Minimum Viable Fitness

Old joke:
First fish says, “how about all this water!”
Second fish replies, “what’s water?”

I know, not a great joke. But, actually, a pretty good reminder when starting a company.  And one I overlooked in the case of Composite, until Jess made some wise comments a few weeks back that helped get me onto a better, broader track.

I should first note that the startup/fish/water problem already gets a lot of coverage, at least in the San Francisco tech world.  There, 20-year-old tech dudes developing apps apparently gradually forget that there are other people in the world aside from other 20-year-old tech dudes developing apps, leading them to focus their energy solely on startups that solve their own problems.  Hence the spate of companies focused on becoming an Uber for laundry, and the like.

But, in fitness, the same kind of thing tends to happen.  From my observation, I’d estimate that about 5-10% of the US population sees exercise or fitness as a primary hobby, or a core part of their identity.  And I’d guess another 5-10% aspire in that direction, even if they’re not currently fully immersed.  And then there’s everyone else: the other 80-90% of the country who would like to be fit and healthy, but for whom that’s just one priority among hugely many, one obligation they can try to wedge into an already crazy busy schedule and life.

When fitness startups pop up, however, they tend to come from people already entirely surrounded by other people in that deeply fitness-committed 5-10%.  And so they essentially preach to the choir, solving the problem of how you might make that 5-10% even fitter, more deeply engaged.  (On rare occasion, companies do pop up targeting the non-enthusiast majority.  However, they tend to do that through savvy branding and messaging, rather than actually tailoring the underlying product or service.  Consider Planet Fitness, which has been hugely fiscally successful, yet whose members I would guess make even less forward progress as a whole than the already dismal results for gym members overall.)

Anyway, as I’ve been putting together Composite’s algorithm, I’ve too much been a water-ignorant fish, solely wearing my fitness-insider hat.  I pondered questions like: will members want to come in to the physical gym three or four times a week?  And what if they’re avid runners, and want to do some 5k or marathon training on top of that; how many times should they do that each week, too?

All of which is excellent and valuable and will be greatly appreciated by the insider crowd.  But the real question is, what about someone who can only commit to coming one time a week?  With the right guidance, maybe they’d also be willing to do two more 15-minute sessions at home during the balance of the week.  So given those parameters, for that person, can we still make a big impact?

Fortunately, I absolutely think we can.  It just takes a very focused, scaled down approach.  And the big upside of the AI-plus-human-coach model is that we can seamlessly go in either direction, personalizing to individual needs.  In fact, we can even scale up and down over time for the same person: maybe you have a busy stretch at work this winter, and want to pull back, but then in the spring, you’ve always wanted to do a Tough Mudder and you want to look good for a big upcoming beach trip at the start of the summer.  Perfect.  We can do any and all of that.  Or, at least, we should be able to.

And that’s what I’m working on at the moment.  Though the Composite algorithm is getting better and better, this week I went back to the drawing board, to start thinking about the changes and additions we’d have to make to expand it to really work for EVERYBODY, rather than for just the hardcore fitness few.  Sure, we may still start out with a beachhead model, bringing in the fitness-obsessed first and expanding out over time.  But just having that goal in mind gives me all kinds of ideas, things I want to work on, and small tweaks to the setup that I need to bake in from the start.

If I had to come up with a Good to Great-esque Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal for Composite, it would be to eventually make a statistically significant impact on health outcomes for the US as a whole.  And making sure we set out from the beginning asking how we’ll one day move beyond the NYC workout crowd is certainly the only way we even have a chance of getting there.

October 9, 2018

KISS Weight Loss –Habit 2

Last month, I shared the first in a series of super easy changes you can make to help lose weight: drink 16oz of water, 30 minutes before each meal.  In one study, over the course of 12 weeks, that one change was enough to help participants lose an average of 10.5 pounds.

Small, but powerful.  So let’s keep it going, with this month’s simple but effective habit!  Which is:

Use a smaller plate.

