Since I have naturally found myself becoming satiated with less meat, I KNOW that I'm going to be stoked with this Thursday's weigh-in—I know it'll be better than last time's +1 gain! I mean, C'MON, talk about not having your head in the game! Sure, my body plateaued for 3 months (and for valid reasons), but mentally, I cannot shake off a gain so easily! The 22nd Expedition has been about fixing what has been wrong, which is really going back to how I find success and (not so surprising) it's about awareness. Am I'm eating because I'm supposed to be / scheduled for eating? Today, I go out of my way to ensure that I don't need to checkmark the "have I finished my plate" metric.

As I'm working on my fourth year of (somewhat) sustained dieting (again, reference the Fit page graph), I'm implementing something I haven't done before: I'm cycling high fat days with low ones. The thing is, I want to ensure to keep my body out-of-sync with the changes. And while this isn't fasting, I know from my past 4+26 day water fast that this biomechanical automaton is REALLY good at working the metabolic levers—thank you, my bigger brained Neanderthal fathers!

But, this cycle isn't fasting the way I define it. And while I think it correlates to calories, I find calories are invalid. Life is all about the macro! Thus, this approach cycles fat intake while maintaining protein levels. At least that what I'm going to go with for the remainder of 2021 as I gun for that fabled 163 lb mark—BTW, can I sit back for a moment and think how it wasn't that long ago I was in my 330's with no realistic path to reach that mark? Ah NO, I cannot—"we're on to Cincinnati."

A core piece of my success is the implementation of a protein sparing wonder bread that has grapevined to the simplicity below. I don't know if it's genesis is on Emmerich's site, but I first heard about it from her on a Kelly Hogan video.

Basically, it's something that gives off the appearance, texture and flavor of...Wonder bread, not that it's particularly telling since Hostess sold off that brand years ago, making it cease to exist—at least from my childhood anyway!

The recipe:

A. One cup of liquid egg whites
B. Quarter teaspoon of cream of tartar
C. Quarter teaspoon of salt
D. Half cup of egg white powder (I use Judee's Dried Egg Whites)

1. Mix the A) egg whites, B) cream of tartar and C) salt until the compound sticks to an upside down bowl.
2. Gently mix in D) egg white powder.
3. Bake for 375 for 15 minutes. Turn oven off for another 15 minutes.
4. Let cool.

On my low fat days, I figure I'll eat some of this and drink coffee. On my fat days, I'll do the meat thing and return Kerrygold to my coffee. In essence my body cycles between being powered on fat stores to being fueled by dietary fat.

1. Click-click. 2. Boom. 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!

It's now less than a week a way from weigh-in (and the Holiday of Bill) and less than 150 days from the new year!

It's a good time to make a strong pivot toward being better, dare I say...SPECIAL? In the game Fallout 4, the character build system is structured as below—I pulled directly from the game the description:

S is for Strength, and that means I am strong! I can carry lots of toys and swing stuff all day long!

P is for Perception, a long, funny word! It means what I tasted, smell, saw and heard!

E is for Endurance, and that's how long I can play! I'm always really healthy, and have energy all day!

C is for Charisma, it's why people think I'm great! I make my friends all laugh and smile, and never want to hate!

I is for Intelligence, it means I'm really smart! I use my brain for lots of stuff, like science, math and art!

A is for Agility, that's how I get around! I move real fast and easy, and I never make a sound!

L is for Luck, and it's simple, you see! It means that good things always happen to me!

I love this as a schema for personal development! It's something I want to apply for the rest of the year. And you might think, "Luck? You cannot improve luck!" Hey, just grab this classic, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." It's the capacity of putting yourself in the position, isn't?

I look forward to adopting a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. framework for the rest of 2021.

The Tech Sandlot

Music

My CD-to-FLAC experiment is over along with the overall spirit of music ownership—this is definitely a topic I've seesawed over! I went so far as to start buying MP3s of content that isn't otherwise available! But, the inherent problems of all of that are storage, application and breadth. It's difficult to be satiated and I get worn out on the same genre/content. And it's really hard to follow the retrowave genre that way! I even signed up for a Bandcamp account to buy albums from the artists directly!

