2023 Goal Accountability Phase 9 Closeout/Phase 10 Kickoff

Phase 9 of this year’s Goal Accountability is now in the books as well. The novelty of keeping the exercise being dialed in is now gone. I’ve manaed to keep that dialed in for another four weeks straight. There was some falting, both planned and unplanned, in the other metrics though.

Methodology

This is a quick refresher of how this works. The “Goal Accountability” method is to give myself five focus areas each day which help contribute to longevity. Technically it can be any five things but for me these have historically always fallen into the categories of: diet, sleep, cardio movement, strength movement, and mind exercises. For each day one is given a numerical grade like in school from 0.0 (F) to 4.0 (A). By keeping track of those things we can see how we do by week and over the year. To give myself opportunities for feeling the “new years resolution” type psychological prodding more than just once a year the whole year is broken up into four week “phases”. Therefore I can see how things are going over the year and at an approximately one month interval have an opportunity to start with a clean slate and “get a good grade”.

Phase 9 Closeout

As I wrote in the Phase 8 Closeout/Phase 8 Kickoff Post , this phase had some travel and holiday time in there which I knew I wanted to slacken things up temporarily on diet. It wasn’t that my targets were being slackened it was I wasn’t going to artificially constrain myself on trips and didn’t care if the grades suffered for a brief period of time. Knowing the travel was going to impact my schedule I also said I was going to prioritize getting my workouts in over sleep if necessary and that my sleep was going to be impacted to catch early flights etc. Everything else, all the exercise and brain health stuff, I need to keep dialed in though. The goals were identical to the previous phase but with a tweak in how I describe my diet target.

Therefore the goals for Phase 9 of 2023’s Goal Accountability were:

• Goal 1 (Diet): Eat a plant dominant Mediterranean diet averaging at least 90 grams of protein a day
• Goal 2 (Sleep): Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
• Goal 3 (Cardio Health): 30 minutes of focused cardio exercise (indoor cycling, running, swimming, etc), with one hard session per week minimum and a stretch goal of two hard sessions per week
• Goal 4 (Non-Cardio Health): 20-30 minutes of weight training, calisthenics, or yoga
• Goal 5 (Brain Health): No more than 40 minutes of social media per day in increments no smaller than 5 minutes at a times; meditate 15 minutes or more per day with a stretch goal of 30 minutes

  

First lets look at the aggregated daily grade. We can see there has been a marked drop off compared to the last several phases of high quality plateau. One day I actually had a grade that bottomed out at 2.00 for the day since diet was a goose egg, sleep was a goose egg, and the brain exercises was a 2.00. I haven’t had a grade that low since since I started that health reboot at the end of April. That grade would still be higher than most of the grades I got from the pre-reboot phase but still it is noteworthy. Looking at the individual grades you can see the times that I was on the trips and the times I had things more dialed in. How did that look in the per-goal chart over the four weeks:

I will again start off with the good news: I was able to maintain a perfect score on both the cardio health and the non-cardio health exercise goals. I not only hit my goals but I hit the stretch goals every week too. As I’ve written many times in the past, the exercise was the hardest thing for me to keep locked in. Even with the travel perturbations I was able to get a 4.00 (A) in both Goal 3 (Cardio health) and Goal 4 (Non-Cardio Health). Sleep (Goal 2) I was concerned was going to be dinged even more than it was in Phase 8. As it turns out I had a very small improvement in that score, going from 3.44 (B) to 3.48 (B). It is a not bad but not great plateau so I don’t want to get too comfortable with it being where it is but I knew it would be dinged a bit.

Brain Health (Goal 5) had no excuse for getting worse but it did, going from 3.84 (A-) to 3.54 (B+). I think it is worse than that though. The letter of the objectives was a legit 3.54 but the spirit of it is probably closer to a 2.0. What are the two pieces? No more than 40 minutes of social media and 15 minutes or more of meditation. Well, the objective is to have a quieter mind and to be less reactive. Meditation is about creating a good foundation of that sort of non-reactivity. The timeboxing of social media is about shying away from the constant stimulation that overly exercises the need for impulse control. Well, I may have done my meditations time wise but every since session except two were shit from a quality perspective. I may have had half decent success at dialing in the social media timeboxing but I have been substituting that with ever more consumption and distraction with YouTube videos on comparably aggravating current event topics. I’m going to need to think about how to really approach the brain health metric in the future.

