I need to get a handle on what, exactly, it is that I’m going to hyperfocus on. Being in “good health” is a goal that can be approached in a general sense (i.e. regularly working out, eating fewer calories) or something that can be approached in a very specific way (i.e. going on a specific diet, using a certain training program in the gym).

I’m not sure which direction I’m going to go in yet – general or specific.

I might start eating a lot more of this stuff if I go on a Paleo Diet.

On the one hand, I’ve been incredibly successful with a general approach to “good health” in the past. As I’ve noted on this blog time and again over the last decade – I once lost 125 pounds over a 6 – 8 month period. I’ve since regained about 100 of those pounds, but I initially lost that weight by taking a very general and yet time consuming approach to getting healthy. When I lost that weight I did a lot of cardio, lifted weights in a unorganized manner (i.e. I knew what I was doing with the weights, but didn’t have set days for lifting certain body parts or regions), and went on a low calorie diet. That was it. No tricks and no gimmicks. In essence, my successful approach boiled down to “eat less, workout more.”

Pretty powerful stuff.

This time around, I don’t think that I’ll have the free time that I once had to take such a general approach allowing me to just “workout more.” Since I realize that I need to efficiently use my time if I want to achieve better health, I’ve spent the last few weeks unofficially toying around with certain specific approaches to getting healthy. There are three specific approaches that I’ve attempted and each of them have some merit. They are listed out below.

The Paleo Diet
The first specific approach that I toyed around with was the paleo diet. If you don’t know what it means to “go paleo,” then you should know that this diet focuses on returning to our roots as cavemen by eating more fruits, vegetables, and meats versus grains and processed foods. But more importantly, this type of diet all but removes the highly processed foods from a person’s diet and returns the person to eating natural, organic foods. Personally, I’ve been trying to eat organic foods more often than not over the last decade so I’ve got that change down already. And because of making this change over the course of the last ten years I’ve seen significant changes in my digestive tract. For example, my digestion of organic milk versus processed milk and organic apples versus apples grown in a genetically modified way is unbelievable. In other words, I’m already a believer in eating organic!

Nerd Fitness
The second specific approach that I toyed around with isn’t necessarily a diet program, but rather a workout program that comes with some guidance on how to eat better (in a paleo style, actually). There is a website called Nerd Fitness and the kid who runs it – Steve Kamb – produced a training program called the Rebel Fitness Guide. I’ve been reading Steve’s blog for a few years and I like it. He manages to successfully blend a nerdy type of entertainment in his writing along with an inspirational message about getting healthy. As a writer, I can tell you that successfully blending these two paradigms is a particularly hard task to achieve – and Steve does it well. I went through a cycle of the Level 1 Rookie workout (the beginning of the program) and I liked it. What drew me to the workout was that it doesn’t necessarily require you to go to a gym since most of the movements can be done in the privacy of your own home, out in the yard, a public park, or wherever you feel comfortable. And while the freedom of the workout drew me to it, the fact that it is achievable made me stick with it for the entire cycle.

DDP Yoga
The third specific approach that I attempted was utilizing the DDP Yoga program. For those of you that don’t know what “DDP” means, it stands for Diamond Dallas Page – a former professional wrestler. DDP created this yoga workout program to help him recover from back surgery that doctors said would put him out of the ring for good. Before you ask, the program has nothing to do with professional wrestling (though he does make professional wrestling references from time to time on the videos). What drew me to the DDP Yoga program was the fact that real people are achieving real success with it and they are posting their successes on social media sites. I’ve looked over the results that these folks are achieving and they are impressive. I tried using DDP Yoga a few times and the workouts were achievable and I felt nice and loose after completing the routines. Improving my flexibility has always been a goal of mine and DDP Yoga might help me achieve that goal.

And there you have it, folks. On Monday I wrote about the two areas that I would consider hyperfocusing on once my student loans are repaid later this summer. Then on Wednesday I wrote about why I chose to hyperfocus on improving my health of obtaining a doctorate (right now… I’ll get that doctorate at some point or another!). And above you have the completion of this three part series where I share some of my thoughts about three specific approaches that I am considering taking to achieve the goal of being healthier.

Stick around at JerseySmarts.com – the next adventure begins soon!