Ultimately, streaming music is the shift toward the future. Sure, I can grab one of my old vinyls and listen to Springsteen's The River or Simon & Garfunkel Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme when want to hear the warm grooves again that only a turntable can provide.

I am glad to have made this decision so I that I can go ahead and free my head for other things!

Books

I'm back to reading again! Or should I say listening? Yesterday, I finished another book by one of my favorite authors, Annie Jacobsen Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins (2019). I'm starting her latest book, First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance (2021). While I never know the applicability to my own life, it's like digging up holes and finding something shiny.

Now, as to whether I want to use Goodreads again for tracking or do my own thing here, I haven't decided. Goodreads always comes off (to me) as the totality of everything I've ever read. I just need something that tracks the 25-30+ books a month I gobble down when I'm feasting. And frankly, I find sparse value in unweighted crowd-sourced evaluation.

Website

My flirtation with a Jekyll/markdown/Github version of this site has met it's end. Sure, I've toyed with it on-and-off—even implemented for a few months; there's something enchanting about having a free website that's static! And I love that the copies of my writing are saved in a text format—a great archival approach! Ultimately, however, I'm sticking with Wordpress so that I can better focus my efforts. I've found that Jekyll/Github is more needy for development and content creation. It's not like Jekyll is a worldwide standard anyway. It was just fun to have a static site behave like a dynamic one. But, to become the best version of me, it's about honing my focus, isn't it?

Regarding CSS, I do want to return into some sort of retrowave vibe again—it points to the direction I'm going!

Other Tools

I like to more effectively apply Garmin's Connect platform. While my my watch has been my faithful ride along, I haven't given it much attention, which provides the results thereof: Garbage in...the Grouch out.

I NEED some sort of task management platform. Perhaps I'll make a callback to 2020 and run with Habitica or Todoist.

While I don't really intend to be as prolific of a poster as I have been in the past, i.e., daily posts, constructed around a song for the day, I gotta admit: I do feel THRILLED to return here and open things up because I KNOW it leads to success! It's about a daily focus; if I may adopt an analogy from shooting: its about coming back and lining up my sight picture. You cannot do it once an assume you'll hit the target on every shot thereafter. It's not something that will do well on autopilot.

Of course, there's GOTTA be the desire to become better, to achieve the best version of yourself. I recognize that I'll never reach that point, but each day I want to be the guy that makes an investment toward that future. A driving motivation for me is that I know I can be smarter, faster, quicker, stronger—I am simply not satisfied with where I am today. And this is the sort of thing that is a lifelong pursuit.

Sure, when I was younger, I was indestructible! While I had access to better tools and time, I was no mechanic! It's like that Cinderella title, Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone). Of course, the benefit of added experience is that added capability is unlocked because the biggest barrier, ignorance, is removed. And sadly, future me never did find the keys to that DeLorean to swing by my place!

While this writing is coming off like an Expeditionary restart, I've stuck to my diet. In recent weeks, my appetite has shifted. I once was a 2-3 lbs of meat a day guy, but lately, it's played out to be about a lb of meat. Sometimes, I'll throw in six eggs, but on most days I don't. I still do 2 tbsps of Kerrygold butter with coffee to make an iced 30 oz tumbler about twice a day. I've felt satiated, so why eat more? I've run across a few ribeyes that made it through sous vide that were SO GOOD! When I look back on all those months when I starved myself on dehydrated crackers made from spinach, broccoli, flaxseed and spices, I just shake my head and laugh! Yes, with time, added capability is unlocked as ignorance is removed. Only if I could justify paying for a ribeye everyday!

While up to now I haven't taken any supplements since becoming a carnivore, I've finally added one: 500 mg of krill oil. I'm giving it a shot to see if I can recover from this shoulder/arm injury faster.

In the near future, I've got two, new things coming up:

1. I'll be trying out a "bread" made out of egg white powder and egg whites to cycle between days.
2. Instead of signing up for another gym, I've got a spin bike coming my way. While I still want my roadwork to play an integral role to my development, I want it something that I feel stoked to do and fits my schedule. A bike is just what I need to put the time into increasing my aerobic capacity while contributing to the overarching objective.