Clawing My Way Out

Well, I'd been looking forward to today for a while--the day when we'd finally start bringing down the monster, taking the bites out of the elephant, clawing our way out of the hole--whatever analogy seems appropriate to your character.

Today, I went from a guy who's been getting himself deeper in debt to a guy who's getting out of debt. That, in and of itself, is a turnaround.

I started off the day running in the park. I spent the afternoon paying off debt, even getting ahead again on a couple of bills we'd been behind on, and paying off a couple of outstanding bills we'd let sit because we didn't know how or when to deal with them. I'd managed to save a bit extra from my last paycheck, so we were able to do all that. Then, I spent the evening lifting weights with my brothers.

None of it was as great as it could have been. I dropped pine cones every three yards or so in the park and tried to recreate the drill basketball players do where they start at the baseline, then run and touch the free throw line, then go back to the baseline, then run and touch the top of the key, then repeat with the three point line, half court line, and each line until you get to the other side of the court. I'd planned on doing it for 30 minutes, but I didn't even make it to 10.

You can see from the tale of the tape what kind of debt I made in the bills. Not a bad chunk--I'm certainly not upset about it--but not the kinds of numbers that are going to get me out in a year.

My wife made rolls and breadsticks that turned out fantastic, and I had more than I should have. Do you know white flour has 100 calories per 1/4 of a cup?

And lifting tonight, it reemphasized how far I'm behind where I've been before. We worked out back and biceps, and mostly for biceps I just used the bar. My muscles are going to be mean to me tomorrow.

Even with all that, it was exactly the kind of day that this turnaround is about.

Sir Winston Churchill said, "Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

I'd modify that to say "Success is maintaining enthusiasm even when reality starts to set in." It's easy to imagine yourself thin and healthy, easy to imagine yourself out of debt, easy to imagine yourself living the lifestyle you wanted. It's easy to get excited about those images.

But when it's not just about images in your head, when it's about sore muscles and letting the roll sit there uneaten and foregoing that extra purchase and locking yourself into a budget, that's when continued enthusiasm starts breaking ground on the path to success.

You can't do it all at once, in one grand gesture of working out or paying a whole bunch of money or buying that 80 video set. Explosions don't make diamonds. Explosions make messes. Diamonds come from consistent, intense pressure applied over time.

That's how success is really brought about.

Measuring Holes - How Deep Is Your Debt?

I have to be honest--I didn't know how deep I was in until today. My wife and I had made a few thumbnail estimates, and I knew we were somewhere between $17-20,000 in debt. It turned out to be the upper end of that scale, and was probably above that last month.

It was a far more emotional experience than you'd think. I've actually been excited about this day for a while--thinking about how great it would be to finally start seeing some numbers going down. What I wasn't prepared for was what it was like to watch the numbers pile up as I discovered this bill or that bill I didn't even know we'd had.

My wife and I were both on edge the entire time, snapping at each other. I don't think either of us blamed the other, really, but we both were experiencing that kind of guilty defensiveness you feel when something's your fault, and you know it's your fault, but you don't want anybody to call you on it because it would be more than you could bear.

She behaved far better than I did, and may even have found a couple of transactions that we can get reversed and get us that much further ahead. We won't know for sure until Monday.

In the meantime, the bills were a combination of the serious--there were medical bills on there from my wife and daughter--and the stupid--I can't believe I'm still paying interest on trips to Subway and Quizno's from two years ago.

If you've never done this, do it and get it over with. Pull out all your bills, all your debt, get the balances, and add it up. Use a calculator, use Quicken, use Excel, use Lotus, do it however you want, but get a total.

I'm telling you, it won't be fun. But it's like pulling off the bandage. You may as well do it quick and get it over with. The sooner you know how deep the hole is, the sooner you can start weaving roots together to make a rope so you can climb out.

Tomorrow, I start climbing.

On Feeling in Control

I was talking with a co-worker today who had the same spending problem I did.

Everybody's got something they like to do that helps them feel in control. For my wife, it's getting her hair cut. Even if everything is going wrong in the world, she can still gain a sense of control by making her hair look different.

When I was a teenager, I would buy notebooks. They were cheap, and I would vow that I would fill them with pages of wonderful prose that I could then sell to a publisher and make money.