Thanks to something called the Delboeuf Illusion, your brain perceives the size of a thing in comparison to its surroundings.  As a result, people tend to use the size of their plate as an unconscious cue as they pile on food, covering, say, 2/3 of any given plate as what seems like a reasonable serving.  Thus, when you use smaller plates, you end up serving yourself less by default.  According to one study from Cornell and Georgia Tech, moving from a 12-inch plate to a 10-inch plate led people to serve themselves 22% fewer calories.  Do that just at dinners over the course of a year, and you’ll lose about 10 pounds!

That’s it.  So now you’re up to two habits: drink a big glass of water a half hour before each meal, and then eat those meals on slightly smaller plates.  Crazy enough, those alone should start to make a real difference over the next month.  Tune in four weeks from now for dumb but impactful KISS habit number three!

October 6, 2018

Wu Wei

There’s an old joke in the meditation world: don’t just do something, sit there!  And, for me, I think that’s the crux of why meditation has been helpful.  By my nature, I bias towards action – I’m constantly in motion, trying to push life forward, trying to make things happen.  And, often, that’s great.  But there are also a slew of times when not doing, when stopping and pausing and listening and waiting are actually a far better idea.

In Taoist philosophy, it’s called ‘wu wei’ – doing by not doing.  And though I learned about it some twenty years ago, I feel like I’m only just now really starting to get the hang of it.

For example, last week, Jess shared some of her current life frustrations with me.  And, in standard boy-mode style, I immediately set out to try and find solutions.  After all, if she was telling me about things, it must be because she wanted me to fix them.  Or maybe she was blaming me!  So I leapt into frenetic and defensive action, feeling like I needed to figure things out, stat.

Then, after a day or two, the wiser part of my brain finally clicked in.  And it reminded me that she wasn’t sharing frustrations because she thought I would make them disappear – she was sharing them because she wanted me to listen and care and understand.  And in my solution searching, I had actually done a pretty mediocre job of those far more important things.  So, better late than never, I apologized to her for not getting it at first.  And then I told her that I really did understand how she felt and that if I were in her shoes I’d feel the same way and that I thought it sucked and that I loved her and was there for her and on her team.  Which, not surprisingly, made her much happier than what I was doing before.

Similarly, over the past couple of years, I’ve had the usual array of athletic tweaks and injuries – most recently, left knee; before that, right hip.  In the past, I was quick to start puzzling through causes and solutions, would head to physical therapists or doctors, and would generally make myself crazy trying to deal with the situation.  But the past few times, I’ve been more measured.  Time may not heal all wounds, but it sure seems to heal a lot of them. For the vast majority of non-catastrophic athletic injuries, just stopping doing stuff that hurts, and then waiting it out, is actually wildly effective, so long as you’re willing to be patient, and give it the weeks or months required.

So, wu wei: definitely something I’m working on.  As the world throws things at me, these days I’m trying to give myself at least a moment to pause before I react.  And, increasingly, I’m finding that the best reaction is more or less no reaction at all.

October 3, 2018

Unetaneh Tokef

This year, I helped lead the Jewish High Holiday services I attended (on top of blowing the shofar, as I’ve done in a number of past years).  So, more than I would have been otherwise, I’ve been immersed in the Jewish liturgy over the past few weeks, leading up to Rosh Hashanah and then Yom Kippur.

In the midst of that, I learned that one of my friend’s mother had passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly.  Which made the prayers I was practicing, most of which revolve around life and death, judgment and compassion, seem all the more relevant and real.  Even so, I felt unprepared to comfort my friend in his loss, much less to really contemplate how fragile my own life is, like the lives of the people I love.

Though the High Holiday services are built on the same framework as a regular Saturday Shabbat service, they include all kinds of expansions and ornamentations.  Among those additions, there is one prayer that I’ve thought about in particular in the past few weeks, especially in light of my friend’s loss: Unetaneh Tokef.  Since I first remember hearing it some thirty years back, it has always seemed to me the central expression of what the holiday is about.

