It’s a new year and of course one of my resolutions is to get back into shape. The very thought of putting something like this at the top of your resolutions is stressful. 80% of people who put going to the gym as their New Years resolution abandon it by the second week of February.
But I’m determined to not be part of that 80% dropout rate which means I not only need a gym but I need one that’s convenient enough and offers the things I really want in a gym. Continue reading
It seems like New Years last year went by without any notice for me. I made no resolutions and thanks to all the fun I had at the Rich’s, I don’t really remember much of the celebration haha.
To be honest I’ve never really been someone that relied on New Years resolutions in order to make good changes in my life. In my mind it’s really just an opportunity to set yourself up for failure that’s so expected, when it happens there is no consequence. With a failure rate of 92%, it should come as no surprise that I don’t put much credence in them.
That being said, I am making a conscious effort to do a few things different in 2016 that I failed miserably in accomplishing in 2015. Continue reading
I loved the idea of these sunglasses. I was hovering over the “Buy” button on a pair of Ray Ban folding tortoise sunglasses when I saw these were going to be in my June shipment from Birchbox. So imagine my excitement that I was just about to save around $150!
Update: Birchbox contacted me and are fixing me up! More at the end of this post.
And then they came, in a neat green box and they looked every bit as good in real life as I’d expected. Bigger lenses than the Ray Bans, not my typical style, but considering the price difference it seemed like a worthy replacement.
I should say that these Birchbox sunglasses are also not polarized, have plastic, not glass, lenses and aren’t quite the quality of an Italian sunglass. But for $30 (their retail price), it’s hard to argue against affordable, stylish summer shades. Sadly it wasn’t long before I realized these shades were a bit too shady, and in the worst of ways. Continue reading
I’ve been a member of Birchbox for quite some time now. For $20 a month they ship to my doorstep a box full of products marketed to men. Generally speaking I get one physical product (sunglasses, tie, socks, whiskey stones, leather coasters) that meet or exceed the cost of the entire box. Along with that you might get one full-sized health or beauty product followed by sample sizes of three to five more products.
All in all it’s a decent deal, especially if you’re looking to discover new products. These shipments typically come in at a $30-60 value. However, recently I discovered a heavyweight contender in this space by the name of Bespoke Post. At $45 a month it costs more than twice the price of Birchbox but is it worth it? Why yes it is.
The May Bespoke Post Refresh shipment is a stuffed bag of swag!
My first shipment came today and boy was I surprised. Where Birchbox gave me sample sized items, Bespoke Post had full size and travel size items. On top of the fact that the items were so plentiful and large, the bag they came in was worth the cost. The entire box was worth the price of two three nearly four shipments! Let’s break this down. Continue reading
It’s been just around two months since I started the Four Hour Body lifestyle, more precisely the slow carb diet portion of Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Body book. First thing every morning that I am here in San Francisco, I weigh in to see my progress. Some days my weight is up, most times it is down.
I do this in the morning, religiously and on the same scale, so that I can get a consistent measure of my progress. During my trips, which happen far more often than not, I have tried weighing myself on other’s scales with mixed results. Seems my friends and family’s scales are either really nice (I’ve been up to ten pounds lighter on theirs!) or mine is really mean.
Nevertheless, I present to you, my chart of weight loss.
As you can see, there has been a pretty dramatic loss in weight. Twenty-two pounds to be exact. The first week on the diet I had a sharp drop in weight. Most diets work this way as your body is shocked into a new regimen. The first two spikes upwards are from the “cheat days” where you get to eat whatever you like. The much slower drop in weight later on the graph represents my two weeks traveling.
I made a silly decision to start my slow carb diet the week of Pride. But I was tired of putting it off for this reason or that. Family in town, traveling, still having to live in hotels, etc etc.
I knew that this wasn’t going to end any time soon and that putting off this experiment would do me no good. Even if it meant I couldn’t enjoy the food and drinks of Sunday’s Pride Parade here in San Francisco.
This morning I woke up, went downstairs and did my weigh-in. Down twelve pound! Almost too good to be true so I did a scale reset and tried again. Twelve pounds, right there. Wow. Here’s how I did it.
Last week, I went to the grocery store and purchased a weeks worth of food, slow carb food. If you don’t know, here is how the diet works.
There are three things you have to eat at every meal. You can mix this up a bit with spices and different ingredients here and there. I recommend you buy the book. You do this for every meal, six days a week. On your seventh day, your cheat day, you eat whatever you want and as much of it as you want (don’t go too crazy). Continue reading
I first heard about Tim Ferriss‘s new book, The 4-Hour Body, through commentary on a podcast from the TWiT network. It was during the show that I checked out the Audible version of the book. Unfortunately the reviews were pretty horrible for the Audible version. Not for the lack of quality content but an actual lack of content. A six hundred paged book abridged to just a few hours of audio.
So it came to be that I completely forgot about the book, until I was listening to another podcast, Nerdist Podcast #73: Tim Ferriss. Nerdist is a weekly podcast about all things nerdy and standup comedy related hosted by Chris Hardwick, Jonah Ray and Matt Mira (wow, look at me name drop).
Ferriss was on to talk about his new book, which coincidentally two of the Nerdists hosts were already following. The idea of the book was intriguing enough the first time I heard about it, however, learning all the gritty details, experiments and science really got my interest going. Before the podcast was even over I purchased a copy from the iTunes iBook store.
The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, fixated on one life-changing question:
For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results?
I’m only a few chapters in but I can say it is interesting and I can’t wait to finish it and start putting the new knowledge to good use. The premise of the book is basically that most of what you know about working out, dieting and getting “healthy” is wrong. Not in that calories vs calories out is a lie but rather it is a misconception. And so seem to be a lot of the other things I thought I knew about nutrition.
I’d love one of my nutrition-fanatic friends and readers to give this book a read and tell me what they think. Things like how drinking grapefruit juice before consuming carbs helps burn the carbs instead of storing them. That cinnamon with sugary foods helps more efficiently process the sugar. That fructose is bad, when I had always been told that it was a better sugar compared to sucrose.
Back in February I started working out again, after nearly a one year hiatus. I was in pretty bad shape. The first week of training left me a miserable mess of pain and stiffness. By the second week, and with the help of USP Labs Jacked, I was pain free, running faster and lifting more.
In a month I went from running a 20 minute mile to a 10 minute mile, doubled my lifting abilities in nearly every category and increasing my overall energy and feeling of wellbeing. It was awesome. But then I went on a business trip for a month and broke down my workout a bit. Then there has been the mold infestation that kicked us out of our apartment and took almost all of our belongings, which has really slowed me down.
Tag on the fact that I wasn’t seeing any real results in weight loss, only in performance enhancement. It wasn’t long before I began to lose my motivation.
So in the spirit of Ferriss writing a book about his exercise experimentation, I am going to dedicate a series of posts to my own exercise experimentation using his book as my guide (as well as my personal trainer). So here goes. Let’s see a 20lb fat reduction with muscle gain and let’s make it happen soon! No one wants to spend summer inside right?