As I got older, I started buying workout magazines a lot. Buying the magazines was an outward sign that I was going to get in shape. I'd also buy money management books or other books.

My friend today admitted he'd had the same problem--when he was depressed, you could always find him at the bookstore, picking up one book or another.

The last time I lost weight, a big part of what I did was mental. I had to mentally transfer the sense of power that I used to feel by buying things (or by eating things--I'm a stress eater) and transfer it into my weight loss. In other words, my weight loss didn't really become effective until managing my eating and exercise habits began to give me the same sense of power I'd previously found through eating and making purchases.

I still feel you have to do this to create any true change. You can't just change the symptom or change the behavior--ultimately, you have to change who you are.

If a "diet" is a prison to you, one you hate and can't wait to get out of, you're missing the point. As soon as you break out of the diet, you're going to go right back to your old weight and end up right back where you ended up.

We're better at doing this for debt. Credit cards usually get cut up, and situations usually change for the good once we start learning to invest rather than spend our lives as an investment for the credit card company.

But ultimately, the biggest obstacle that stands between us and our real goals is ourselves. Ultimately, if we haven't done something yet, it's because there's still something else we want more. It's either the comfort we get from the food, the security we get from the (false) idea that if we don't try we can't fail, or it's something else.

So we're left with two choices--either we change our level of desire for the thing that's stopping us, or we increase or level of desire and satisfaction regarding the goal.

That's what I did. I mentally shifted the feelings of satisfaction the purchases gave me over to weight management. If I could control nothing else in my life, I could control the food that I ate and the exercise that I did, and that put me in control.

Is this real? Absolutely. There was a while where I could wander around endlessly looking for something to have for lunch, because I'd mentally and emotionally come to reject all the foods that made me fat, but hadn't yet accepted the foods that could make me thin. So nothing looked good to me.

Try it for yourself. Work on mentally changing your associations and emotions regarding your behavior.

Tony Robbins does an exercise on some of his tapes that you can try right now. Check this out:

Think of one of your favorite foods. Any food. In my case, it was one of those Italian chicken sandwiches they used to have at Burger King. It reminds me of trips with my Dad and it was tasty.

Now, on a scale of 1-10, rate how bad you think you want that food item right now. You hungry? Not hungry? How you feeling?

Now, try to raise your level of desire for that food. Close your eyes, and try to raise your desire for that food up to, say, an 8. Imagine the taste, the texture, think about hunger, whatever you have to do to make yourself want that food more than you did a minute ago.

Once you've done that, kick it up to a 9. Imagine whatever you need to, create the emotion, but make it a 9.

Got it?

Now go all the way. Make it a 10. Make it so that you want that food, right now, this second. Imagine it perfect, imagine the best it ever tasted, imagine it in your mouth this second.

Now wait!

Before you run out and get it, turn it around. Imagine your desire going back down. All the way down. Make it a 1. For me, this was easy--just imagine that bun being just a little soggy. Nothing worse than wet bread, to me. That idea of soggy bread turns me off. If your food is sweet, maybe imagine ants in it. Do something to bring yourself down from that 10 to that 1.

I hope you took the time to really do that exercise, because if you did, you'll see that you have more power over your desires than you may think. If you didn't do it, you may be skeptical right now, but I encourage you to go back and give it a try. It works.

You can affect your desires.

Weights and Measures

To those asking when I'm going to update the "Tale of the Tape," I, um, already did.

Yup. I lost a quarter of a pound and 1/8 of an inch. Not enough to register on this chart.

Not all that phenomenal.

But, it leads to the question of why I measure and don't just weigh. Why should you use a tape measure as much as a scale for tracking weight loss?

It's because all weight is not created equal. Just like people talk about "good debt" vs. "bad debt," there is good weight and there is bad weight.

The good weight is muscle. The bad weight is fat.

Now lots of people (particularly women) are afraid of muscle, because they think that women with muscles look like the pro wrestler formerly known as Chyna. This simply isn't true. The pro wrestler formerly known as Chyna was engineered by scientists in a lab. It would take a lot more than a couple of 10 pound dumbbells to turn you into Chyna.

Putting some more muscle on your body gives you several benefits. Mainly, it takes energy to maintain muscle.

Think of your body like you would a pet store. The fat is like all those bags of pet food. They just sit there, waiting for somebody to buy them. Until then, they will sit there forever, waiting patiently. That's how your fat is. Until your body gets around to using it, your fat doesn't do anything but wait. And as most people know, fat can wait a long, long, time.

