Day 79, Must Have Been Something I Ate...

I worked hard today and trained hard as well. So I had a nice "big" dinner when I got home. 2 tortillas with steamed vegetables and shrimp, with some fresh salsa I made a few days ago and wanted to use up. For dessert I ate half and apple and half a banana and some dates with a crumbled gingerbread cookie in milk.

I think the salsa had gone off, and when that milk hit my stomach I felt pretty bad. And it's been regular trips to the toilet ever since.

Sorry to be gross. But there's a great lesson here. After a long day of work and or training, there's a tendency to eat a meal that is as unhelpful as your day was tough. Hard day at the office? Finish it off with a few beers and some fried food! All that stress and weariness will really be helped by taxing your liver and arteries. Those organs just love when you make them work double shifts!

The truth is, after a tough day, we need to come home, eat a piece of bread, some thin soup, and a bowl of vegetables. Our bodies don't need anymore work to do, they're still recovering from the stuff that happened 9am to 5pm, why give them a whole new load of stuff to deal with from 9pm to 5 am?

I'm not preaching at you here. I'm having some serious stomach issues now because when I came home I thought I deserved a few extra ladles of that tasty salsa slathered over my entire meal.

Day 78, What's In the Box?

Today Kazue gave me a mysterious box with a "Peak Condition Project" tag. Inside, it read, "Do not open until July 23rd." (The day the project ends)


I've always been terrible at waiting to open presents (if it is indeed a present) especially if I have to look at the thing for a month and a half. So I thought I'd open this up to the general public to make the waiting more interesting.

So, here's the idea. Everyone, submit your idea about what's in the box in the comment section. After a week I'll aggregate all the answers into a poll, which people can vote on until the end of the project, when we'll crack open the box. I've been wanting to do a poll thingy, and this sounds like fun. If anyone gets it right I'll do something nice for you!


But this will only work if you send a lot of ideas. This includes you, silent readers, comment with your best guesses! I'll get things started with my own comment below.

And many thanks to Kazue. I couldn't have succeeded in this project without her patience and support!

Day 77, How to Eat 5 Egg Whites a Day...

... and not go crazy.

Egg whites are not the most appetizing thing in the world. Especially considering you are eating the cytoplasm of an unfertilized chicken ovary. But you gotta have them if you want to build muscle. Why? The things are pure protein. Nothing but amino acids, which your body uses overnight to make new muscle. But, all hope isn't lost, there are some tricks you can do to make the things more palatable. I eat 5 a day now, so I'll put up 5 different techniques, although there are many more.

1. Pepper

Pepper adds a spicy and 0 calorie way to liven up egg whites. Use freshly ground pepper for extra bite.

2. Mustard

I love mustard. Plain old yellow mustard is great, and the fancy stuff with the peppercorns still intact is great too. At 5 calories a tablespoon it's no problem if you're sticking to a close training diet

3. Red Wine Vinegar

This is one of my favorites, and has the added benefit of improving circulation. You can also use Chinese black vinegar if you are truly hardcore. Use the hollow of the egg as a kind of cup.

4. Ginger

This is something you can find in any Japanese food store, a tube of emulsified ginger. Very spicy and fresh taste! Also keeps your breath fresh and not eggy.

5. Pesto

This is the least diet friendly of the bunch, with Pesto's oil and salt content. But it tastes so good and works when you can't stand the thought of eating one more egg white.

So there are some ideas for anyone crazy enough to eat a lot of these things. Chen was telling about one of his bodybuilder friends who eats 20 a day. I can't imagine. Does anyone have any more ideas for dressing up the blandest food on earth?

Day 76, Still On the Hunt...

... for a Chin-Up bar. I've looked all over the web and called a few sports stores, and I'm seriously thinking about trying to make this thing:



I found the plans for this on this awesome DIY exercise site.

I have a long history trying to make crackpot gadgets and it usually ends up in failure and costing triple the price of a professionally made one.

I've never fallen into many of the cliche male stereotypes. For example, I have absolutely no problem asking for directions, as I am constantly lost, I have no problem admitting I'm wrong, because I usually am. But I do have that tendency to get knee deep into a building project only to find out that it won't work. Among my many failures include:

A 50 gallon barrel used for holding clean drinking water, accessed by a spigot. (It leaked)

An in-store beach display including moving waves on a rotary engine. (It shook itself to pieces)

A turtle home including an active waterfall (turtles can't stand being near moving water... oops!)

A greenhouse for growing herbs in winter (it tipped over in the mildest of breezes, killing the plants a little each time)

A meditation bench (worked for me but I let a *cough* heavyset friend try it and the screws were ripped right out)

... and many, many (many) more.

So, am I really going to try and make this thing out of plumbing pipe and electrical tape? You bet! What could go wrong?

