The diet that I thought would be the easiest to square away has turned out to be the hardest: the Mediterranean Diet.  As I have highlighted previously it’s mostly about trying to dress up a Standard American Diet into something that sounds healthy so that people can feel good about trying to eat healthy.  If it wasn’t just lipstick on a pig I wouldn’t find the concept so offensive.  I still wouldn’t bother eating it for 3 months just to pretend to be picking up a new eating style, but at least there could be a claim of some health benefit.  That still leaves me to try to figure out what I’m going to do for an actual Mediterranean diet.  As I worked through my backlog of podcasts this week I think I found some hints to what I’m looking at in the form of the diets of the Sardinians and Ikarians.

When this lifelong non-athlete got too winded from walking up the stairs a few years ago, he decided to start doing something about it.  Exercising just for the hell of it, or for some long term health benefits didn’t seem to be motivating enough.  I instead directed that towards the one thing that I thought may work, attempting to run a 10K.  I thought a short term but doable goal would motivate me better than anything, and I was right.  But a 10K soon became a half, and now I’m on may way to starting to run my first full marathon.  While that has been good, one thing that has been concerning me is my perpetual muscle tightness.  I’ve talked it over with my PT several times and had some late night sessions with Doctor Google trying to figure it out, but it has been persistent.  I had hoped it was a lifestyle thing, and after the last week I think I’ve figured out that indeed it is, but not what I was originally expecting.

Tom Hussey is a photographer whose work has started popping up in viral Facebook and Twitter messages. Particularly his “Reflections” series is quite riveting. What would a photograph look like if you had the present-day elderly and the lost to time young adult version of the same person? You can get a glimpse of it at FStoppers.com.  Imagine yourself looking forward in time into the elderly you, or looking back into the younger you from a few decades ago.  Projecting yourself into the images leaves you with a most surreal emotional impression.  For the biohacker in me, it also got me reconsidering yet one additional technique I used to engage in but no longer do.

With July underway I wanted to belatedly post what the first of many monthly updates.  During the actual experiment phase these sorts of updates will allow me to look at large scale changes during a diet phase.  By looking at the month as a whole it is possible to see much longer term trends than what one can see for simple daily or weekly stats, which will also be a bigger part of the experiment.  You can see graphs of the various elements and their discussions below the fold:

The closest thing to an addiction that I have is soda, now diet soda.  We were allowed to drink soda all the time as a kid.  That contributed a lot to me being a chubby kid growing up.  There were other factors too of course.  None of my other siblings graduated into “husky” sizes, but perhaps I just drank more of it and was more sedentary as a computer geek than they were.  As I grew up that graduated into being hooked on diet soda.  Like all programmers, I turn soda into code.  My poison of choice has always been the least revolting diet soda, until the Zero products came along…