carbohydrates (Wheat, Sugar, Potato, Corn, Quinoa)
- Celebrate Festivus once every week (consume as much, of whatever, as you want) [We party on Saturdays]
It’s not easy to follow, and I have paraphrased it down to the fundamentals because Tim makes some great suggestions as rules that are really reiterations of the first rule.
I did this for two weeks, went from 77.9kgs –> 73.9kgs and watched the fluctuations when I deviated from the plan. My body fat is now 6.9%. This part works!
So now, I’m going from Geek to Freak.
Target: 90kgs of raw Ben.
Same basic diet, but lots more protein. I went to the gym today, it was pretty entertaining. I am sure I looked mighty thin in the mirrors-of-self-love lining the long wall. Another fortnight and we’ll see who’s sneering at who, Conan.
This one is quite funny to write; I remember having a similar issue when this happened to me and so it echoes quite nicely.
For a while now I have been encouraging Emma to keep an eye out for cheap flights to places we might like to go. For holidays, as opposed to places we might like to go to get away from the in-laws, which would be a completely horrible suggestion and totally unwarranted. “Hello to Emma’s family”, I know many of you read this :-)
So, over time, we have had the occasional conversation about dream holiday locations, logistics and timing. Largely these took the form of a tentative suggestion that could be construed as something completely different (have you ever wanted to go to Disneyland) which, upon further investigation, rapidly descended into either hurt silence or stomping footsteps towards a door. Oh, it wasn’t just her. We swapped roles at regular intervals.
So it was quite a surprise to get a jittery phone call from Emma that started out with, “Honey, I’ve found some flights to Paris next year that look really good, can we go?” i would like to say that i answered suavely, “Sure, Baby, what ever you want”, but that would be a misrepresentation of the facts. There was some confusion as we tried to fall back into the old pattern, but after realising what was happening, I tried a different tact and, within 24 hours, Things Were Different!
Emma had figured out the connecting flights, arranged a stop over and paid (with my plastic to get the travel insurance) for the entire escapade.
I’m pretty sure she is still not quite sure when the piano will fall on her, but it’s very amusing to watch her try to get grumpy now. All I have to do to dislodge any cranky is start humming the French National Anthem.
And now she is starting to think that maybe, just maybe, things will turn out alright for her after all.
Highly, HIGHLY amusing.
Last night Ben and I sat down and had a discussion about what we will do with our lives, and mainly my life, if I don’t get this contract in Singapore. With six days left until ‘the end of August’ has been and gone and the very real possibility that the jobs have already been assigned and I am one of the unlucky few who have to come to terms with missing out, we need a back up plan.
Sure it has been great thinking that all of our problems are going to be solved by one phone call from Singapore but what if that phone call never comes? What do we do then?
We made a list of what is important and what goals I have in regards to becoming a better singer and dancer and the possibility of making a career out of it all and we came to the following general plan.
- I want to study singing and dancing more. The last two years I have been very lazy in my study and as a result I haven’t really improved very much and in the case of dancing I have put on weight, lost a lot of flexibility and lost some skills that I used to find easy. What that means in real terms is I need to find somewhere and something to study so after scouring numerous course and finding ones that offer some of what I want, I am going to apply for BAPA (musical theatre), WAAPA (classical), WAAPA (musical theatre), and AIM (musical theatre).
- I need to stay at Kolbe till the end of the year which means I have to suck up the fact that I hate it here and deal with it. Unless I have another job to go to, this is my only opportunity to save some money for what is going to be a difficult year next year.
- Work more on my writing and start to produce some of the things I have written into some form other than just keeping it all to myself. Sure this opens me up to the potential for ridicule but until I try, I will only have failed.
- Stop looking just at what is going wrong and start to focus on what is going right. I actually have a lot of joy and happiness in my life I just get bogged down in petty crap.
I’m not pretending that I am not upset about missing out on this contract. It would have been a dream come true and would have made so many things simpler. I cried and cried last night when I thought of all that I had lost, but it is time to move on. I can sit here and mope about it or I can do something now. I can have something to look forward to again and besides this means that I can still play Hodel in “Fiddler on the Roof” at the end of the year and that is something I am looking forward to!
In light of the recent cavalcade of Very Important Things that Need To Be Done Now; this post by Dawn Michelle stuck a chord with me. It’s something I have worked towards myself, but never formalised. Read the (short) article for more details, but briefly:
- Do no more than 3 important things every day.
- Ask for help.
- Taking a nap is better than doing the project tired.
- Limiting your tasks creates space for play.
- Practise Yoga or Meditation
Emma and I have both noticed the Grumpalunkus has come to visit us more often than usual lately. It’s time to get back on the minimal and happy path again!
Image by lotus8(Flickr).
Australia day is my favorite day of the year. It involves the culmination of all my favorite things; having a barbie, listening to good music (although this years result on the hottest one hundred left a lot to be desired), spending time with good friends, fireworks, having a few drinks and generally just having a good day outside in the sunshine. So you can imagine my disappointment to discover that I had forgotten to ask for the day off and ended up landing an eight-hour shift at work which took a great chunk out of my Australia day festivities. Sure the pay was double time and a half but missing the day, in the end, wasn’t worth the money.
It was nearing the end of my shift and I had planned to have my last break to coincide with the beginning of the Australia day fireworks on the Swan River. I rushed down to the car park and along with a large group of hotel guests and other staff I watched the fireworks from the distance of the Burswood car park. It sucked.
The whole time all I could think about was how much I wanted to be down on the foreshore, having the fireworks explode right above me so that they filled up my entire range of view, having a few drinks and celebrating with friends. Instead I was here watching through trees, with no music, sober, relatively alone and missing half the show.
How many times do I do this? How many times do I do something I don’t want to be doing because I didn’t have the forethought to plan ahead or because I had somehow managed to convince myself that it was worth it for the money, or I thought it was better to inconvenience myself rather than inconvenience someone else despite what actually was at stake.
I would rather have missed that day at work and actually celebrated my favorite day the way I wanted to, to have the memory instead of the money.
Image by muffytyrone (flikr)