Muscle, on the other hand, is like the kittens and puppies and Gila monsters. It needs to be fed to stay around. It takes energy (or in other words, it takes calories) to maintain muscle.

So if you make sure and buy a little less pet food than you need, you're going to have to start cracking open some of those bags you have lying around in order to feed the animals. The more animals you buy, the more feed you'll have to pull off the shelves.

Not a good way to make a pet store profitable, but a great way to lose fat.

So you could, in theory, lose one pound of fat and gain one pound of muscle and stay the same weight. This would be a good thing, because you'd now be burning more calories each day to keep that muscle.

And sometimes dieters will throw this excuse out there. I probably would have been tempted to throw it out there, seeing the results I saw this week.

"Yeah, I didn't lose anything, but I'm probably just gaining muscle."

That's where the tape measure comes in. If you're losing fat, it's going to show when you measure. As a very general rule of thumb, for every inch you take off your waist, you've lost about four pounds of fat. Figure about a quarter inch for every pound.

This is also a good thing mentally, because it gives you twice the opportunity to get good results. If you lost weight on the scale, great. If you only lost a little on the scale, but lost a lot on the tape measure, that means you're losing the bad stuff and gaining the good stuff. You still get to celebrate.

Don't have a tape measure? That's okay. There's a handy measurement tool that you already use every day that's almost as good--your clothes. Even if the scale isn't responding as fast as you like, the fact you didn't have to lay on the bed and hold your breath to button those pants is a terrific sign. The way your clothes fit is a great way to track your progress, even if you don't have access to a scale.

Of course, if you get results like mine, the tape-measure back up takes away any excuses you might have had, and forces you to be honest with yourself. I can take comfort in the fact I've stopped gaining. But to make the turnaround, I'm going to have to step it up a notch.

The Simple Starter Diet

Okay, I've received a lot of questions about diet. What's the best diet to use to lose weight?

Well, in some ways it will take me all year to answer this question. But if you want a fast, easy answer, here's The 365 Day Turnaround Simple Starter Diet.

Step 1. Make a list of foods or food combinations that have less than 300 calories each. Start by looking at the foods you normally eat, then expand the list from there.

Examples:
1 cup of nonfat Yoplait and 1 cup of nonfat cottage cheese: 290 calories
1 apple and 1 cup cottage cheese: 220 calories
Healthy Choice Classics Frozen Dinners: 250-300 calories
Wendy's Spring Mix Salad and Reduced Fat Creamy Ranch Dressing: 280 calories
Wendy's Small Chili w/ 2 saltine crackers: 225 calories
McDonald's Chicken McGrill, no mayo: 290 calories
McDonald's Apple dippers w/lowfat caramel dip and McDonald's Fruit & Yogurt Parfait: 260 calories
Subway 6 inch Savory Turkey Sub: 210 calories
Two Fudgesicles: 208 calories
Krispy Kreme original glazed: 200 calories
1 cup Vanilla Ice Cream: 265 calories
Baskin Robbins Pralines and Cream Ice Cream Bar: 280 calories

Step 2. If you're a guy, eat something off your list six times a day. If you're a girl, eat something off your list five times a day. Try to spread it out as much as you can, but if you miss a meal, double up on the next one.

Step 3. Don't eat or drink anything else except water. Drink two cups of water with every meal, and as much more water as you would like.

That's it! An eat-anything-you-want diet that you will lose weight on. It's good for people who are busy or on the go, because nearly every fast food restaruant gives out "Nutrition Guides" and store bought food has the nutritional info on the side. You just find something with under 300 calories, and you're good to go.

Wait, you're saying. Can I really lose weight doing this?

Yup.

But there's ice cream and stuff on that list.

Yes, but remember, diet isn't really as much about food types as it is about calories. If you eat less calories than you burn, you'll lose weight. This diet is designed to provide less calories than a moderately overweight person would burn, but still enough to keep them going. You'll lose weight, and have energy.

How much weight will I lose?

Well, that depends on a lot of factors. How much you weigh, how tall you are, how much you exercise, and how old you are.

And if you're not at least moderately overweight, this diet may not work for you at all. It's not designed to fine-tune away those last four or five "vanity pounds."