Our health is that ever-present aspect of being a human that we cannot get away from because we are an active participant in our health each and every day of our lives. If we don’t focus on our health, then we run a very real risk of becoming unhealthy. And being unhealthy manifests itself in so many ways. For example, I stopped sitting in booths at restaurants a number of years ago because I just don’t fit comfortably in them any more (same goes for those chair/desk combos in most college classrooms). Further, finding good clothes with a decent fit and modern style is nearly impossible for someone who is overweight. Another constant reminder of not being in good health is the variety of pills that I take on a daily basis to combat my type 2 diabetes. And, of course, there’s the guy staring back at me in the mirror every morning.

My next big hyperfocus will be improving my health – it has to be!

Reading Monday’s entry and the beginning of this entry makes it seem pretty apparent that the next big hyperfocus for me is… improving my health.

However, this is a much different goal to achieve than paying off a financial debt and the methods by which I might achieve this goal are altogether different than the methods by which I was able to accelerate repaying my student loan debt. For instance, I could live frugally to stockpile additional funds so that I could afford to make a larger payment on my loans each month. There’s no easily equatable variable that I can manipulate to achieve being a healthier person overall. Sure, I guess you can make an argument for calories being a somewhat equatable variable, but money is more of a set variable where you can reasonably predict the amount coming in and the amount going out over a long period of time. Calories can change by the day – even by the hour! – and calculating them is not an exact science.

The inexact nature of achieving “healthiness” is another one of the apprehensions that I have about diving into this thing head first. With money there is a level of exactness that you can achieve. In the American monetary system everything is built off of a base of ten. It’s a very easy system to understand and master. However, with health there isn’t an easily understood system that you can grasp and master. Instead, you’re tasked with mastering a series of lifestyle changes with the hopes that they become habits. You’re tasked with learning about food and exercise both in general and in certain specifics. Health isn’t an exact science and because it’s not an exact science it has the potential to be a very frustrating area to hyperfocus on.

Yet so many great things spring from being in good health. I have minor aches and pains now that I shouldn’t have at this age. Sometimes, I get odd internal feelings (not the emotional kind, the physical kind like pains in my stomach) that I know must come from having a destabilized system. Each morning I take a handful of pills and I’m the type of guy who doesn’t even like taking an aspirin when I have a headache because I don’t like putting foreign entities into my digestive system. Ridding myself of these inconveniences (and so many more that I won’t write in this space right now) is reason enough to hyperfocus on becoming healthier.

I’ve got a few ideas on what I’m going to do to hopefully achieve a healthier state of being. Stick around the blog for this Friday’s entry where I’ll write about some very specific approaches that I’m considering to help me improve my health. I’ll see you all back here on Friday!

The full repayment of my student loan debt should be coming up in the next few weeks. And if it’s not in the next few weeks, then it will certainly occur at some point this summer – and hopefully sooner rather than later. Those of you who have been along for the ride via this blog, my twitter feed, and through our personal discussions know that I’ve spent the last few years hyperfocused on repaying my student loan debt. There is a lot of discipline and new skills that come along with successfully hyperfocusing on one aspect of your life. With my student loans, for example, I’ve crafted some exceptionally useful spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel to track my income and expenses. These aren’t your run of the mill spreadsheets that one can find for download off of any financial website. Instead, these are highly customized spreadsheets that I built from the ground up and that I’ve been using day in and day out for years to track my income and expenses, short and long-term financial goals, and debt repayment.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I would have been able to quickly and successfully decimate my student loan debt without the organizational help and long-term planning provided by using these spreadsheets on a daily basis.

The big decision – which direction do I go in next?

When you set your mind to completing a long-term goal, your mind will use your innate abilities to adapt your environment to help you achieve that goal. For me that innate readjustment was spending more time doing long-term financial planning through the use of highly customized spreadsheets and highly customized budgeting. And I couldn’t be happier with the end result (no student loan debt!) of this hyperfocusing.

Now, when it comes to hyperfocusing I have a decision that I need to make. When I sit and think about what my next big hyperfocus might be there are two items that come zooming to the front of my mind. The first is improving my health and the second is completing a doctorate. I don’t list these as first and second because that is how I rank them; either of these two items could be the next big thing that I hyperfocus on. Below are some of my ideas on each of these items and since I listed health first and a doctorate second above, I’ll give my thoughts on the doctorate first and my health second.

