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The past few months have absolutely devastated all my healthy routines. Its time to get back on track. This winter I was completely levelled by a vitamin D deficiency and my ongoing depression and anxiety problems. This also explains why my last two challenges have tanked, and I haven't been able to follow a fitness plan for more than two weeks without getting derailed. I've been to the doctor about both of these, and am seeing a counsellor regularly about the depression. I've also got some meds now to help me out. I am feeling much, much better and am ready to take on this challenge. My main emphasis this challenge is to lose weight. I have made a great deal of strength gains in the past nine months, despite my problems, but I am still quite overweight and want to be able to show off some of the muscle beneath. Unfortunately, I do have a number of bad habits to break in order to proceed in getting awesomer at lifting heavy shit and getting in shape. I am currently reading the book The Power of Habit: Why We do What We do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. I still have to read the last 100 pp. but I highly recommend it. Some of my strategies for reinventing my habits will be based on insights from that book. These are the key guidelines: 1. Habits follow a simple cycle: Stimulus --> Response (the habit behavior) --> Result ( another stimulus that signifies completion of and justifies the Response ) (this is almost Pavlovian) 2. Building a new habit or breaking an old one can be achieved by altering the response or the stimulus 3. Keystone habits: these are habits that when established or altered create sweeping changes in other habits Goal 1: Get up when the alarm goes off. early M-F and go to the gym. exercise at home Sleeping too late is my keystone habit. Too often I hit the snooze button and let my morning drag on. With the depression this winter it was exponentially worse. Then I'd be late to work, fall behind, get extra stressed out, and have to work late leaving little time to get a workout and a good meal in in the evening. Old Habit Cycle: Alarm --> Snooze Button (zzzzz) --> stressful day I am going to change the stimulus, and response, which will fix the result to something more rewarding. New habit Cycle: Alarm (with different ringtone) + coffee pot noise and smell --> Exercise and good breakfast --> productive day, done by 5pm (ideally) I'll be getting up a 6:00. 4:30. The gym opens and five and if I get there by then I usually have all the weight equipment to myself. Not all days will be SL 3x5, all I have to do is show up and do something. I'm switching this one up already because I can already feel that 4:30 am is going to be too early, it will save me time in the morning and not make me wiped out too early. If I stick to light exercise at home, I can get it done while breakfast and/or lunch is cooking. I'll probably stick to light kettlebell practice, pilates, body weight, and stretching exercises. Just to get the heart pumping first thing in the morning. I also don't want to short my strength training in order to get to work at a respectable time. I can also read a paper or two during breakfast. I did that this morning and it worked out really well. I'll add that below. The important thing is that I get back on a schedule, and quit wasting time in the morning. Not how early I get up or whatever. I think my natural circadian rhythm is sleeping somewhere from 11 pm - 7 am-- later, since I prefer to lift in the evenings. Grading: Percentage of the 30 opportunities to do this during the six weeks. Goal 2: SL 3x5 at least 3 days per week. If I'm successful in goal 1, I'll have plenty of opportunity to do this. I might limit it to two during the week, then sneak the third in on Saturday or Sunday though. Lifting before breakfast can be brutal. I'll just stick with doing this in the evenings. Also, I'll be adding the Ice Cream 5x5 accessory work to my SL 3x5. Grading: percentage of 18 total required SL 3x5 workouts Goal 3: Poverty Paleo Eat healthy -- support the gainz -- but economically. So my financial troubles have forced me to go paleo-ish and ketogenic. Essentially, I have to cut back drastically for a while on how much I can spend on food. However, I REFUSE TO GIVE UP MY PROTEIN! So I'll be living primarily on chicken leg quarters and eggs on the challenge. I did the math. I can hit ~2500 cals per day (maintenance = 3000) and ~150g protein (my lean body weight is somewhere just above this). If I eat lots of chicken, without being picky about the leanness of the meat, on my budget I still have room for a good dose of veggies everyday. So I'm going paleo/keto. I've figured out that I can splurge on some other stuff to break the monotony (I've been doing this the past two weeks, its boring for sure). So I'm going to stick to eating this way 6 days a week. Going keto and having the deficit will promote weight loss. Getting gains is going to be tough. I will have some carbs for recovery after my SL 3x5 workouts, that ought to help. Okay, so I'm not really paleo or keto. My goal is to just eat economically (and therefore monotonously) and avoid splurging on anything extra except for maybe one thing a week. In other words, don't buy and eat an entire frozen pizza and a can of Pringles cuz I'm drunk, emotionally, and/or bored. And yeah, avoid drinking. Grading: Number of days out of 36 that I stick to this plan. don't splurge on a more expensive/less healthy meal. Goal 4: Exercise at least 5 evenings after work a week. I want to build a habit of exercising at the end of my day. Life gets busy, and there will be days when I can't exercise afterwork, but if I make a habit of doing something every day when I get home, and not put off working, I decrease the number of workouts I'll miss. 3 of these will be my (SL)Ice Cream 3x5 workouts. The other two will be lighter stuff like pilates, playing with the kettle bells, stretching/recovery work, or body weight exercise. Grading: Percentage of 30 points Life Goal: Be more productive, and increase rate of progress toward finishing my PhD. Gonna try to hack my work habits here: Sub-goal: Spend 1 hour in the morning a day writing: As soon as I get to work, spend one hour writing my thesis or papers. I've been lagging a great deal on this front. Habit cycle: sit down at desk --> write --> check progress (word count, review/edit) Sub-goal: Read at least one article directly related to my thesis M-F: At the end of the day (when reading is best) whenever, but I'll try to do this during breakfast to just get it done. Habit cycle: ??? Food + Coffee --> Read --> Check this one off the list for the day. Sub-goal: Go to work at least one day on the weekend: Focus on catching up (things will be missed). Habit cycle: ??? Not sure how to hack the habit cycle on all these. Maybe add alarms on my phone, look for other cues. We'll see. The first one will be easy, as its just sitting down at my desk. Grading: Percentage of the 66 total points.