016: Baseline Average Progress

Howdy folks,

There's been a lot going on the past week and I'm excited to get to share it with you.

I want to talk about baseline averages. But wait. Don't snooze and drift off just yet.

If you are someone who struggles with keeping consistent, and accountable or you just get frustrated with yourself.

Why am I not making progress kind of vibe?

Then you'll find what I want to talk about interesting. I hope you can relate and maybe take something positive from it.

So I'll talk about how I banged my head into this today and how I found out of that self-loathing and frustrating despair.

I've been on a path to losing some weight. I set a goal of 90kg which I smashed a few weeks ago.

So I set a new goal of 85kg.

Over the past 4 weeks, I've been losing around 1-1.5kg

It's been feeling so good. I've got my exercise routines, a clean diet and I'm seeing the results every week.

It's exceeded all my expectations.

That was, until today.

Today I did my weekly Monday weight-in.

I looked down and saw that not only did I not lose my weekly 1kg.

I had gained 1kg

What a bummer.

Is an understatement of how I felt.

My head was then already trying to figure out how this happened.

I was doing all the same things. Okay sure I had a bit of a relaxed weekend.

But 1kg come on.

I was annoyed and frustrated.

It felt like it wasn't fair.

So I need to be perfect all of the time to see the results I want?

If I slip I fall back 1kg

I was chatting with my bestie ChatGPT figuring out what was going on

I was getting helpful answers back.

Water retention, excess salt, hormones, muscle all these answers which sounded reasonable.

I decided that it was most likely water retention, excess salt and undigested food.

But after this I kinda caught myself.

How fast we to start judging ourselves negatively

I thought back to 2 years ago

I was probably around 100kg

I had just gotten back home for the 1st time in years because of covid

And what was meant to be a happy joyous occasion ended up being one of the toughest moments of my life so far.

It was during that time I lost my granny

It all happened over a few months.

It would take more time to go into all the details.

But essentially it was a really tough time.

I put on a lot of weight

I was going through a lot and my diet wasn't a priority.

I remember I got a takeaway with my mum, brother, sister and Vaidile.

We got an absolutely horrific Chinese takeaway.

It was called a munch box.

It was basically a pizza box filled with everything you can imagine just deep-fried.

It was awful.

But we didn't care

It was the day that Granny just passed

That was 2 years ago nearly to the day.

It's funny how quickly we forget the things we've been through.

And how hard we can be on ourselves as well

So now I think to myself.

Man yea, you have gone from 87-88kg in the past week.

But think about how far you've come over the past 2 years

It took a lot to bounce back from 100kg

The 1kg is a little blip in the grand scheme of things

In fact, this is where the baseline average comes into play.

Here's an image to show exactly what I'm talking about

This is my resting heart rate data over the past 6 months

You can see how it fluctuates every day.

Some days it's high others it's low.

Even the weeks fluctuate

But the most interesting part to me

Is seeing the new average baseline

That's the most important thing in all of this

It's seeing if is there a trend that things are going in the right place

Forget about the daily or weekly stats

But overall are things getting better

That's all that really matters

So my question for you is.

Is there anything that's been frustrating you lately? Anything that you feel like you haven't made enough steps forward or progress?

Then can you think back to when you were in a worse position than you are today?

Maybe by doing that you can start to see if your baseline average is overall going in the direction you want it to.

If you haven't made any steps forward feel free to start today.

If you want some help with that. You're welcome to join the Start Designing Life Discord community.

It's completely free and it can be an additional tool to help you keep accountable with other people who are there to support and encourage you.

There's daily, weekly accountability, there are live accountability sessions too, we have an open resource library and a great group of diverse and interesting people from all walks of life.

But I hope you got some value from reading this if you join up or not

As always thanks for checking in and reading.

Here are some things that's been going on the past week:

(the following is a transcript from an upcoming weekly recap video I'll release this week!

1.  Have you seen what a watermelon looked like in the 17th century?

It's wild. It's completely different to what we have today. Let me show you what I'm talking about.

You can see how different it is compared to what the watermelons we have today. So today, you know, inside the watermelon is like completely red.

And in here, you can see that it's got that white bit. It's all like swirly and stuff. So it shows how over time that, the fruits that we've been eating, has been, you know, naturally selected over time to make sure that we have the biggest and the juiciest fruit.

2.  How to boost your brain performance by 20%, by just opening the window.

I came across this really interesting post on X, formerly known as Twitter, and it's from Sterling Crispin. And what it says is: Want to increase your cognitive function by over 20 per cent without ingesting anything or working hard to achieve it.  Get yourself a CO2 monitor and open the doors and windows. It has a huge impact.  I'd have them in every room if I ran a company with an office.  

And it kind of shows, these are the CO2 monitors . And it has these really interesting stats, which it's showing that this like PPM, which is CO2 level in the room.

What it's showing is, is that the more CO2 that is in the area,  the less of the brain functions.  So you can kind of see here. So if it's 600 ppm, it's in the superior range, and it goes down to the dysfunctional range. And it shows the different types of activity at the bottom. Yeah, and he's just sharing some interesting studies around the effect of CO2 concentration on the brain.

I found this super interesting because we're always looking at different ways in how we can improve our performance and if it's just life or if it's for work. And we can use coffee for this or we might look at different diets, nutrition. We might take supplements.  But this is one simple thing that we can basically we can all do, which can give us a 20% increase. Like if there was like a tablet. That we could take that would say, Hey, you're going to be able to increase your brain performance by 20%.

