Winter is a great time for me to pursue my health goals. I’m almost always in control of it since we rarely travel and I mostly leave the house for exercise or groceries.

That hasn’t been the case this year, as we’ve already had two trips where it was difficult to do a keto diet and also impossible to exercise the way I do normally. So out of what should be about a month of keto, I’m missing 6 days.

Still, it’s been a month, so it’s good to review. Just like last year, my first proper 100-day keto diet, the weight has come off quickly. It seems it’s about 3 pounds of water weight, and then another 3-4 pounds of fat and lean tissue. My 7-day weight average was at a high of 197.6, and that average is now at just over 190.

The travel interruptions have made it difficult to get a good rhythm for more than 2 weeks so far, and that means I’ve been trying to gain ketosis 3 different times already. Since that’s the hardest part for me – queue the keto “flu” – it’s not been nearly as easy as last year.

Just this week, though, I’ve started to experience some of the “lightness of being” and “brightness of outlook” that I had for a couple months last year, and I’m looking forward to more of that.

Calories In / Calories Out

I estimated I wanted to arrive right around 2500 calories consumed per day for this beginning part of the keto journey. For the past 8 days, I’m a bit above that at 2650.

My calories out have been at 3100 through yesterday. That should equate to about a pound per week of weight loss, which is in keeping with what I did last year.

Just like I’ve started to see the lightness and brightness in just the past few days, I’ve also seen my appetite lessened. For me, not feeling hungry is the absolute key to trimming down

I’m only looking to lose about 5 more pounds, and I think that will happen within the next month, putting me about one month ahead of the 100-day challenge.

Dry-ish January

In all the 6+ years of recording my alcohol consumption on a daily basis, I’d never once had a 7 day stretch with zero alcohol. I’d honestly never given that a thought, but the recent coverage of alcohol having only negative impacts on health made me think I should give it a try.

This January, I’ve hit zero on the 7-day scale twice. I’m glad it didn’t feel all that difficult, and I think I’ll keep my consumption a lot lower than in the past. I do enjoy having 2 or maybe 3 drinks on weekend nights, but I find I’m paying a much higher price for those in terms of mental acuity and well being. As I’m coming up on 53, it doesn’t feel like I can spare days to hangovers anymore.

Speaking of mental acuity, it does seem like keto has had a somewhat negative impact on my sharpness so far. I’ll write about the effect of keto on my chess rating next.

I was going to call this post “My 2024 Physical Goals”, but it just doesn’t feel right to me to call them goals. I’m just going to do what I know I need to do, and I’ll achieve what I want to achieve. There’s no striving necessary.

Anyway, here they are through April 18, 2024, my 53rd birthday.

I think I like my weight best at right around 190. My 28-day average weight is 196 right now, and I don’t feel just the right way.

I’ll track my calories and need to be eating an average of 200 less calories less than I have recently. The thing that’s going to make this 200 calorie deficit a little harder to get to is that I haven’t tracked them recently and don’t really know my starting point. I’m going to assume it’s been a bit over 2700 on average, so I’ll settle in at 2500 for a bit and see how it goes.

I’d like to drink a lot less than I have recently. When I was doing keto last year, my cravings for alcohol fell a lot, and I’ll expect the same thing this year. Hopefully, starting tomorrow, I’ll do a solid week with 0 alcohol and see how it goes. If I slip up during my practice week, no big deal. Anything less than 1 per day on average will be a win compared to this last week.

Besides my weight, I’ll focus on 3 things for the first 100 days:

1. Developing a stretching and movement routine.
2. Being able to run a 6:30 mile on a treadmill. (By the end of the year, I want to do a 6:00 minute mile, but it seems better to give this a little more time than 100 days.)
3. Taking a small break from heavy resistance training for recovery. I’ll up the core work as a replacement.

My legs are beginning the year in good shape. I also have a strong core, chest, and back. My arms, though, are a disaster. I need to see a doctor about my left arm, which shakes uncontrollably when trying to drink coffee especially.

