Month: October 2023

The Michelin guide publishes their rating of the top restaurants in the world with the following definition:

(1) 1 star: A very good restaurant.

(2) 2 star: Worth a detour.

(3) 3 star: Worth a special journey – this could even mean traveling to a new company.

It is a simple way to illustrate how special a culinary experience can be.

I think of the national park system the same way. A county park is often a good place to go. A state park is likely worth a detour. And a National Park is worth a journey.

I’m not an expert at Michelin starred restaurants (fine dining isn’t our thing) and have no opinion about how good these ratings are. But I view National Park journeys with a Michelin star mental model. While all National Parks aren’t created equal (just as there is variance between Michelin 3 star restaurants), they’re the nature’s equivalent of a Michelin 3 star experience in my mind.

Since writing about Outlive two Sundays ago, I started sharing changes I’ve made in my life thanks to Outlive. Last week spoke to the first major change – intermittent fasting. Today’s is about another major change – to workouts.

Peter Attia breaks workouts into 4 categories –

(1) VO2 max or Zone 4+ workouts: Imagine going up a steep hill at full pelt and feeling breathless. This stretches our lungs to maximum capacity and is the type of workout that helps us build up our VO2 max.

(2) Zone 2 workouts: These workouts involve extended periods at an elevated – but not uncomfortable – heart rate.

(3) Grip strength: Our ability to deadlift weights. This needn’t be lifting weights above our heads – it is just a measure of our ability to grip a heavy weight and carry it.

(4) Stability: Our ability to maintain balance.

I learnt 3 lessons from the book that have inspired more changes –

(a) Stability first. I didn’t appreciate how important stability is. It is logical – stability prevents injuries. And, in the long term, the single best thing we can do for our health is prevent serious injuries. I’ve added some stability work to my workout every day.

(b) Grip strength. I’ve been gradually building grip strength in the past year with 12-15 min workouts 3-4 days a week. I’ve now made these 5 days a week with gradual increases to grip strength.

(c) Zone 2 + Zone 4 run. Finally, I’ve made a 12-15 min run every morning a priority. I’ve seen some of the research about the power of getting a few minutes of sunlight in the morning. And this run has been a breath of fresh air – no pun intended. I’ve started with a fixed circuit involving two steep hills nearby and I can already see marked improvement in my ability to run up these hills. I expect to add more variations in time – the goal is to maximize time in Zone 2 with at least one Zone 4/max sprint.

I don’t know how or why I didn’t do this before – but moving from 3-4 days of ~15 minutes of workouts to a ~30 min workout every weekday morning has felt great.

Additionally, I’ve been increasing time spent walking up and down stairs in the office – which has also added a surprising amount of time spent in Zone 2.

There are more additions I expect to come in time. As our kids grow up, more time spent outdoors actually results in a workout. A year ago, for example, a bike ride with the kids did not do anything for my cardio. But that’s changing quickly as they get older. And I’m also in the market for a regular game of football/soccer. There are many small changes coming together – all of them are having a large impact on my mental health in addition to my physical health. The key is to keep the momentum.

Every addition to the schedule has trade-offs however. Creating space for all of this means removing stuff that takes space. And, in my case, the trade-off has been following Manchester United. Following the news, catching up on highlights, and watching the news was a guilty pleasure. Breaking this 20 year old habit came easy once I realized what was at stake. I’ll write about this in the coming weeks.

“Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.” – Warren Buffett

# of people who actually love you/# of the people you want to have love you is a powerful success metric for life.

Few things are truly not measurable, few things are worth being measured.

We optimize what we measure. Pick wisely.

All these years later, I’m still amazed at the transformative effect the “What is a learning that has changed your perspective or how you operate” question can have on a catch up conversation.

Whenever we take a shortcut, we incur a debt.

In time, that debt always comes due. Always. Regardless of which aspect of our life. It applies to health, to our relationships, to the products we ship, and the people we hire.

The answer isn’t to never incur a debt.

It is just important to be conscious and thoughtful about which debts we choose to incur and overall debt load we carry.

A lesson I’ve learnt from years of reflecting on my emotions every day is to not overweight emotions from any given day.