If you take this tablet. I think everybody would want that tablet. So it's something that's super simple that I think for most people we could just open the doors or the window. And as long as we're in an environment where the air quality is good, then we can all take advantage. All of this extra brain performance.

As a side note, I went on an absolute rabbit hole of looking at different CO2 monitors, and it's probably something that I'm going to buy I hope that I can just take it with me so I can check in to see what the CO2 levels are in the different spaces that I might be working.

3.  Automate outreach for metalabs

One of the ways that grew with design and marketing agency is having people know about it. And one of the ways you can do that is just by saying hello and tell them about who you are and what you do.

And that's exactly what I've been trying to build this week.

I did a whole video on what I built and the messages that get sent. It hasn't been published yet on my socials but keep an eye on my YouTube if you're interested.

4.  Preparing for Christmas sales on Amazon

Another thing I've been working on this week is preparing for Christmas in Q4. With e-commerce specifically Amazon. So right now I'm going through and looking at all the products that we're selling and just getting everything ready for one of the busiest times of the year.

At the moment, I am doing three things.

1. I'm changing the prices. So dropping some prices just to start getting the sales in.
2. I'll also start running some ads and making sure that they're well optimized for the Q4 season.
3. And I'll also be looking to try to add more products,  across Amazon and, you know, the other places that we sell online.

5.  Life Design Exchange Library

One of the fun things I've been working on this week is creating the life design exchange library.  That I put into the discord community that I've been running for the last few years.

What's the Life Design Exchange Library?

It's a collective resource that the community is helping to build.

It's based on life design principles as a structure but everyone has a chance to put in what they are doing or find useful. It can be diets, nutrition, exercise routines, and work strategies. It covers all areas of life and will be a growing free resource that is available to everyone.

A details will also be in the full video :)

6.  How to stop doom scrolling

Last week. I noticed that I was spending far too much time. Nighttime and in the morning just being on my phone. So at night time I'd be reading, I'd be on social media. And then in the morning I'd also do the same thing. I would reach for my phone, turn off the alarm. And before I know it, I'd be going through social media or checking work emails.

I spent a bit of time looking around to see if there was any ways I could help myself stop doom-scrolling and here's what I found.

(again full tutorial will be released on socials)

7.  I am Grok vs OpenAi

Last week, Elon Musk launched his competitor to open AI and chatGPT called Grok. It has a bit of humour. It's a little bit sarcastic. And yeah, I'm really interested to see how it develops.

At the moment it's only available if you're a premium subscriber on X. But it seems like it's a decent alternative to using chatGPT.

One of the biggest benefits is that it has the most up-to-date information because it takes its data directly from the X feed. So it's getting live data from everybody around the world and what they're posting.

Compare that to chatGPT, which has a specific date cut-off, which is normally a few months ago.

Here's the 3 key takeaways I posted about on X

8.  How I've lost five kilograms in four weeks, really simply.

Now that I've got back to Bali, I'm trying to lose the weight that I gained from being back in Europe. That time that I spent in France eating all those baguettes and croissants was amazing, my weight went up.

So after the past few weeks, I've been looking at ways and how I can get back into shape. I always find that if you layer multiple things together, you end up getting the best results. So that's what I've tried to do. Here are the things that I'm doing and nor that's helped me lose. One to one and a half kilograms each week for the past four weeks.

So I don't want to get too complicated. So there's just three things. That's been really helpful for me over the past few weeks, the first one is diet. So I cleaned up my diet. I'm eating mostly, organic grass fed food, and I am eating in a time restricted window, or it's also called intermittent fasting. So that's been really helped for me.

And at the moment I mostly eat just once a day. So I have like a big meal normally in the afternoon. And that usually does me. So with that meal is because it's so big and it's nutritious.  I'm full for the rest of the day and that's really helpful so eating clean, healthy, nutritious eating once a day. I'm in a time restricted window.

The second would be exercise. So I started exercising and I wanted to start just really easily. Um, Slow. So what I did was I joined the gym and I am doing 60 minutes of walking pretty much every day for the past month. I walk for 60 minutes and I also do a bit of writing while I walk on the treadmill and I just really enjoy it.

And it's helped a lot. On top of that after the gym, I jump in the sauna. I do a bit of an ice bath and I think they help a little bit too.

The third thing that I think is really helpful is just sleep. Back in Europe, my sleep was a little bit all over the show. So now that I'm a bit more settled, I can make sure that I'm getting at least around seven to nine hours sleep at night.

These are just a few things that I find helpful for me. What worked for you can be totally different, but over the years I've tried lots of different diets, I've tried lots of different ways of exercise and I've just been experimenting and playing around. I'm a lot more comfortable knowing what works for me and what doesn't.

But hopefully, these might give you some ideas and maybe some things you can think of by too.

9.  Have you ever had a pie that came from a tin?

Okay, that's everything in the recap of the past week. I hope you find it interesting and there were some things in there that you really enjoyed, or even just learned a little bit.

This is just a bit of an experiment to share about what's been going on through the week. I know there are lots of different things that just happen through the week, but I'm just trying to capture it all and share it as I go along, I'll also be sharing this in a video format and hopefully, there'll be more of these to come.