My right arm needs a lot of help. I started last year with shoulder issues. I ended it with my shoulder being slightly better, but I developed tennis elbow, generalized inflammation, and a twinge in my bicep. I’ll schedule several massages for this, and I need to try acupuncture for the tendonitis based on a friend’s recommendation.

That seems like all the major stuff. I think I’ll accomplish my weight goal relatively quickly if I stick to keto. The other stuff will need some time and practice.

2023 turned into a great year for me, and I’m not quite finished celebrating. We have our annual New Year’s Day party for close friends and neighbors, so there will be one last hurrah before I start practicing for 2024.

With a birthday on the 108th day of the year, I “practice” what I want my habits to be for the first 8 days, and then I’ll be off and running for 100 days of “game time” effort until my birthday. I don’t need any resolutions with this. Just a few things I’ll do a little bit better each year.

Near the end of last year, when I was in-between celebratory holidays, I had what was a very strange thought for me for the first time in my life.

I felt in complete control of my body and had the certainty I could accomplish what I wanted to without anything that would be considered “effort” or willpower or motivation. Instead of needing to get “fired up”, I’ll just start doing it again, and I’ll get the results I want by my birthday.

Yes, there will be times when I’ll have to remind myself not to do a few things. I’ll make some mistakes, too. But overall, I’ll just cruise right to where I want to be.

For someone who has had lifelong depression and has “struggled” with weight loss and maintenance for the better part of always, that’s an amazing thought and feeling.

I credit the keto diet I used strictly to begin last year for this winning mindset. Throughout the rest of the year, I experimented with some different variations of it – with more protein specifically – and also had good results throughout the year.

Toward the end of the year, I definitely “let go” a bit and enjoyed some different foods I hadn’t had for the rest of the year. But during these last 5 weeks of the year, I didn’t feel like I was giving in to cravings, I didn’t get any extra delight out of them, and I don’t feel like I’ll miss them. I did it mostly for social reasons, and I had a nice time with family and friends without worrying about what I was doing.

That’s over now. I’ll still enjoy myself, but I’ll do it without the carbs and with quite a bit less alcohol. Close to none actually.

Ok, off we go into 2024.

We’re now a few weeks into 2022, and I have to say, it could have started better without the omicron variant of COVID. At least it’s not 2021 or 2020 anymore.

For the most part, I think this will be a great year, but there’s a long way to go for that happen.

This year, I’m already very close to the physical health goals I set out to achieve, and that’s the main thing I’m happy about right now. It’s January, though, and I’m never all that happy in January…or February or March either.

That brings me to what I want to share more about in 2022: depression and mental health. I’ve now been managing chronic clinical depression for almost 35 years. I’ve very rarely shared anything about it with anyone.

The reason I’ve decided to do so now is that I finally feel as though I’ve figured it out. That doesn’t mean I don’t have it, I won’t get it, or that I’m not suffering from the ravages of it all time. It’s just that I now have the information I lacked before to know why it happens to me, and maybe this information will be useful to others, as well

To get things started, I’ll say this. There’s absolutely no outside reason for me to suffer from depression. I had a good childhood. My parents were good to me. I had everything laid out in front of me in perfect order. I’m a white male American, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not offensive to talk to, be around, or look at from what I can tell.

I also have great internal drive and strong motivation to learn new things. By the time I was 15, I was a nationally ranked chess player while playing 3 sports.

I can’t say I was exactly *happy* at that age. I’m not sure anybody is at that age, but I was doing ok in the grand scheme

But when I was 16, depression just full on attacked me right out of the blue. I was mostly able to cope with it, but my trajectory in life was altered terribly. By the time I was 18, I really fell apart.

Like I mentioned, there was no good reason for it. Nothing “happened” to me.

Only in the past couple of years have I learned the cause of my depression is almost certainly the overproduction of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. I figured out around 15 years ago that acetylcholine has other negative affects on me, all of which I’ll talk about in future posts. But I missed the bombshell research papers in 2012 that linked acetylcholine and depression until late in 2019.