Though much of the service is considerably older, Unetaneh Tokef was written only about a thousand years ago, by Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, Germany. Apparently, Amnon was a close friend of the bishop of Mainz.  Close enough that the Bishop was concerned for the Rabbi’s soul, and insisted that Amnon convert to Christianity.  To buy himself time, Amnon asked for three days to consider.  But once he reached home, he became distraught about having given the impression that he might be willing to betray his god.  So he spent the three days fasting and praying.  And when the time ran out, he didn’t come back to see the bishop.

Eventually, the bishop had the rabbi rounded up, and demanded an answer.  To which Amnon replied that, not only would he not convert, he’d rather his tongue be cut out for having said he’d even consider it.  Furious, the bishop told Amnon that his sin wasn’t in his tongue for what he’d said, but rather in his legs for not coming back as promised, and he ordered Amnon’s feet to be chopped off, joint by joint.  They chopped off his hands, joint by joint, too, asking after each cut if Amnon might reconsider.  And, when he didn’t, he was eventually sent home, along with his amputated limbs.

When Rosh Hashanah arrived a few days later, the Rabbi asked to be carried to the front of his synagogue, where he recited one of the central prayers of the service – the Kedushah – recited a poem he had composed – Unetaneh Tokef – and then died on the spot.

Three days later, Amnon appeared in a dream to another Mainz Rabbi, the famed Kabbalah scholar Klonimos ben Meshullam, teaching him the text of Unetaneh Tokef, and asking him to send it out to the Jewish world so it might become part of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers.  As indeed it has.

Anyway, even for non-Jews, the prayer itself is kind of amazing and haunting as just a piece of literature, with descriptions of how the great ram’s horn will be blown, how a “still, thin sound” will be heard, how even the angels will tremble. Amnon writes that god will make “all mankind pass before [him] like members of the flock. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall [he] consider the soul of all the living [and] inscribe their verdict.”

But it’s in the middle of the prayer, set to a mournful melody that gives me goosebumps every time, that he really gets going, describing in detail the fates we might face:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning.  Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

Tough stuff.  Though as the rabbi eventually advises at the denouement of the prayer, “through repentance, prayer, and charity, we may reduce the severity of the decree.”

I’ve always been fascinated by that phrase.  Amnon doesn’t say that repentance, prayer, and charity will nullify the decree, just reduce the severity.  Yet when you’re talking about death, it seems like a pretty binary outcome: you die or you don’t.  And as I read the prayer, that’s Amnon’s point – eventually, all of us do die.  Yet by trying to return to our best selves, trying to be our most transcendent, trying to do the greatest good we can in the world, we can at least change the ‘severity’ of our eventual death.  We can change what our life means along the way.  And we can leave a lasting legacy to the people we love.

September 24, 2018

Lech Lecha

“God does not tell Abraham his destination, because the goal cannot yet make sense to someone who has not experienced the journey. Arrival is not the essence. The lesson that Abram will pass on to his descendants is that the key to the journey is the journey.” – Rabbi Wolpe

On this Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, I’m wishing a shana tova umetukah – a good and sweet year – to all of my readers, Jewish or not. May you enjoy the journey in the year ahead!

September 12, 2018

KISS Weight Loss – Intro + Habit #1

In the gym world, while the first week of January may be the busiest time of year, the start of September is a pretty close second.  Summer winds down, people come back to work, the school year boots up, and everyone generally seems to be ready to buckle down and make some change in their lives.

All too often, however, people set out on that road by making a bunch of big changes.  They completely revamp their diets.  They start working out five or six times a week.  And for a few weeks, it goes like gangbusters.  But by a month in, almost all of them have fallen off the wagon, reverting back to their original habits.  Because – as both the research and most people’s direct experience shows – large-scale, all-at-once change is extremely difficult to sustain.  And much like tooth-brushing, fitness habits really on help so long as you’re actively keeping them up.