First, completing a doctorate would allow me to accomplish my long-term academic goal. As a high school student, I thought that I would eventually go on to become a lawyer. During that process, I would have obviously needed to earn a juris doctorate and thus would have obtained a doctoral degree in that manner. As we already know, though, I ultimately didn’t go in the direction of being a lawyer. Instead, I earned a master’s degree and I’m in the process of completing a post-master’s certificate. Frankly, you can’t get many more education credentials than what I have right now… except for a doctorate.

And even with these various certificates and commendations, obtaining a doctorate is still a very real goal of mine and one that I think about somewhat frequently. Not only does a doctorate open up the possibility of becoming a full-time professor, but there is a unique air of certainty that comes from someone speaking as a doctor versus speaking as an “expert” in a field. And since most “experts” have doctorates anyway, enrolling in a program to obtain one wouldn’t be out of bounds for what I do in my work.

Second, I could hyperfocus on improving my health. Whether we like it or not, our health is that one thing that we can’t get away from in our lives. Of course when we do get away from it our lives typically aren’t as robust as they could be or they just downright don’t last as long as they should. For each of us, our health is that thing we see in the mirror each morning and that thing we are somewhat consumed with when engaging in and interacting with the outside world. Let’s be honest, folks. We live in a very superficial society where a person’s appearance matters. You can be a brilliant scientist on the verge of curing cancer, but if you’re fat or generally out of shape, the superficial American public doesn’t give a damn about you. That is, they don’t give a damn about you until you can do them some good by providing a cure for their sicknesses!

I am confident that once I am no longer hyperfocused on repaying my student loans, I’m absolutely going to focus on one of the two items above. It’s either going to be the full completion of a doctoral program or a sincere focus on improving my health. Stick around the blog for this Wednesday’s entry where I’ll let you know which of the two I’ve selected. See you then!

Since I joined the gym I’ve worked out over a dozen times, which isn’t so bad when you consider that most days I am out of the house from 7:30am until about 6:30pm and that I have a two hour daily commute which is completely exhausting. In fact, the two hours that I spend in the car are the two hours that most other gym-goers would spend working out, but I don’t want to start a digression about my commute.

In my trips to the gym, I’ve primarily focused on aerobic exercises – riding the bike and walking on the treadmill. I’ve only just begun to do some light weightlifting and not the type of weightlifting that I used to do in high school where I was trying to gain mass and strength. Nope. The weightlifting that I am going to focus on this time around will solely focus on maintaining a certain level of strength and wellness.

Unfortunately for most of the readers of this blog, I don’t have many funny gym stories just yet. The gym I am going to is not staffed at all times so there are occasions when I get to the building and the lights are off and no one is there except for me. I guess that’s a type of oddity, but I assume that a bunch of other gym-goers at this location have experienced the same thing.

In terms of overall health, I feel good, but I wouldn’t say that I feel completely different from before I began working out again in March. That’s probably because I’ve been attending the gym sporadically and not on a set workout regime. Once I change my workout habits to be on more of a schedule, I think that I’ll feel a physical change. I have lost a few pounds since I started working out, but nothing major to brag about.

As I spend more time at the gym, though, I’m sure I’ll eventually have stories and craziness to tell you about – so stay tuned!

The purpose of the annual fall workshop is to focus on the various keys to success for each of the chapters in the province. While we generally have a broad array of presenters speaking on a variety of issues, this fall we took a different approach. We invited Josh Orendi from Phired Up Productions, LLC to come in and run the entire workshop.

I’m pleased to say that Josh and Phired Up hit a home run in New Jersey!

Some of the feedback regarding Josh and his outstanding Phired Up presentation:

He really had an effect on the chapter here at FDU and we’re already putting into effect his recruiting methods. Also his methods turned the little wheels in our heads and we are tweaking some of our previous ways of doing things into a combination of his system and our own to make it work best for the chapter.

This is just one of the bits of feedback that we’ve gotten from our undergraduates. From an alumni advisor’s perspective, the Phired Up team is easy to work with and presented no problems in setting up this workshop. And while I’m going over the workshop, the team from Rowan University’s conference services was great to work with, too. I highly recommend working with both Rowan University and Phired Up!