Lesson Eleven: A sound mind requires a sound body
Lift? Run? Walk? HIIT? Whatever, just do something and be consistent
One of the hardest things to remember when you are working in a fast paced environment is that even though it feels like you are running a marathon at a sprint’s pace, you actually have to find time to do real running. Or weightlifting. Or, better yet… both.
But the process of building a sound mind and body doesn’t end there. At a Silicon Valley company worth its salt, there is usually free food everywhere. Not just food at mealtimes but the offices have micro kitchens with every sort of conceivable snack on hand. You can run all day, lift all night but if you spend a lot of your day in the micro kitchen eating whatever the snack of the month is and your lunch is made up of two bacon wrapped hotdogs (a very popular delicacy at Facebook when I first started) and a mountain of french fries it is not going to be very successful at keeping you healthy.
The benefits of exercise are pretty obvious. There are studies showing that exercise can help people sleep, avoid depression, minimize anxiety, improve memory and focus. Basically, saying the exercise is good for you isn’t just an opinion, it is a fact backed up by numerous studies looking at many different angles of how exercise impacts human beings.
Likewise, there are many studies that tell us which kinds of foods are best for us to consume. I am not talking about blog posts highlighting the latest fad with pseudoscience justifications. I mean real studies and information provided by registered dietitians that can help us all stay healthy, where healthy isn’t seen as “skinny.”
Luckily for you, I screw this up all the time and have a lot of experience with getting back into shape after gaining way too much weight. I remember when I started at Facebook and they warned us all about the “Facebook Fifteen.” Many new employees found themselves packing on weight within the first few months after they joined the company. I decided that I would set a goal of losing 15 lbs. I weighed 206 lbs on day one, so I focused on getting to 191 lbs.
I started working at Facebook in May 2010. I reached 191 lbs on August 20th, 2010. And that is pretty much where I called it good and started eating like an idiot again. And that is probably the most important aspect of any healthy eating and exercise plan, it has to be something that you can consistently follow. A lesson I am still struggling with to this day.
I recently started a new plan with the help of a childhood friend who runs a crossfit gym. I am at 203 lbs these days but have weighed as much as 230 lbs at some point between when I reached 191 lbs and my current 203 lbs. I am gonna tell you all the things I have done in that more than a decade in hopes that some of it seems like something you might want to try. The times I was the most productive in my life were when I was exercising and eating in a healthy way, so you have that to look forward too.
First, I made some pretty personal confessions about substance abuse in lesson four of this series. The single greatest thing I ever did for my health was stop drinking alcohol in any form. No beer, no vodka… no nothing. I did not undertake a 12 Step Program, but I encourage people who struggle to stop drinking to go to whatever counseling or sobriety program that makes sense to them. I saw very clearly that my problem was ruining my life and I stopped drinking by leaving any room where anyone was drinking and sitting by myself with a book.
I took this course of action for six months. I made sure to tell my wife Rachel that it wasn't personal. I told her I would much rather sit with her and have a drink but that I knew that if I did, I would drink way too much and ruin the evening. And I also knew that if I didn’t isolate myself I would take that drink. It was a long six months, let me tell you.
Alcoholism takes many forms and mine is probably the easiest to get around. I was not a guy who had to drink all day everyday, I was a guy who once he had one drink it was off to the races and the binge was on. I first told myself that I would only quit drinking for a year, and on the one year anniversary I drank again. Two weeks later I was exactly who I had always been, a stuttering drunk if I even took a sip of whiskey. In my case, abstinence is the only cure and it got easy to give it up once I realized that this was the only way.
Another side effect of drinking for me was that when I drank, I ate like an imbecile. Alcohol lowers your inhibitions and makes it difficult to be disciplined about eating. So not only would I pound an entire case of beer, drink a whole bottle of vodka or whatever, I would also eat a gallon of ice cream, an entire pizza or a package of microwavable burritos. When I was at Square, having recently stopped taking Adderall at Facebook, I gained a great deal of weight. While this wasn’t all alcohol related, it was alcohol fueled. It was so bad that I had to go get a new suit for our company holiday party because I weighed 230 lbs.
Second, I have at times been a frequent pot smoker. For whatever reason, this one has been harder to kick for me. As I write this it has been a while since I have smoked pot. My intention is to follow the path that I did with alcohol because pot has all the same network effects on my heath that alcohol does. I smoke pot and then I am crushing an entire box of twinkies. I do not think I am alone in this.
Some people can function drinking, pot smoking and doing whatever else they do. Heck, I was able to keep trucking while mixing those two with other substances so I get it. The truth is that drinking alcohol and smoking pot are bad for your health directly and lead to behaviors, like overeating, that cause further problems. For this reason, I believe it is best to avoid them.
The best running shape I have ever been in was when I decided to sign up for four half marathons in a year. I have never been crazy enough to go and do the whole 26.2 miles and that is probably because of how rough it was to go from the couch to my first half marathon, not to mention the year I ran four of them.
The truth is that I knew I needed to get in better shape and my brother suggested having the goal of a race to run as fuel I could use to go from sitting on my butt to getting more physically active. It worked great and I pushed myself to do something I had never even considered realistic. When I ran the actual race it was a lot easier than I expected, if not altogether easy.