Suddenly, it all made sense. I’d figured it out. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s gone or subsided in anyway. There’s no surgery to reduce acetylcholine, and the state of medicine for it is severely lacking.

So I’ll talk about understanding it and also living with it. And I’ll talk about how it makes me a bit different on the inside. I’ve looked at it from just about every angle, and I’ve come to know that I’m definitely not the only one who suffers from this particular variation of depression. So maybe I can help others with it, and maybe I can help some caregivers understand better how it’s affecting their loved ones.

That’s it for now, but I promise I’ll be back with more. More about why I faint, why I sweat so much, why I have a great memory, why I exercise every day, why my dreams are so vivid, and why my left hand is starting to shake so much I can’t drink my coffee with it.

So, welcome 2022. Get your act together! We’re going to be busy!

It’s January 2, 2020. Have you broken your New Year’s resolutions yet?

I’d bet about half the people who make resolutions don’t even make it to Day 3. And that’s absolutely fine as long as they don’t give up or feel badly about themselves at this point.

For me, I start thinking about things I want to change or do better in December. I give a couple of them a try throughout the month. For Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, I try to keep them in mind just a bit, which helps to curb the excesses that normally happen at this time of year.

January for me is all about “practicing” resolutions in the form of habit-making behavior. For simple ones that don’t require much cognitive load, I’ll try to do them every day but don’t punish myself if I miss every now and again. That worked well for the habit of making my bed every morning, and now it’s hard to *not* make my bed.

For the more complicated ones that require my body to cooperate, I’m much more lax about the process. I’ll do them for a couple of days and then probably miss a couple. Then I’ll up it to a few more consecutive days. About 3 weeks into this process, I’m usually ready to go for it every day. By the beginning of February, I’m in full-swing.

My philosophy on making lasting changes is to keep the changes as small as possible on a day-to-day basis.

This is especially helpful during and after the holiday season. Most of us eat and drink too much in December. It seems our bodies quickly adapt to too much of anything. Trying to completely reverse course to nearly nothing to eat and drink on exactly January 1 is next to impossible because our bodies go into panic mode almost immediately. If you haven’t noticed, your body will almost always win over whatever will power you thought you’d saved up by not using it during December.

But if we just ease back to normal eating and drinking and then try to do a little less over the course of 30 days, our bodies don’t panic. We don’t have to do battle with our evolutionary instincts. Our bodies will agree to work with us instead.

Once we’re rolling at the end of January and into February, it’s simple to keep going at that point. And I promise you, what you can accomplish over the course of 11 months is far more powerful than what you can do just in January.

If you find this helpful or have any questions about it, feel free to leave a comment.

It’s Day 7 of my #500DaysTo50 project, and right on time, Vishy Anand, one of my chess heroes, turns 50 years old today.

I’m sure I first heard of Anand when he was 14 and I was 13. Back then, I thought I was on the path of becoming a grandmaster player, and I figured I had plenty of time to catch up to him on my way to greatness. 36 years later, it’s obvious I’ll never be as good as he was at 13 years old!

That’s one of the strange things about aging. Prior hopes and dreams simply must die – or at least be scaled back to reality. I still enjoy chess immensely, and I can be among the top 1-2% of all rated players in the world. But statistically, someone like Anand would beat me 100% of the time for up to 1,000 games in a row. That’s a big difference!

I first realized I didn’t have that special thing that makes for greatness when I had to chance to play 3 tandem games with Peter Svidler in 1989 as part of the run-up to the Goodwill Games. I was 17, and he was 12.

We easily won the first two games. In the third game, I couldn’t see the right way to conduct an attack, and we drew that one. Young Svidler was extremely upset. In perfect English, he went through a series of moves that I hadn’t even considered. He just saw the game in a different way. He had a genius for that it that I just didn’t have.

