Discipline – No Excuses

It’s easy to allow “life” to get in the way of maintaining your health. We often make excuses to rationalize taking the easy road. This can quickly lead to a downward spiral of unhealthy choices that is tough to recover from. The only way to snap yourself out of it is through having an honest conversation with yourself. You have to be brutally vocally self-critical, and you have to accept the fact that you control your situation, no one else does. If someone else controls your situation it is only because you are allowing it to happen.

I spent 15 years in Ecommerce, an industry that doesn’t stop. Several years in I found myself overly committed to the point that it was impacting my health. When I started out, I was around 180 lbs. and lifting/running regularly. Within a few years I had put on nearly 25 lbs. I somewhat hid the gains as I continued to lifted as I found time however I had horrible eating habits that were catching up with me fast. I didn’t eat breakfast, I got to work and ate from the dreaded wheel of death in the cafeteria and then I came home and would over eat with reckless abandon, paying no mind to my macro-nutrient intake. I was tracking my steps through my Fitbit application and found that as meetings piled up, I was only getting 3k steps per day on most days, I felt like I never left my office. I would leave work after 12 hours, go home, eat dinner and sit on the couch working until I went to bed, usually late into the evening. I would usually get woken up in the middle of the night for all sorts of reasons that were “emergencies” at my place of employment. At best I was getting 5-6 hours of sleep a night and I was wearing it like a badge of courage.

I made the all-too-common excuse to myself that I didn’t have time to invest in my fitness and nutrition. I told myself that I was doing well enough however it was just a lie. My transition to improving my health didn’t occur overnight and didn’t come by way of some abrupt revelation. It took a series of events and insights that ultimately led to me moving the needle back in the right direction.

Not many could match my commitment at work however that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. I was operating several levels down and not delegating the way I needed to in order to develop my team and free up valuable time. I realized this when speaking with one of my direct reports. I mentioned to him that I was up past midnight the night prior on a conference call regarding a downed piece of equipment that was preventing one of our buildings from shipping packages. As I finished telling him the story he stated “did you add any value on that call”. I sat back and thought about it and quickly realized, no, I didn’t add any value and likely being a VP on a call such as that I was more of a distraction. I realized that I needed to learn how to effectively delegate and I needed to set work boundaries, not just for my health but for my own sanity and the sanity of my team.

In 2017 my wife was bitten by a tick however instead of getting super powers she ended up with a myriad of allergies. Within a few months she was having allergic reactions to gluten, dairy, red meat, and a host of other items. All of sudden things that were a staple in our house (steak, ribs lathered with BBQ high sugar high fructose corn syrup sauce, pizza with extra cheese, lasagna, stuffed shells, etc.) were off the menu. We had to completely overhaul our eating habits. This happened nearly overnight and quickly led to us discovering cleaner eating habits as we scrutinized the ingredients in all the foods we were buying, something that we had not previously done.

My father-in-law ran a marathon in 2017. Competition is engrained in my DNA, so naturally I needed to run just one marathon so that I could put up an unbeatable time that would solidify bragging rights until he took a dirt nap. I ended up poorly training for and running the Baltimore City Marathon in 2018, finishing in 3 hours and 14 minutes. I cramped in both my hamstrings and calves at mile 22 and subsequently cursed out several dozen people that ran past me saying “you’re doing great”, as I hobbled the last four miles to the finish line. While my time was unbeatable in our unspoken challenge, I knew I could do better. Nine marathons later I had taken three trips to Boston and held a PR of 2:46.

My marathon running took me to the next level of training and nutrition to support my newfound ambition. To accomplish the goals, I set I had to make hard commitments to myself. I would get up between 4:00-4:30AM to train every morning before heading off to work. When I traveled for work, I would ensure the hotels that I was staying at had the equipment available to facilitate the training I needed to complete while I was on the road. I also used goggle maps coupled with driving the local roads to pre-plan out morning runs. There was no excuse for failing to execute my training plan. Additionally, I committed to hitting 10k steps per day, no matter what. This has led to me doing all sorts of interesting things over the years however I am currently on a streak of 855 days. I also made a commitment to eating healthy and getting sufficient sleep, usually close to eight hours every night.

Turning my health around didn’t happen overnight, it was an evolution over several years however in my 40s I feel better than I did in my early 30s. To achieve these results, you have to stop making excuses, set goals, and develop rigorous discipline to keep yourself on track. You have to set boundaries at work. You have to commit to getting the workout in, even if that means getting up at 4:00am. You have to commit to eating healthy, this starts with knowing what is “healthy”, as there are many foods that are masquerading as “healthy” that are pure poison for your system. Much of eating healthy can be accomplished by setting a specific day of the week for grocery shopping, reading the ingredients of the food you are about to purchase, planning out your meals for the week and doing meal prep to get a head start. In the end, there is no excuse for letting your health go, it is all within your control, you just have to have the discipline to execute the plan. I’m not saying this is easy, but pick somewhere to start and plant your flag. If you are sedentary, make a commitment to just start walking for 30 minutes five days a week and build on it. If you eat out seven days a week, scale back to four and work towards two.