If you think running is your thing here is the training plan I used to go from the couch to the first race. I started 13 weeks before the race, so including race week the whole thing took 14 weeks start to finish. That seemed to be an appropriate amount of time to avoid injuries, the biggest threat to stopping you from completing your race. Another thing I did to make sure not to hurt myself was that I always walked for five minutes before and after a training run of any distance.
On Monday, I ran for 10 minutes, not really caring much about how far I went. Tuesday was a day off. Wednesday I ran for 20 minutes. Thursday was a day off and Friday was 15 minutes. This pattern continued for the first 12 weeks of training to where I eventually got to 30 minutes on Monday, 50 minutes on Wednesday and 40 minutes on Friday. I only focused on continuing to move for a set length of time during the week, not any specific distance.
On Sunday of every week I would focus on completing a certain distance no matter how long it took. The first Sunday I ran 2 miles. The following Sunday I ran 3 miles. By the fourth Sunday I was up to 5 miles rounding out the first third of my training. The following week I pulled back to 4 miles, getting up to 7 miles by the end of the second third of my training. The last third of my training I went 6 miles, 8 miles, 10 miles and then dropped all the way back to 6 miles.
I took the next week off entirely. The week of the race I ran my regular Monday 30 minutes, Wednesday 50 minutes and Friday 40 minutes. On the Sunday of the race I felt strong and ran the 13.1 in 2:01:33. That is the fastest time I ever completed any of the six half marathons I have run. The rest of them I didn’t really care how long it took and just cruised along, usually hitting about 2:15.
If running in a race that is 13.1 miles long is not the kind of thing that will motivate you to move, but you’d like to lose weight like I did at Facebook, here is what I did at that time. I ate eggs, nitrate free bacon and fresh fruit for breakfast. I looked at my plate as if it was split into thirds and the eggs filled one third, the fruit one third and I grabbed two pieces of bacon.
I had a morning snack that was a piece of fruit and yogurt about two hours after breakfast. At lunch time I ate a salad of romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and grilled chicken with balsamic dressing. I didn’t use any specific portions but I put it in a regular sized bowl and filled it to the top.
After lunch I would go to the gym and get on an elliptical machine for 45 minutes. I drank a lot of water. I had no sweets, not even diet soda. For dinner I ate whatever we were having at home, even if it was pizza or burgers and fries. I am, obviously, not a dietician so I can’t tell you how balanced this meal plan was. I think it worked because I cut out a tremendous amount of calories and ate nothing out of a box for most of the day. But, whatever the reason it worked to get me down to 191 lbs, the lightest I have been in the past 20 years.
The next time I let myself balloon up to an unhealthy weight, I decided I wanted to get buff. Running was not really appealing because I was at 230 lbs and my knees hurt when I tried to run. I remembered reading about the difference in density between muscle and fat and how muscle drove your metabolism while you weren’t even doing anything. I also grew up reading comic books religiously and my brother and I couldn't get enough of pro wrestling. I figured it was probably not realistic to be Batman or Hulk Hogan, but maybe I could be the Green Arrow. Figuratively speaking of course, I had no intention of donning a costume and shooting trick arrows at super villains.
Luckily I had recently met a former Army sniper with a real penchant for weight lifting. I sent him my goals and he wrote out a plan for me that included a ramp up. He also introduced me to a new nutritional concept of macros, where my entire diet was a caloric target for what I wanted to weigh and then a ratio for the amount of grams of protein, fat and carbohydrates that I should eat every day. I made a spreadsheet to track what I was eating and I was once again on my way.
The weight lifting workout was quite simple and made up entirely of compound lifts. These are exercises that require a lot of strength but don’t target any specific muscle like a curl or triceps extension would. This was lifting for strength and meant to hit my entire body with only five exercises. I needed nothing more than a rack, olympic plates and a barbell to complete the program.
The exercises I used were Back Squats, Push Press, Flat Bench Press, Bent Over Rows and Deadlifts. To ramp up I started at a very low weight for each. For Squats and Deadlifts I loaded the bar with two 25 lbs plates for a total of 95 lbs. For Bench Press, Push Press and Bent Over Rows I added 10 lbs on both ends for a total of 65 lbs.
When I did my workouts I started by doing five sets of 5 reps for each exercise, leaving a one minute rest between sets. I made it my goal to add 5 lbs on all exercises at each workout for as long as I could. After about a year I was able to Push Press 135 lbs, Bench Press 225 lbs, Bent Over Row 185 lbs, and I could Squat and Deadlift 315 lbs. While I didn’t exactly look like a superhero, I felt great at 205 lbs.
As with every other time I got myself into what I considered good shape, I let life circumstances distract me from staying at it for a longer period of time. I kept eating the macros as if I was still lifting weights and slowly my weight grew back up to 220 lbs as I had zero activity going on to balance out the calories.
So there it is in a nutshell. It doesn’t really matter exactly what you do. Set some goals, whether that is running a 13.1, losing 15 lbs or trying to grow your strength to match that of the Green Arrow. Pull together a plan for healthy eating, whether that is replacing one meal a day with a salad or diving deep into macros.
The key is to follow the plan consistently for as long as possible and when you lose your way, take heart in the fact that a jabroni like me has struggled with being overweight and out of shape multiple times and found his way back to some semblance of fitness. And looking back, each time I did I not only gained strength and endurance, I also became much more focused and clear minded. A sound mind goes hand in hand with a sound body.