The 13th Expedition is winding down. In less than 24 hours, I'll be moving on to The 14th Expedition in this daily march to 2021.

There have been some good things that have come out of these last 41 days. Immediately, I think of the year-long subscriptions to the following:

• Cronometer.com
• Brooklyn Public Library
• Habitica.com

Still further from The 13th Expedition:

• Maintained a new 70%+ fat approach with 5% total carbs
• Adopted new items like butter & coconut oil coffee and bone broth.
• Averaged an audiobook a day.
• Added a solid meditation/visualization regimen.
• Migrated over to GitHub Pages for this site's web host.

Of course, there's the return to hitting my FitBit step goals and my 3 AM-something workouts. There's even an Expeditionary playlist coming together based on a theme reminiscent of past Expeditions.

Regardless of the outcome on Thursday, The 13th Expedition is my best Expedition from an innovation perspective.

Befittingly, as this is the 42nd day of The 13th Expedition, exactly eight years ago today, I was returning with my boon out of Heathrow through all the Olympic fanfare and regalia.

I draw closer to the weigh-in. I suspect my numbers would be better if I spent all six weeks in my new workout program as opposed to my 5th week kickoff. Of course, my justification for doing it for weightloss at the time was that I would be motivated to eat more thereby canceling out the energy expenditure. In practice, I've found that I haven't eaten more, though I have shifted to eating a portion of meat right after the session.

Yesterday, I noted that I've been torquing my knees with the bag workout. While I still want to focus on core strength, I shifted to a HIIT routine atop an exercise ball that has promise. For 15 sets, I spend 1 minute twisting and a brief hold to eliminate the snapback action as I rotate left to right. Following that, I then lean all the way back and come up in a situp to my knees for the next 30 seconds. Repeat. It was a nice stand-in for keeping my knees safe.

This morning, I'll likely do a variant of it while incorporating strikes. In the past, I've used it for situp strikes to the heavy bag: up: two forearm strikes; downward: two punches.

One of the more helpful tools I've been using is Interval Timer off of the F-Droid store. I'm sure there's a slew of interval apps on the Google play store, but I'm just not a fan of ads for something as basic as tracking time. While I've also been meditation (I'll write more about that in a later post), I like Breathly for breathing practice.

Eight years ago on this day, I listened to the theme of Top Gun as I packed up my Plzeň dorm room. That morning, I was handed myTEFL certification as I finished my graduate degree and wound down water fasting for the month. What a great time to be alive!

A time of accomplishment!

Fast forward today and it's the winding down of The 13th Expedition, one in which I hope is a scale model of the rest of 2020.

On Thursday, I'm going to have my 6-week weigh-in. I doubt it'll be the 40+ lb losses of Expeditions past—I just don't feel it. I feel lighter, I just don't feel THAT MUCH lighter. I do feel normal and not deprived like even the best of intentioned 1150 kcal/diet levies. Unlike my diet of 2018, 2019, and early 2020, I'm actually content beyond the satisfaction of intermittent fasting with an escape of sleep.

I am satisfied, yet I am devout in keeping that 30 total carb boundary; however, I haven't been dogmatic when I go beyond my 140 protein and 190 fat gram targets. Of course, whatever my weigh-in is on Thursday, after checking fat percentage, I'll be dialing my protein requirement down, and whatever percentage it drops, I may just replace it with more fat to keep the overall % of carbs around 5. And while I don't monitor calories, if I want to eat less, I will.

That's the basic diet strategy for the rest of the year as I carve away my midsection and have fun doing it! < cue Richard Simmons prancing about >

The great thing about this approach is that it seems to be something that I can run indefinitely for it does not rely on an ironfist grasp to maintain. That sort of approach eventually rusts and failure invariably occurs time and again—it's not like we can drop weight and capture our physique into frozen state that we can revert to like a backup. A diet cannot think in terms of the initial ride down, but also consider the rise of the ride back up as well.