But here’s the good new: there are a bunch of small changes that are surprisingly effective, and highly sustainable.  I’ve been researching a ton of them for Composite, and I’m going to start sharing them here, too: simple things you can do that make a disproportionately large impact on your fitness and health.

To encourage you to actually put these suggestions into use, I’ll be posting them one a month.  That gives you thirty days to actively focus on one behavior, baking it into unconscious and automatic habit by the time you start on the next one a month later.

Here we go.

===

KISS Weight Loss Habit #1

This one’s as simple as it gets:

30 minutes before each meal, drink 16oz of water.

That’s it.

But according to a recent study in Obesity, just that single, stupidly easy intervention allowed subjects to lose an average of 10.5 pounds in 12 weeks.  (!!!)

I’ll skip over the science (which hinges on tricking your brain’s satiety sensing system), and stick with the simplicity theme.  A big glass of water, a half hour before you eat.  That’s it.  But that alone is enough to jump-start serious weight loss.  Try it for a month, and then check in again for the next one.

September 9, 2018

It’s Always Sunny

So here’s a fun fact about me: my skin is impervious to suntan lotion.  Well, not exactly impervious.  But when I put it on, five or ten minutes after it absorbs into my skin, about 25% of the suntan lotion reappears: a layer of white streaks and patches that needs to be rubbed in a second time.  It’s happened since I was a kid, and apparently it’s a genetic trait, as my mother has the exact same issue.  Still, it’s not something I think about frequently when I’m not at the beach, which is how today’s adventure unfolded.

As I’ve mentioned previously, these days I’m neck-deep in research for Composite, trying to compile the largest possible list of evidence-based health and fitness habits for our algorithm.  To that, with end-of-August vacation time upon us, I recently dove into some papers around sun exposure, trying to tease out the balance between skin cancer safety and the importance of vitamin D, along with a bunch of other similar questions.

Somewhere along the way, I found a study about the impact of suntan lotion use frequency.  Essentially, it tracked two groups: one who used suntan lotion every day, regardless of weather, and another who used suntan lotion only when they thought it was needed.  After a couple of years, the daily use group had dramatically fewer new wrinkles, brown spots, and fine lines than the as-needed suntan lotioners.

As I’m on the verge of 40, and old enough to start worrying about such things as wrinkling (and, based on some of my grandparents, I’m pretty sure I’m en route to full prune), the study struck a chord.  I decided switching to a daily moisturizer with some SPF protection in it would be cheap insurance.  So, I picked some up.  And, this morning, I applied it before heading out the door.

Sadly, in standard style, somewhere en route to work, it seems a good portion of the suntan/moisturizer then reappeared.  Which I didn’t realize, despite the puzzling ten minutes of people either averting their eyes or staring at me confusedly as they passed.  It wasn’t until I arrived at work, and headed to the bathroom to pee, that I discovered I was mangy with strange white patches.  The anti-suntan lotion superpower strikes again!

So it seems I’m back to the drawing board on this one.  Perhaps, with the right kind of suntan lotion, I’d have less of an issue; I know from beach use that the spray-on kind doesn’t tend to reappear, but it does leave me looking more glossy and shellacked than is probably suitable for daily use.  For the moment, it seems I’ll just have to risk the wrinkles.

September 4, 2018

Mouse & Bunny

A couple of years back, Jess bought a box of Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies – basically, organic goldfish crackers shaped like rabbits – one afternoon while we were shopping at Whole Foods.  Later that evening, we sat down on the couch to watch a movie, and she brought out the Cheddar Bunnies, to snack on while we watched.

Halfway through the movie, I asked her to hand me a few.  At which point, she looked into the box, then over to me with a guilty smile; she’d unintentionally eaten the entire box.  I told her she’d probably turned into a Cheddar Bunny herself after eating that many of them.  And, from then on, the nickname stuck.

Shortly after, in response, she tagged me Mighty Mouse, I assume due to the trifecta of small size, big ears, and super(-ish) strength.  And ever since, in texts, emails, and notes, we usually address and sign off as Cheddar Bunny and Mighty Mouse.

