As always, though, before we get to this week’s links I again want to strongly recommend signing up for a free Feedly account. I get absolutely no kickback for promoting Feedly, but I am so appreciative of their product being the best RSS reader on the internet and I encourage everyone to use it. If you are using another RSS aggregator, please consider following JerseySmarts.com at http://www.jerseysmarts.com/feed/. If you are already on Feedly, then you can follow us by clicking here. Thanks!

Have you come across any great articles lately? If so, please share those links in the comments below! And one more time before you go – for those of you who love reading online articles, I strongly recommend considering a free Feedly account. You can follow JerseySmarts.com on Feedly or you can add us to your existing RSS aggregator. Enjoy!

As always, though, before we get to this week’s links I again want to strongly recommend signing up for a free Feedly account. I get absolutely no kickback for promoting Feedly, but I am so appreciative of their product being the best RSS reader on the internet and I encourage everyone to use it. If you are using another RSS aggregator, please consider following JerseySmarts.com at http://www.jerseysmarts.com/feed/. If you are already on Feedly, then you can follow us by clicking here. Thanks!

One more time before you go – for those of you who love reading online articles, I strongly recommend considering a free Feedly account. You can follow JerseySmarts.com on Feedly or you can add us to your existing RSS aggregator. Enjoy!

Taking a quick inventory of some major events that took place during my 2013

Without further adieu, here is a brief review of my 2013.

And there’s a brief review of my 2013. I stopped making resolutions a few years ago because I realized that they’re all eerily similar to one another. Thus I don’t have much to write about what I want to accomplish in 2014. Among my own personal goals are the same old, same old including greater financial stability, becoming healthier, continuing to improve professionally, etc. I guess one item that I really want to focus on in 2014 is reading more. I’ve noticed that over the last 5+ years I haven’t been reading as much as I used to read. One of the greatest ways to differentiate yourself from the pack at work and in life is to read more; and as a guy who was an English major in college (i.e. I like to read and write), I should be reading a lot more than I do right now. I expect that this particular goal will obviously be helped by the fact that I just signed up for a library card (and Lord knows what type of stories I’ll have from visiting the local library).

That’s it, folks. I hope you each have a prosperous and rewarding 2014!

Now, enjoy the links! If you come across any interesting links, then please share them with us in the comments section below.

Get your weekend started right by checking out these links. And if you don’t have one already, I recommend you open a new, free Feedly account. You can follow JerseySmarts.com with your new account or add it to your existing Feedly or other RSS aggregator account. Enjoy!

In an effort to reduce this mess, I wound up adding to it.

Oh – and all of those realities that prevented me from going to the gym at 5:45am over the last several years… well, they still exist and they are still a problem. I deal with it by getting a little bit less sleep each night and a lot less high quality sleep throughout the week. Again, no one has invented a workout routine made for the honestly busy person or the long commuter, so I just have to do what I can and deal with the consequences (i.e. general exhaustion).

Along with the vague goal of getting healthier, I’ve opted to focus on my health in an attempt to reduce the number of medications that I take on a daily basis. Those medications include 8 pills each morning, a shot in the stomach each morning, and then another pill each night. The picture above is a quick snapshot of four mornings’ worth of pills (minus the shot in the stomach). I should note that 3 of the 8 morning pills are optional (they are my brown-colored multivitamins and the orange turmeric pill). The majority of the remaining 6 pills that I take each day (and the shot) are all related to controlling my Type 2 Diabetes. Since I was diagnosed back in August 2009, I’ve been on a rather unsteady amount of daily medication – sometimes the number of pills has been higher, sometimes it has been lower. And other times the amount of medication that I’m taking changes based on other factors including my weight and level of physical activity.

And it’s those weight and physical activity factors where I can make a real impact on my daily pill intake. So I’ve been working out consistently for the last eight weeks and trying to drop weight, get mildly stronger again, and reduce the amount of medication that I take each day. I bet you’re wondering what the results of that activity are, right?

The results not good.

In addition to having a poor quality of sleep like I noted above, I’ve only lost about 10 pounds. Now granted, I understand that if someone else were to lose 10 pounds, they may have a massive celebration. I get it. For me and my physical state, though, I should have lost 10 pounds in water weight during the first week that I started working out. That didn’t happen. Instead, it took me about eight weeks to drop those 10 pounds and I truly feel that if I stopped working out for a week or so, then those 10 pounds would come rushing back. But that’s just the weight part of the equation. My bigger aggravation and bigger frustration right now is that in addition to only dropping 10 pounds, my doctor decided to increase my daily pills by 1 each morning starting last week.

After having worked out for so many weeks and feeling better and stronger overall, you can’t imagine what my face looked like when my doctor prescribed the additional pill.

What’s worse is that he prescribed it for high blood pressure. My response to that diagnosis was, “What?! I’ve never had high blood pressure. I’ve always had low blood pressure.” And that’s the truth. I (like so many other overweight people) have marveled each of my doctors over the years because my blood pressure has always been low. And then, randomly, my doctor tells me that my blood pressure is high because it tested at 118 over 94? Really? I was at the gym earlier in the day for goodness’ sake!

Very frustrating. For me, working out hasn’t really worked out. I don’t know what the problem is, but I know that buying into the bullshit in the healthcare and gym industries isn’t going to help – my doctor just managed to prove that outright. So where do I go from here? Well, in addition to not losing a substantial amount of weight, disrupting my sleep schedule, and increasing my daily medication I have to admit that I’ve actually enjoyed going back to the gym and lifting weights. My entire workout regime is based around lifting weights and I enjoy that aspect of working out. So I’m going to keep at it, but not because of any health benefits (clearly, I haven’t realized any yet). Instead, I’m going to keep at working out because it’s fun and waking up at that ridiculous hour is now a habit that I wouldn’t mind keeping for the foreseeable future. Why not?