Day 75, Sliding Scales

Human psychology is an endlessly baffling thing, especially the fact that no matter what happens, our egos never seem to be satisfied or at peace.

Case in point. Today, I caught myself mentally berating myself for overeating. I was doing some housework and everytime I passed the kitchen I would take a dried prune from the jar I have on my counter and eat one. Then, 5 minutes of cleaning, and another dried prune, and so on. I wasn't eating because I was hungry, just because the prunes tasted good and were there for the taking.

After an hour or so of this I felt full and starting giving myself a hard time. Was I so weak minded that I would just eat something because it was there? What kind of Peak Condition am I going to be in with that kind of mentality. A few minutes of this passed and I realized that I was sitting there giving myself a guilt trip over eating a dozen dried prunes.

Rewind the tape to three months ago and the same self-berating head conversation would have been happening, only that time about a tray of donuts or an entire tube of Pringles. Intellectually I know that the prunes are good for me and that I'm eating better than 99% of people in the world, but the ego doesn't pay any attention to facts like that, and just keeps up the mental hammering no matter what the situation.

I've found the same thing with my physique. Although almost near Peak Condition (my back needs a lot of work, more on that in future posts) I still get frustrated that I don't look more like my vision of what the final product should be, or that this muscle group isn't as toned as it looked last week. And this dissatisfaction has been in the back of my head the whole time, right from day 1. And it will continue into the future.

Be it fitness, wealth, or career, nobody ever seems to say to themselves, "Ok, I think I've done enough. This is good enough for me. I'm going to finally relax and enjoy my life now." The ego works on a sliding scale. When we get close to what we imagine will satisfy us the mind moves the bar a little further away. And why? Buddhist thinkers will tell you that the ego needs dissatisfaction to perpetuate itself. A truly happy person doesn't have anything for the ego to cling to and obsess about. This state is pretty much what I think of as enlightenment.

It's interesting to see the same ego mischief applies to fitness. Getting into awesome shape will not soothe the little voice inside your head, although it will quiet it down. Only a lot of meditation and awareness will really deal with the underlying issues.

And that's harder than any diet or exercise plan could ever be.

Day 74, Fashion Show

You might not believe this but I am actually not an exhibitionist. I am very shy about being seen with my shirt off, probably a result of being a chubby grade schooler humiliated at dozens of pool parties

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(Note: This picture isn't me but it's damn close!)

So it took a lot of courage for me to start the daily pictures, but I knew it was the only way to motivate myself and keep the transparency a project like this needs.

So, much to my embarrassment, you've seen 73 topless pictures of me, and I thought it might be good to show how the PCP effects how you look in clothes. You know when you go to the clothes store and they have the mannequins showing off the fashions? Well, if you look at the male mannequins, you'll notice that they are totally ripped.



And the clothes look good on them, the chest fits, the shoulders are filled. But when most guys put on the same stuff, it looks like this...


The good news is that after 74 days my torso resembles the mannequin's much more than the weaklings. And as a result clothes look the way they're supposed to.


Also I promised I'd show the funky shorts I got that are actually boys size 14. Here they are. Cool huh?


So yet another happy side effect of the PCP. Clothes look better!

Day 73, Non-Permanence

Sometimes after teaching a lot of yoga (5 hours today) I actually end up feeling tighter. In my last class today I could hardly touch my toes in a forward bend. In the morning I had my head on my knees in the same pose.

One of the most important Buddhist concepts is that of impermanence (anicca). Nothing in the entire universe stays the same. Therefore, getting hung up on something staying a certain way is a recipe for frustration. This applies to little things, like getting upset when it starts to rain on your picnic, or big things, like when someone close to you dies. Of course we all intellectually know that nothing is forever, but we don't really believe it in our bones. I think, in all of us, there is a little voice that whispers, "Sure, everyone else will have to deal with change, but somehow we're going to beat the system."

Impermanence is especially true of the human body. I heard a report about how within 7 years every single atom in our body is replaced save for a few brain cells which we have for life. So, if you look at your hand right now, there isn't a single atom in there which was with you in 2001.

But of course sometimes we feel that our bodies have changed just over the course of 7 hours, as I did today in the afternoon forward bend. These rapid changes in my flexibility levels used to take me by surprise, but now I just roll with them, without trying to force the pose back to where it was last week or where I think it should be in my image of it.

And it's interesting to apply these ideas to the PCP. Every ounce of muscle I have put on will soon fade away, either in the near future if I stop training or in the not so near future as I get older and just can't maintain it anymore. It's all destined to weaken and die. This is a good thought to have. It quickly deflates any pride I might develop in my progress, and keeps everything light.

Many people ask, "how can you think like that and still be motivated?" For me, impermanence is a great motivator, because I only have today to make something of the opportunities presented, as tomorrow everything will be different. And I'm strong right now, today, which is made all the more pleasant with the knowledge that it will all fade away before I know it.