Jess has a talent for finding awesome greeting cards.  In the past she’s given me great ones for even minor holidays.  (For Halloween, one with a ghost on the cover that read, “You’re my boo!”; another with two skeletons – one in a tux, one in a wedding gown – holding hands: “Till death do us part is for quitters.”)  But inspired by the nickname, she’s also managed to somehow find, and give to me even on random, non-holiday days, dozens and dozens of mouse and bunny-themed cards.  (“You’re wonderful,” with a bunny dressed as Wonder Woman; “You’re somebunny special”; or, for my birthday, a grey bunny holding a slice of birthday cake: “Oh no, another grey hare!”)

As I realized I could never keep up with finding equally excellent cards in response, I decided to go an alternate route, one requiring just raw time spent rather than card-sourcing skill: I started drawing cards for her myself.

Lest that sound overly impressive, I should first caveat with a note about my artistic abilities: you know how, when you’re in kindergarten, you start by drawing stick figures, and then you move on?  Well, I didn’t.  I’d like to think of my style as sort of “outsider art”, though in truth it looks more like something you might buy at a local fair to support an after-school program for severely mentally-disabled children.

Nonetheless, I have enough enthusiasm to trump my lack of talent.  So, after doing a handful of mouse and bunny cards for our anniversary, and Christmas / Chanukah, I went all out for Jess’ 30th birthday, doing 30 cards for the 30 days leading up to it: Mouse and Bunny out for a run, at dinner together, strolling hand in hand through Central Park, etc. And they were a hit.

So, since then, I’ve been sending hand-made cards to the rest of my family.  Some, like my Father’s Day card to my dad, stand alone. (That one illustrated all the generic ‘dad gifts’ my brother and I have managed to skip over the years, whether ties, golf clubs, or bottles of Scotch.)  But other cards extended the world of Mouse and Bunny to include the rest of my family.

That was aided by the fact/weird coincidence that my brother calls his wife “goat” as a term of endearment.  (I have no idea about the origin, but it predates the bunny/mouse thing by several years.)  Therefore, I already knew how to draw my sister-in-law as an animal.  And, since my brother and parents are related to me, I obviously could just draw them as mice, too (just with different hairstyles, etc.).  Then there’s my niece and nephew, though that was also pretty easy to solve: goat parent plus mouse parent equals goat-colored mouse, or mouse-colored goat.  Thus, for my parents’ birthdays, I was able to draw them cards with the whole family (everyone at the beach for my father, at the ballet for my mom), which were also a hit.

Inspired by those successes, a month or two back, I started working on a next-level attempt: a Mouse & Bunny children’s book for Jess.  Though there’s obviously a series waiting to happen here, I started with Mouse & Bunny Go for a Hike.  I loaded it up with inside jokes, small visual gags, and details I knew she’d appreciate.  And though it took me waaaaaay longer than expected to complete, I think the time definitely paid off.

Not, admittedly, in the quality of the drawing itself, which is as bad as ever. (And given Dan Ariely’s research on the so-called Ikea Effect – “people who have created something themselves come to see their amateurish creations as similar in value to expert creations” – it must be even worse than I’m self-assessing.)  But, at least, it paid off in terms of what I hope it communicated to Jess.

As I’d otherwise have trouble putting into words how mind-blowingly, heart-overflowingly wonderful and awesome and amazing she is, or what a perfect match she is for me, those 20-some terribly illustrated pages at least show how far I’m willing to go to try and communicate that love to her nonetheless.

August 26, 2018

25

Since my freshman year in college, I’ve been using more-or-less the same approach to setting goals: I start from 25-year big-picture ones, and then trace backwards from those to 10-year, 5-year, 1-year, 1-quarter, and 1-month goals in turn.  Then, each Friday, I chart out the following week, figuring out what I need to accomplish over the next seven days to stay on track towards the 1-month goals, knowing that in turn keeps me aligned all the way back up.

