2023 Goal Accountability Phase 5 Closeout/Phase 6 Kickoff

The 30 Day Health Reboot was about getting focus on the various health metrics that I track each day and grade myself on. While I’ve been very consistent in measuring these things going back to 2017 when I came up with the concept, I haven’t been very good at holding myself accountable to them. That makes the whole “goal accountability” part of this exercise a misnomer most of the time. It hasn’t been a total waste though. I probably would have gotten my act together for even less time than I did over the years without it. But I want to keep doing better. Having a closeout and kick off of each of the “phases” was something I always intended to do but never did. This is my attempt to bring that in line too.

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 5 Closeout

My 30 Day Health Reboot Challenge began near the beginning of 2023’s Goal Accountability Phase 5, exactly three days in. The goals I set out for the challenge are the grading goals for the whole period:

• Goal 1: Eat a Blue Zones inspired plant dominant diet averaging at least 90 grams of protein a day
• Goal 2: Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
• Goal 3: 20 minutes of focused cardio exercise (indoor cycling, running, swimming)
• Goal 4: Daily calisthenics or yoga
• Goal 5: 15 minutes or more of meditation

The first two days of the month were outside of the challenge and were not great. I had whiffs on Goal #4 and Goal #5 (calisthenics/yoga and meditation) mixed scores on Goal #1 and Goal #3 (diet and cardio/movement), but a good score on Goal #2 (sleep). The more detailed write up of the challenge can be found in the summary post which I won’t go too much into depth on with respect to details here. From a numerical standpoint though this was a very solid performance.

No surprise if I felt the need to do a health reboot that I wouldn’t have had things dialed in leading into it. The veritable step function in the daily grades graph is a testament to that. There are several perfect scores with some hits in there for when I either didn’t get enough sleep, didn’t eat well, or a combination of the two. Since I got perfect scores on the other three goals that is the only place those daily grades could be dinged.

Of course the phase didn’t start off at the beginning of the reboot so the actual recorded grades for all metrics was less than 4.0. Every single one though showed marked improvement though. As I wrote in the reboot final update post I feel like I have a lot of momentum in all of these things going into Phase 6

Phase 6 Kickoff

With such a strong showing in Phase 5 I really want to keep that momentum going. Hitting each of those goals was substantially better than my previous performance but it isn’t minimally sufficient for my longevity goals yet. I’ll take progress towards good enough over not doing anything at all. Part of what kept up that motivation was keeping the perfect score trend going on those parts of my grades that I always struggle with the most: exercise and meditation. Rather than push harder into minimally sufficient for the threshold I’m instead going to keep the thresholds for grading the same but give me some stretch goals.

On diet (Goal #1) things are going to be exactly status quo. The “Blue Zones inspired plant dominant diet” is pretty much my target. On sleep (Goal #2) things will be identical as well. I know how much sleep I need and between 7 to 8 hours a night is it. The final three metrics are where things get a little more interesting.

On Goal #3, from a health/longevity perspective I should be doing 30 minutes a day of cardiovascular training and getting reasonable amounts of movement throughout the day. Tackling getting both of those dialed in could be a bridge too far though. I am experimenting with some systems to integrate that into my very desk-bound lifestyle. I like the lifestyle I just need to make sure it isn’t cutting down on my lifespan or healthspan. I am going to try to do 30 minutes of cardio each day but in order to get a perfect grade I only need to hit the original 20 minute mark. Why not go for the full 30? Partly because the other thing I want to start working in are running workouts. This health kick thing has me looking at wanting to run races again. I therefore don’t know if I’m going to be so clobbered after a run day that I will need to really take it easy on a follow-up day. I also don’t know if that extra ten minutes each day may be 100% achievable yet. It should be but I don’t want to push it yet.

On Goal #4, the 5-10 minutes of yoga/stretching/calisthenics/etc. was usually somewhere between the two. For the challenge I didn’t even have a specific time limit written down but I was shooting for 5 minutes minimum. Usually it was a post-cycling stretching with some additional core work and pushups. That is literally infinitely more training than I had for the preceeding three months. It was enough for me to feel some real differences in flexibility and performance. However it is really not sufficient from a longevity perspective. It was just too short a duration and way too ad hoc. I therefore want to up this a bit. Rather than the mere 5 minutes being the minimum I now have it bumped to 10 minutes. Really these workouts are more like 15-30 minutes with some days it will just be the 10 minutes of stretching. That is much closer to the actual minimums from a longevity perspective. I’d love to work in more difficult calisthenics eventually bit it is something I want to work up to.

On Goal #5 I very much need to get more mindful in general not just during meditation. That is something I’m trying to do but the meditation practice is integral to that too. As I wrote in the summary I was very much not able to ramp up to sitting for 30 minutes at a time without it being difficult. When I started off with monkey mind dominating within a couple minutes and quickly got up to a good 10-15 minutes of meditation before that happened I assumed that the path to 30 minutes of that would be achievable in a month. That was folly on my part. While I’m going to keep the threshold for perfect grade the same I am shooting for 30 minutes per day instead.

Therefore the goals for Phase 6 of 2023’s Goal Accountability is:

• Goal 1: Eat a Blue Zones inspired plant dominant diet averaging at least 90 grams of protein a day
• Goal 2: Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
• Goal 3: 20 minutes of focused cardio exercise (indoor cycling, running, swimming), stretch goal 30 minutes with “hard” sessions three times a week
• Goal 4: 10-15 minutes of daily calisthenics or yoga
• Goal 5: 15 minutes or more of meditation, stretch goal 30 minutes per day total