6 Month Quest

Inspired by the main blog that I follow, Nerd Fitness, I am going to begin a 6-month quest.  Now, I've already stumbled.  I intended to begin this on July 1st, and have it end on December 31st.  However, I'm just going to recover from my stumble and start on the right foot.  This quest will begin today, 7/8/2014, and end January 7th, 2015.  I'll do an overview of what I accomplished then.

This quest will revolve around self-improvement of my whole life.  My body, my mind, and where they overlap, what I'll call my spirit.  I'll outline what I'm going into this quest intending to improve.  I expect that this will change as the months go on.

Body: 

One of the things I've been focusing most on recently has been the welfare of my body.  Over the past several months, I have gone from not working out and eating horrible lunches, to going to the gym 2-3 times a week.   As of this morning, I'm 212 pounds with what the scale says is 28% body fat.  Doing some simple math, that puts me at 59.36 pounds of protective casing covering my body.  That is quite a bit extra to be carrying around.  It's going to be a huge focus on dropping this down.

Stats:

Here are my weightlifting stats right now.  All I'll be looking for in this is an improvement, as I don't understand enough how I'd improve to give a realistic goal.

Bench: 145 lbs.

Shoulder Press: 80 lbs. 

Deadlift: 75 lbs.

Lat Pulldown: 105 lbs.

Row: 125 lbs.

Squat: 80 lbs.

In 36 minutes (30 minutes of activity plus 3 minutes warmup and 3 minutes cooldown), I can get 2.75 miles.

For the Fitness test, I fail out at 8:00 minutes.

My sitting heart-rate is 72 bpm.

Goal: 

My long term goal is going to be to drop down to 9% body fat.  After doing some more math, going by the numbers above and assuming I don't lose or gain muscle, I'm going to need to drop 44 pounds of fat to make this happen.  Optimistically, this is safely doable in the next six months.  The maximum recommended weight loss is 2 pounds a week.  However, I'm going to take into account holidays, delicious family dinners, and other unforeseen factors, and set my goal to be at 20% body fat by the end of this year.  That will require me to only drop 21.45 pounds of fat.  For reference, that's a little more than two and a half gallons of water that I'm carrying around on my body all the time.

Approach:

Here's how I'm going to approach this.  First, in regard to my exercise plan, I'm going to work on kicking up my workouts to 5 days a week.  I'll still be strength training 2-3x a week, but for the rest of the time I'm going to put a heavy emphasis on cardio.  Strength wise, I'm squatting 85 pounds 3x10, benching 150 pounds 2x10 + 1x10 @ 145, and in one 35 minute period, I alternated jogging 5 minutes and walking one minute, and manage to complete 2.75 miles.  Dietary wise, I'm going to work more on calorie replacement.  I've cut back my sweets a lot and my fats a little bit, but I can do much better.  On top of my daily lunch salads, I'd like to decrease the calories of my dinner and make sure they revolve more around vegetables and lean meats instead of cheeses and heavy carbs.  I'll work on documenting my diet a lot more, and then making tweaks where I see fit.  Go science!

Mind:

It took me awhile to decide what would be categorized as my mind.  I've come up with what I'm training in Lumosity, and crystal memory (What I know).  This will be a lot looser, as I haven't decided strict goals in this area.  As I work on the spirit portion of my quest, and understand my mind better, I will come up with my goals and approach more clearly.  As for now, my goal is to improve my BPI in Lumosity, finish my machine learning class, and take at least one more class.  I'm also not sure if this belongs here, but I'd like to work more on my writing.  Having confidence in myself and just getting stuff done.  More on this in the future.

Spirit:

This is where I'm hoping the most noticeable changes that might be viewed by others would occur.  Spiritually, I'm not very in-tune with myself.  I have plenty of processes that are inefficient, and my mind is usually uneasy/unfocused.  I'm going to work on mainly on attempting to understand myself better, and to improve on developing good and healthy habits.  This is also more or less undefined, but I do have an approach.

Approach:

Weekly, I'd like to work on a process.  At the beginning of each week, I'd like to meditate and determine which of my most commonly used processes could be evaluated.  I'd like to make a move toward thinking about how I do things, in order to determine if they are the best for me.  As the week goes through, I'd like to formulate a new way of doing the process, if I think that a new way would work out better.  Finally, at the end of the week, or during the next week, I'd like to reflect on the change and see if I want to keep my process the same.