Through the years since college, I’ve started companies and worked in jobs across three or four different industries, garnered a ton of life experience, and weathered ups and downs of all sorts; that, in turn, has often shifted my shorter-term goals.  But the longer-term ones—the 25-year goals in particular—have stayed remarkably stable.  So much so, in fact, that the last time I really re-thought them from scratch was when I was about 25 years old.

A month back, I turned 39.  In my usual style, I spent a bunch of my birthday thinking about the year behind and the year ahead.  And it suddenly dawned on me that, when my next birthday rolled around, the putative date for those old 25-year goals would then be just 10 years off, becoming my new de facto 10-year goals.  Which meant, in turn, that I needed a new 25-year set.

Starting from 40, those 25-year goals would take me all the way to 65.  And though I suspect I’d likely be one of those guys who never retires, I would hope by then to be at least well on my way towards leaving whatever legacy or positive impact I can on this world.  So, I’ve been spending a little bit of each day thinking through exactly what I hope that legacy or impact might be, what goals I’d like to set that make me push and stretch for the 25 years that (hopefully) lie ahead.  Much like the effective corporate BHAGs – big, hairy, audacious goals – described in the classic study Good to Great, I’ve been looking for goals that both excite me and slightly scare me.  And I have some, by now, just starting to take shape.

Still, I’m giving myself all the way until the end of this birthday year before I call them final.  If I’m hoping this set holds equally steady for the next 25 years, that probably requires at least a full year’s consideration up front.

August 23, 2018

Plus or Minus 2.5

Here’s a depressing fact: the average American gains about two and a half pounds each and every year.  Which means, over the decades, you can probably expect to slowly balloon up to increasingly ill health.

Of course, there are a slew of ways you can counter that upward trend, from healthier eating to walking more each day.  But there’s one hugely effective approach that people often overlook: building some muscle.

Unlike fat – which just sits there – muscle is metabolically active.  Which means that, just by existing, muscle burns calories.  A pound of muscle, in fact, burns about 10 calories a day.  And while that may not sound like much, it adds up surprisingly quickly.  Over the course of a year, each pound of added muscle burns off a pound of fat.

Thus, if you put on just five pounds of new muscle in one year, you would burn off five pounds of fat annually after that.  That’s enough to not only offset the average 2.5-pound gain, but also to help you lose 2.5 pounds each and every year instead.  In other words, as the decades added up and everyone else slid downhill, you’d be getting ever healthier, and looking increasingly good naked, instead.

Normally when I mention this to anyone over even just 30 years old, they tell me they’re too old to get started on lifting weights.  But as a great recent study showed, men in their mid to late 90’s, beginning strength training for the first time, still managed to build substantial strength and put on new muscle mass in just twelve weeks.  So, really, you don’t have any excuse.

In fact, research seems to be showing that strength training positively impacts pretty much every aspect of health and is possibly the single best way to ‘die young as late as possible’.  Yet, for whatever reason, the majority of exercisers still tend to pick up cardio training first (along with maybe some stretching), while overlooking strength training entirely.

But if you do what the majority does, you’ll get what the majority gets; and, here in America, in terms of bodyweight and general health, that’s probably not what you want.  So, buck the trend, and add in a couple of short strength training sessions each week.

+++

A quick addendum:

In discussion with friends here today, I was reminded that there’s often confusion about what actually constitutes strength training, and about how people gain muscle.  To make a long story short, it boils down to something called ‘progressive overload’ – essentially, lifting incrementally more weight over time.  If you can press ten-pound dumbbells overhead today, and are still pressing those same dumbbells in six months, you haven’t gotten any stronger, and you won’t gain any of that fat-burning, health-promoting new muscle you want.  Instead, you need to build to twelve then fifteen then twenty-pound dumbbells over future months to see results.

That’s hardly a new revelation.  It dates back at least to the 6th Century BC, when Milo of Crete became the most famous athlete in all of Greece after winning the gold medal in wrestling (the big deal sport at the time) six Olympics in a row.  He was a farm boy and had trained by picking

July 28, 2018