Put differently, don’t make irreversible/hard to reverse/expensive decisions based on a day’s worth of data. For such decisions – e.g., buying something expensive, committing to a time intensive project, getting married, hiring someone, having a kid, or quitting a job – there is little upside from making a hurried decision. Especially one made on the heels of a bad day.

We all have bad days. Some days are monumentally bad. But things often turn around quickly enough – sometimes on a dime and often faster than we expect.

If things don’t look up after a bit of time (say 2 weeks), it is worth asking the hard question. If things look stubbornly bad after a month, it might be time to make a decision.

The key is to take the emotion out of key decisions. For most of us, that helps get rid of enough noise so we can pay attention to our gut.

Rash or “rage” driven decisions rarely lead to good long term outcomes. And overweighting negative emotions on any given day is a recipe for rash decisions.

I was out on a run the other morning pondering a challenging situation from the previous day. I was feeling low on energy as I thought about the situation.

Until I paid attention to the sun.

As I saw the sun rise, I found myself wondering – how many such problems has the sun been witness to in its lifetime?

My challenges were immediately put into perspective.

Then, I thought about how the sun just shows up consistently every day. It is there – always present, always reliable.

I realized that is all I should aim to do – show up and be there. In time, the challenges will work themselves out.

And they did.

I started intermittent fasting in earnest in January 2020. I’ve reflected on it a few times. A few reflections as that run came to an end 2 weeks back –

(1) I started intermittent fasting (IF) at a time when I was feeling unfit. Our kids were 3 and 1.5 and survival ranked higher than self-care on my priority list. I had a non-existent exercise routine and, as I was regularly short on sleep, I felt conscious about the fact that I wasn’t consistently making the best diet choices.

I’d read about the benefits of fasting and the idea of restricting meals to an 8 hour window felt worth a shot.

(2) IF did two things for me right from the get-go. It gifted me 20 odd minutes back in the day that would otherwise have gone to breakfast. It reduced the guilt I felt about my health and helped me feel better about myself. Win and win.

(3) Down the line, I realized that the biggest gift I had from this period was about my comfort with hunger. It helped me realize that I had a lot of capacity to deal with hunger. There were days – especially during the COVID lockdowns or during a particularly long day of work – when I fasted for nearly the whole day. It was no big deal.

I realized I had gotten into a habit of eating when the time came and regardless of how hungry I was. IF reminded me of the importance of hunger and the joy of eating when you are hungry. I think this idea had implications in my life that went well beyond food.

(4) I began wondering about whether IF was a prudent choice in the past months. As our kids have gotten older (life gets a lot better after the youngest turns 3), I have been getting back to a more consistent fitness regime. And as I’ve dialed up both the length and intensity of the morning workout, I wasn’t sure how well fasting played with this.

(5) I finally gave up on IF as one of the changes after reading Outlive. Peter Attia broke down diet control into 3 kinds – (1) Diet restricted (e.g., keto or low carb), (2) Calorie restricted (i.e., breaking down everything on your plate into calories – as athletes do), or (3) Time restricted (i.e., intermittent fasting). While each of these can help people reduce weight, he explained that he noticed that patients who were exercising were losing more protein with this approach.

He also shared some compelling data about protein loss as we age and the importance of ensuring we’re getting the protein we need.

That resonated with me. It was the source of the unease I was beginning to feel as I dialed up my workouts. And while I’m sure there are IF experts who will have found ways to make this work – e.g., by skipping dinner instead of breakfast – I’ve realized from my experiments that it doesn’t work for me.

So, I’ve substituted my missed breakfast meal with a protein shake with whey protein, spinach, and frozen berries. It works great – while more work than skipping breakfast, it still keeps things simple enough.

Overall, IF was a positive experience. It was a habit that helped me during a season of my life when I needed it. And, even as I bid goodbye to that habit, I’ve taken away lessons about simplicity and hunger that will stay with me.

The most efficient means of learning is to learn from others’ mistakes.

This is easier said than done. It is easy to hear or read about someone’s mistakes. To truly learn from them, we have to internalize their pain and think about how we might apply what they learnt when we’re in a similar situation.

The trick is in empathizing so strongly with their pain that we reflect on it as if it were ours.

Then, when the situation presents itself, we stand a chance of changing our behavior and, thus, learning.