There are dozens of different reasons for why I wasn’t able to get into the gym and maintain my health. And unlike the arrogant, self-important, idiotic blogs out there who go crazy telling people that they are their own worst enemy, I fully realize and accept that nearly every single one of my reasons for delaying the focus on my health was valid. I realize and accept this because I’m a realistic person who understands that not everyone is in a personal, professional, or financial position to drop everything and work out like a maniac every single day. If you read any “health” blogs that tell you that all of your excuses for not working out are bullshit, then I highly recommend that you stop reading that website and find a blog where real people congregate and talk about fitness. For my part, just as I realize that not all excuses are bullshit I also realize that many of the excuses that prevented me from working out in the past are no longer valid.

I go to a gym in the basement of the Monmouth Mall in Eatontown.

And since those restrictions are no longer in place, I recently started going to the gym again on a regular basis. I had to make some big changes in my approach to working out since 2004 and 2005. For example, I lost those 125 pounds by going to the gym once each morning for a swim and then again each night to do either cardio or weightlifting before taking another nighttime swim. Those were probably two of the healthiest years that I had as a young adult and even after losing 125 pounds I was still probably 80 pounds away from the government suggested “healthy” weight for my age and height. Unfortunately, the gym with the massive swimming pool is no longer in business and so swimming is not part of my new workout routine. In fact, I can’t even go to the gym after my workday is over because of other employment and volunteer obligations. And the truth is that the long commute and spending most of my day sitting behind a desk is absolutely exhausting, so I’ve switched my primary workout time to the morning… early in the morning. Very early in the morning! I always woke up early, but now I’m getting up at about 5:00am and leaving to go to the gym at about 5:45am which allows me to workout from about 6:00am until about 7:00am. I’ve found that the hour I give myself in the gym in the morning is all that I really need to get myself pumped up and going for the day.

On that topic, I’ve decided to change up my approach to going to the gym. For instance, instead of trying to find a few free moments to go and work out everyday, I’ve committed myself to going to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday only. Can I go on another day if the feeling hits me? Sure. Why not? Am I crazy if I can’t go on one of those three days each week? Well, I haven’t missed one yet so I don’t know. However, I know that I’ll be in Washington, DC for work next Monday and that I obviously won’t be able to go to the gym that day – so I guess we’ll see! Of course, I’ll probably try to use the gym in the hotel where I’m staying, but that’s another story because some hotel gyms are a total disaster.

The other big change that I’m doing this time around at the gym is I’m moving my focus off of cardio for now. I’m a big guy and one of the reasons why I’m a big guy is because I used to lift a lot of weight when I was in high school. At one point, I was bench pressing 385 pounds and squatting 660 pounds. No normal-sized high school student is able to put up those numbers – especially some 15 years ago when I was doing it before these silly supplements became popular. The only supplement that I needed was the pasta and meatloaf that my Dad used to make for dinner. That’s it! Anyway, I’m a big guy and every time that I’ve attempted to lose weight since those high school days I’ve hyperfocused on doing much more cardio than weight training. I’m not doing that this time for two reasons. First, I always enjoyed lifting weights. Maybe it was because I was always lifting a lot more weight than my peers or maybe it was because I enjoyed the pumped up feeling that you get after a good weight training session. But for whatever reason, I enjoy weightlifting and if I’m going to the gym at 6am, then I’m doing something that I enjoy, period. Second, over the last decade I haven’t been the most successful in losing weight by just sticking to heavy cardio with light lifting except for when I was swimming twice a day. Proper weight training not only builds and works out your muscles (a side effect of which is making it easier to move this big body around each and every day), but it also helps burn calories to aid in weight loss.

If you’re interested in seeing the weightlifting routine that I’m doing, then you can check it out by clicking here. If you scroll down on that page to the Version 2 workout, then you’ll see the routine that I’m using each week. Much different from the approach that I thought I was going to take back in June. What you’ll notice about the workout routine that I’m following is that it is a short workout. I try not to spend any longer than an hour in the gym between lifting the weights that are noted in that Version 2 workout and doing between 10 and 20 minutes of cardio (split with half at the beginning of my workout and half at the end).

Eventually, I’ll move on to an intermediate workout, but not yet. I’m enjoying getting reacquainted with the gym and the different machines that I haven’t used in ages. It’s fun. Once I feel like the gym is a second home again like it used to be, then I’ll begin expanding my “beginner’s workout” into a more intermediate routine (and beyond). And when that time comes I’m sure that I’ll write about it and discuss it here. For now, though, I’m content with the beginner’s routine so don’t look for that entry any time soon.

That’s the update for now. I’ve gone to the gym every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in September. The soreness that comes along with starting to lift weights is all gone and I feel stronger and more able to move around. I’m definitely not close to “mid-season form” (a reference for all of the current and former athletes out there), but I feel good; I feel much better than I did even just a month ago. Will I be able to maintain these Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning workout routines over the long-term? I don’t know for sure, but I know that I’m enjoying them right now. I have no intention of stopping the workouts, so I guess we’ll see how far this thing goes and whether it does anything to move the bar on my health. I have a doctor’s appointment next Friday – so we’ll know soon.

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!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this infographic – lots of interesting information to consume.