Exercise from an Operations Research Perspective

People are hella weird about exercise. My Navy friends tend to be extremists - either all about taking pride in the hardest workout they’ve ever done (the belief that past accomplishments that haven’t improved others’ lives matter) or shunning exercise, giving anecdotes of the person they knew that ate healthy, exercised and died young (the belief that exercise is about longevity and discounting the belief that it’s about quality of life). My LA actor friends get out of shape, set goals to get back in shape and spend crazy time and effort to break even (The belief that results are linear and won’t look like the sq rt of effort). I don’t know much about how the body works and often make my girlfriend, who loves science and facts, legitimately angry when I make up stuff about the power plants, personified organs and little people who live in the stomach because the internal mechanisms really don’t matter that much to me. That means this essay is a different kind of essay, but it’s tenets have kept me in better shape than most people in the fitness industry even while hotel living, or doing long hr shift work with little control over my diet.

Live close to the gym. If you don’t, find another gym that’s close. If you can’t, don’t go to the gym or make it a fun treat that isn’t the core of your workouts. If the gym is 15 minutes away, you’ve just doubled the time it takes to do a good workout. If it’s further, you’re just being silly. Pushups, pull-ups, squat/lunge variants and running are available to you outside a gym. In my adult life I’ve lived in Annapolis, WestPoint, Monterey, San Diego, The Pacific Ocean, Charleston, Saratoga Springs, Sasebo, Seattle, San Francisco, Manama and Los Angeles all for periods of 6 months or longer. In some of these places I worked long hrs and a gym wasn’t close by. I’m not super tough, or dedicated and don’t possess crazy will power. I switched over to my non-gym workouts and sometimes did 2 minutes a day (max effort on one of the exercises I listed above) and sometimes did 30 minutes a day (usually a run). Depended what I had time for and there’s no reason to feel guilty here.

Don’t make up missed workouts. Here is where you can feel guilty, but don’t try and make it up. Just feel bad about yourself for a little bit and move on with your life. The guilt is a good tool to make sure you don’t fall off completely and your body probably needs the rest if you’re working out 4 to 6 days a week. Don’t weaken your guilt, the useful tool it is, by combining your current workout with a half @$$ version of the one you missed. If you’re working out 1 to 3 days a week, you can probably go ahead and make up the workout. Don’t workout 7 days a week or God will hate you. 

Sometimes unhealthy foods are healthy… and the opposite. If you have never counted calories, I highly recommend it for a period of about 6 months. You can use a free app called MyFitnessPal. They might do a few annoying things on there to tempt you to use the paid version, but none of the paid features matter at all and you’d be wasting your money. It’s time consuming the first two weeks as you save the basic foods you eat for the first time, but after that it gets way easier. You can research your break down of protein, carbs, and fats online. I wouldn’t worry much about calories at first because you don’t know how many calories your body needs and you’re already tracking more than you were before so relax. Eat until you’re full and then stop eating and after a few days, you’ll know how many calories you typically consume. Until then, guess and use it as a filler. I learned through this process what a balanced meal looks like, tastes like, feels like. If you haven’t counted before, you don’t know. There were days when I realized I needed a cheese burger more than a salad because I was high on carbs, medium on protein and low on fat. The cheese burger is high in protein and fat. The salad usually has almost no protein and a few grams of carbs and fat. Counting helps you make these decisions instead of feeling guilt about eating something that isn’t typically deemed healthy. After about 6 months of counting, you have a pretty good idea of how to construct a well balanced day without counting. Don’t get discouraged by imperfect inputs. The search engine has proxies for most food types and if you error towards unhealthy when accounting, you’ll get a good idea of what you’re lacking/exceeding.

Focus on what to eat and not on what you can’t eat. When you count, you’ll realize that you have recurring problem areas in your diet. Sometimes it’s hard to get protein high enough. Sometimes your carbs are too high. Sometimes it’s fats. If you like fat, don’t deprive yourself of fat because you’ll fail. Find something that is low fat and high in protein and high in carbs and make it a standard part of your diet. Since you can only eat so much, by default you’ll eat less fat. For me, I love the fat, but sometimes fall short on carbs (my goal for carbs is over 50% of my calories). I implemented a staple breakfast of steel cut oatmeal with a scoop of fat free greek yoghurt, a drizzle of honey and a small amount of sliced fruit. It tastes good to me and sets my protein and carbs a little higher than they need to be so I can eat so much fat when I get the craving. I also keep the ingredients on standby to make rice, Puerto Rican beans, and chicken breast. It’s a low fat meal that I like and can get me back on track if my fats go crazy high in a day. To supplement micro nutrients (also low fat and high carb/protein) is a smoothy I make in the morning and sip through the day putting the blender back in the fridge after each glass. It usually has some combination of a protein scoop, celery, carrot, kale, beet (I usually use golden beets to avoid looking like a murderer), flax seed, chia seed, a multi vitamin, a dappity-do of cinnamon, a banana and maybe a small amount of some other fruit. I try to keep it more veggie than fruit to keep the sugar lower, but I can taste the sugars from the vegetables too. These are my staples that make it easy to grab a burger when I want to and still be eating healthier than most diet plans. 

Having no goals helps to keep me in shape. So you set a goal. You make a plan to get there. You implement the rituals that are part of your plan. You achieve your goal. Sorry to tell you, but your goal was probably arbitrary and if your rituals aren’t fun, you’re going to stop them and then you have nothing, NOTHING!!!! Seriously though, the way my cycles typically work are: 

1. I get excited to become a swole monster

2. I workout for a period of time without a goal in mind

3. I feel happy seeing my gains

4. If I sustain the inspiration for a period of time, I make new bench marks on where I’m at 

The constraints at the top of the essay aren’t my goals. I’ll beat those numbers with a lack of sleep and my diet being off. Those are indications that I’m getting out of shape. It’s much easier to do some kind of workout once a week and maintain fitness levels than it is to build fitness. Feeling week for getting 19 pull-ups or running a 5:31 mile lets me know that I need to put in a little bit of effort there and it really is just a little bit of effort. It’s the inspiration for consistent work to get back on track knowing that I’ll have good days and bad days and that I’m already close. Minimizing time, effort, cost and pain while not letting my fitness slip makes sense to me and is more sustainable than goal setting.