Diet (Goal #1) was the part I knew I was going to get dinged the most and that I cared the least about taking the hit on. That is definitely how that played out. Diet went from a 3.56 (B+) to a 2.81 (B-). While this score is still way above what I had in my pre-reset period it is by far the lowest grade I’ve gotten on any category so far. I am for the most part okay with that because of how it unfolded but I’m not entirely okay with it. As I wrote in the last update, I knew that I would have indulgences on these trips. I’d be eating junky food. I’d be drinking a bit more than I should. I mean I was in New Orleas. I’m going to be getting plates of beignets for breakfast, something like jambalaya, gumbo, or po-boys for my other meals etc. I was going to be consuming a higher than average (for me) level of alcohol those days too. I never got wasted. The worst I got was a bit of a buzz but drinking throughout the day quickly adds up to consuming half a dozen to a dozen alcoholic beverages. That takes its toll on the body, and thus on these grades as well. I had hoped that I would be able to find some zero beers at some places, but they were nowhere to be found. I figured I’d just sip on soda water instead. The cheapskate in me felt a bit perturbed to be paying just a dollar less for a cup of seltzer water than a cup of light beer so I thought to myself, “Fuck it! Have the beer…” All of that isn’t that unexpected so not that disappointing. Some of the ding though came from my refound penchant for night snacking and having those night snacks being junk food not healthy food. I’m not beating myself up for it, but I’m remaining cognizent of which parts of this fall were intentional and which ones were not.

The aggregate grade across all of the goals for Phase 9 came in at 3.57 (B+), down from Phase 8’s 3.76 (A-). That is still a solid showing but it was my first below A’s score since I started my reboot.

Phase 10 Kickoff

With fitness status quo now being working out every day I’m looking at keeping that momentum going. However the amount of travel, mostly fun too though, this phase is substantially higher than in Phase 9. With a substantial fraction of this phase being family events and an extended vacation I know it will be a bit of a struggle to keep fitness dialed in. Sleep too is probably going to suffer more. Diet is going to suffer even more than that. The question is how bad is it going to get. For all the goals all of the objectives are going to stay exactly the same as they were for Phase 9. The big question is going to be how well I can keep the ones I need to keep dialed in dialed in and how much am I going to slack on the ones I don’t mind slacking (diet and sleep) for this brief period.

I have already done a preliminary calculation of how bad it could actually get. If my performance on these trips is comparable to my performance on the New Orleans trip, which is a non-zero probability, then I can expect to potentially have a Diet score of a D and a sleep score of a C+. I’m expecting that with schedule realities I have a high chance of not being able to ace the exercise goals but I think I can still hit an A- for both.

The Brain Health goal is the one I am most concerned with. As I wrote above I don’t think it is doing what I need it to do. But trying to change it with all of the flux around vacations doesn’t seem smart either. So for me the question is can I get the letter and spirit of that metric to align. Can I not just do my 15 minutes of meditation in some shit session but a higher quality one? Can I pull back on the YouTube stuff as well as meeting these social media objectives even if I’m technically not grading myself on them? That will be the challenge.

Therefore the goals for Phase 9 of 2023’s Goal Accountability is:

• Goal 1 (Diet): Eat a plant dominant Mediterranean diet averaging at least 90 grams of protein a day
• Goal 2 (Sleep): Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
• Goal 3 (Cardio Health): 30 minutes of focused cardio exercise (indoor cycling, running, swimming, etc), with one hard session per week minimum and a stretch goal of two hard sessions per week
• Goal 4 (Non-Cardio Health): 20-30 minutes of weight training, calisthenics, or yoga
• Goal 5 (Brain Health): No more than 40 minutes of social media per day in increments no smaller than 5 minutes at a times; meditate 15 minutes or more per day with a stretch goal of 30 minutes