I do remember being mostly OK with that, even though it was clear at that moment becoming a grandmaster was just never going to happen.

Getting back to the present, Anand at 50 does give “old guys” like me great hope for our own future. Chess is a sport – yes, a sport! – for the young. He is one of only two World Top 20 players over 40 years old, and it’s just now becoming apparent he probably won’t be competing for the World Championship again.

If he can remain *that good* at 50, we can all still hope to achieve our own amazing progress at more advanced ages.

Here we are on Day 3 of #500DaysTo50. I’ve been trying at this “career thing” for over 25 years now. If I’m asked the “what do you do” question now, I’m answering that “I’m an entrepreneurial web developer and online marketer”.

That’s largely in keeping with how I’ve made my career. I formed my first company in 1996, my first successful company in 1999, and I’ve pieced together a bunch of other things since then based on my interests.

One thing that has been an absolute constant for me is learning new things. And I realize a lot of that learning has been based on fixing gaps that were exposed in embarrassing ways.

While running an online marketing agency, I didn’t have any real coding skills. One of our offerings was helping companies make sure their new websites were going to work well for SEO and SEM efforts. While we were great at that, we weren’t qualified to look through the actual PHP code our subcontracting agencies built for the websites. When our client’s site was due to go live, it turned out almost zero work had been done on the site, and we were able to launch exactly one page of the site.

I swore I’d never let that happen again, and I learned PHP and the LAMP stack to be able to make sure I could be better prepared. I now develop WordPress sites for clients as a result. They do very well with the search engines due to my previous experience.

Along the same line, in a business development meeting, I once said, “You can just give us access to your database, and we can build the sites automatically for you.” The CEO of the other company rightly replied, “Well, we’ll never give you access to our database, but we have an API.”

I almost shut down my company at that point, but I chose instead to learn more about MYSQL and other databases and how APIs operate.

But maybe I should have simply hired people who knew a lot more than I did to cover those weaknesses I had. I’ve spent about 5 years re-tooling instead, as I’ve always been disappointed that I couldn’t code. That’s meant a lot of financial sacrifices. Nobody I know would consider them smart career moves.

But that’s how I work, and I can’t see myself stopping. It’s a Sunday morning, and I’m going through a course on ReactJS for a couple of big projects I have thrown myself into. I have others helping along the way, and I’m able to make a few small contributions as I get up to speed.

It’s entirely possible my fear of public embarrassment has shaped my career in completely unreasonable ways. My hope is that the payoff in the end will be huge to make up for the lost time. We’ll see…

It’s Day 3 of #500Daysto50. I started this on Day 1, even though I’ve been suffering with a cold for around 10 days now. Honestly, it’s been getting me down more than a cold should. Why is that?

I’ll be talking much more – way too much more for some people – about acetylcholine (a powerful neurotransmitter), but we’ll start with an extra small dose now.

I suffer from an “above average” amount of acetylcholine in my system. (No reliable consumer-facing tests exists to prove this, but the evidence for that un-diagnosed diagnosis is super clear in my case.) That means all the regular symptoms of a common cold are heightened – runny nose, congestion, etc. In fact, most cold medicines contain anticholinergic properties, which suppress symptoms.

So you might understand why I missed a day, and you’ll hopefully understand that when I miss a lot of other days in this set of 500 posts, it’s almost definitely due to acetylcholine.

As I mentioned, lots and lots more of that to come…

As of today, it’s 500 days until I turn 50 years old. I promised myself I’d start writing more, so let’s get going. I’m not getting any younger after all. #500DaysTo50

I have a lot to say, and I’ll start saying it tomorrow. My hope is to make this a daily practice and to cover all the hard parts as well as the joys and lessons of a man of a certain age…

Wow…it’s been awhile. I’ve been so hard at work on client sites that I’ve completely ignored my own. That allowed an overwhelming amount of malware to build up in my account, and Bluehost shut me down. I’ve had to delete everything related to the style of the site, and now I suppose I’ll start over. Onward!