Hardgaining... or when eating has to become a hobby.

I'm decided to gain weight this year.  I'd like to hit about 160.  I haven't broken 140ish in 5 years.  So it's going to be interesting.

I started working on gaining weight today.  And I realize it's going to be a pain. 

See, that's after dinner.  And that's just to break even.  I've got probably 3 hours before bed before bed and I have to eat another 1500 calories just to break even.  Eating has to become a hobby at this point.  From what I've heard and read, the real answer is eat like a cow. 

In general, I'm following the ideas presented by Starting Strength.  Mark Rippetoe is the only person I've heard that has produced a decent reasoning behind what they were doing.  He's also got an article about the novice effect.  One of his suggestions was to drink a gallon of whole milk a day.  The reasoning makes sense.  You need to increase your caloric intake a lot.  You need to eat about 6,000 calories a day and lift heavy weights three times per week.

That sounds great...  but eating 6,000 calories is a lot.  It took a lot for me to get to 3,000 calories.  Making it to more than that is going to be interesting. 

But then I've always followed complex programs that promised maximum gains without fat.   But then came the answer from Mark Rippetoe.  Basic answer was you can't have it both ways.  If you want to get bigger and stronger, you've got to eat a lot and lift heavy weights.  Spend six months gaining weight and strength.  You can drop those extra few pounds later.  It's worth gaining the strength and muscle mass now. 

So it's now time to make eating a hobby.  Let's see if I can make it past 2 gallons a week this week. 

something started, something finished

I've heard it said that writers end up writing the book they need to hear, not necessarily the book they live by.  I think that was true of the post yesterday.  I'm fully convinced that is what happened.  I've been writing a story about what would happen if dimension hopping became a thing, and the guy going dimension hopping was a self-centered asshole out of to save his own skin from his own stupidity.  I've been writing that story for a while, off and on.  It's currently sitting about 19 pages worth of material, but the story isn't finished and it's going to take a few more pages before I even start to finalize.

The problem is that I haven't been adding to the story very frequently.  I'm a proponent of tracking most things you do during the day.   I don't do it near enough, but I'm a proponent.  I can give you a rough estimate when I will finish the book I'm currently reading, and I can tell you the average days between when I write.  And right now that average days number is sitting at 26.

The simple answer is you are never going to finish anything if you don't pick it up but once a month.  It doesn't matter how many words you write during those single sessions.  And I can almost guarantee when you do write for that one session, it's going to be way shorter than you thought.  On Average, I write about 360 words per period.  The max I've ever tracked in a day was 757.   So that tells me is I'm not going to finish this thing any time soon if one of those numbers doesn't change.

Given that collection of numbers: 26 days between writing, 360 words per session, a maximum of 757 words in a day.  The easiest of those numbers to change is the 26.  See, it's all about math.   360 words seems to be where my brain starts to falter.  Or my limited time runs out.  But...  If I got to the point of writing at least 5 days a week, that would cover about 94,000 words in a year, skipping weekends.


I started this post...  sometime back in 2015.  I finished the story back in August.  It took well longer than it probably should have.  I added 9 pages until I finally came to a conclusion I wanted.  Or at least that's where the story seemed to want to go.  It's interesting that stories have a tendency to take on a life of their own after a while.  Sometimes you have ideas.  Other times, the ideas just flow from the characters you create.

It's interesting forcing those characters to life.  It sometimes feels like a birth.  Maybe, maybe not.  Maybe that's where the real interesting stuff happens.  It's between the point where the idea ran out and the execution is all there is left.  That's where the most complicated bits lie.  It's also where you end up having the most fun and force the best of life out of the story.  Or the worst.  It's also at that point that the characters start taking on a life of their own. 

There was a point in the story I was talking about where I thought about adding a secondary character.  But that didn't fit with the character I had created.  It just wasn't that person.  So I moved forward and changed the idea.  All based on the character that I created.  It was...  the way things needed to be. 

I can't say I'm really an impressive writer.  What I can say is that I try to show up.  And that's where I'm at with that.

I should probably go back to working on the story I'm currently working on.  It's the nightmare I had turned into a story.  Not sure whether it's a horror or something else.  It sounds like it.  But we'll see.

Accomplishments

So, a few weeks ago I started reading my goals twice a day.   You can read about that here.  So I've been reading them.  And making some progress.  But not the progress I want.  See, reading is just a simple action.  It requires little effort.  You are effectively done reading your goals in a few minutes.   But reading goals and accomplishing goals are two different things.

So I've started to keep track of my goal accomplishment in a spread sheet.  I just started today.  I'm not sure how well this setup is going to work, so I may tweak it.  But at the moment its something.  The end result is to start accomplishing goals more.  To do the work to accomplish the goal.  Which is a lot harder than just writing the things down.

I have to admit.  Writing them down and reviewing them on a daily basis is causing me to  put some effort in.  Just not the effort level I want to put.  The hope is small accomplishments spread out over time resulting in a big goal being accomplished.  Not some giant, one time step to accomplish the thing.  There's no exoneration in this plan.    Just straight up dirty labor.  Never ending dirty labor.  But that's what gets things done.

Now, back to reading.  I've got 6 more pages on one goal today, and I want to get those knocked out.

The Monday Post

It's Monday, so I suppose it's time to post something.

I shouldn't have that feeling, but I do.  Anyways.   I am on Thrive.  It's pretty awesome.  You should go check it out.  After a week, I've cut my coffee intake to about 1/3 of a cup per day from 1 cup per day.  And I actually gained weight.  I'm not as incredibly scrawny as I was.

So that's definite progress.

After reading something on LinkedIn, I started reviewing my goals twice daily.  I don't think I was spending enough time on them, and really they weren't even in the forefront of my brain during the day.  How can you possibly achieve your goals if you aren't focused on them?  When was the last time you looked at your goals?   I'm guessing it has been a while.  Probably right after you made them.

I did this with an Outlook calendar event.  I'm not sure this is the best way to do it, but it is definitely the most portable.  It is also the version that is likely to be with me at any given time.

Running out of time this morning, so...   I'll be back.