Ah-ha! I knew it wasn't as simple as you said.

Look, if dieting is an art, this is a paint-by-numbers. If you do a paint-by-numbers, you'll still end up with a painting. It just won't be as creative as if you'd done it yourself, but it will still be a painting.

So how much more complicated is diet, really?

As complicated as you want it to be. Not only could you get into counting calories, you could get into counting carbs and protein and fat, even counting milligrams of vitamins and minerals. Some people do math to try to keep these things in exact proportions. If you're a retired accountant looking for something to do, you could spend the rest of your life managing the numbers of your own diet--if you were really, really missing number crunching.

For normal people, even if you want to count there's really no need to look at anything more than calories, protien, fat, and fiber (The carbs will magically take care of themselves if you do this--but that's another post). A good multivitamin will keep everything else covered.

Is there a way to diet that doesn't involve counting?

Yup. Books like Body for Life and The Zone talk about "portions" instead of calories. A portion would be about the size of the palm of your hand, or the size of your closed fist. A portion of potato would be a potato the size of your fist. A portion of chicken would be a piece of chicken the size of the palm of your hand.

Using this system, you try to have a "portion" of protein and a "portion" of carbs at every meal. The protein should be a lean meat, like chicken breast, or perhaps a low- or non-fat cottage cheese. The carb should be something low sugar and low fat, but high in fiber, like whole wheat bread or a piece of fruit the size of your fist. Eat this five or six times a day, as outlined above. Three or four times a day, add in a portion of vegetables.

Wow. Eat meat six times a day? Isn't that a lot?

Yup. But it's not that much each time--that's the key. Just a handful of protein and a handful of carbs.

Okay, when you put it that way, it doesn't sound like very much.

It's more than you think. And if you're hungry, you can drink more water, or just hang tight for a while. When you're eating five or six times a day, you're never more than a couple hours away from your next meal.

An ideal "meal" in this diet would be some grilled chicken and onions served up in half a whole wheat pita.

Does this "portion" diet really work?

It works, but it can be hard to do, especially if you're on the go. To ease it up a bit, most people swap a few of the meals with some kind of meal replacement shake.

I will say that in practice, it's usually little high calorie, so you may have to exercise a little more than you would on the "Simple Starter Diet."

But you should really be exercising anyway, so what difference does it make?

Don't get snooty with me. You're the one talking to yourself.

I'm blogging to myself. Believe me, that's far more common.

On Unexpected Expenses

The situation Saturday ended up going better than I could have hoped for. Thanks to some very sweet anniversary gifts, not only did we get to replace the window, but we also got to go the movies on Saturday night. It was incredibly sweet.

But it brings up the subject of unexpected expenses. If you're so tight you're barely able to get through the month, and you're trying to get out of debt on top of that, what are your options? How should you figure unexpected expenses into your budget?

Having a plan will take some of the nail-biting out of each month--your heart should only be racing when you're exercising.

You have a few different choices.

1. Leave some elasticity in your budget. Make sure, when you create your budget for the month, that there is a certain amount of each check set aside specifically for problems.

Pros: The money is available each month. Also, if a utility bill or two turns out to be more expensive than you expected, you're still covered.

Cons: The amount you're able to set aside each month will probably be pretty small--smaller than your typical emergency cost.

2. Get $1,000 set aside for emergencies. Do whatever you have to--sell something, cash out something, scrounge it up, whatever you have to do--in order to get $1,000 cash ready to go for emergencies. This is what Dave Ramsey recommends, and he does recommend it be cash, the one form of currency that's still good everywhere.

Pros: The mere process of getting the $1,000 together will teach you that you have access to money in more ways than you think. And knowing you have $1,000 ready to go to pay for an emergency room trip or whatever other thing cropped up--well, let's just say you can sleep the sleep of the just.

Cons: Depending on what your highest interest debt is, and how much you owe on it, that $1,000 could be costing you more than $250 a year in interest.

3. Keep a credit card for emergencies. Two things make a good emergency credit card--low interest rates, and low spending limits. The low limit puts pressure on you to pay it off before the next emergency--and the low interest rate saves you money. If you pay it off before the first billing cycle, that first month will often be interest free.

Pros: The maximum amount of money is put towards debt reduction each month. This emergency tool only costs you interest if you use it.

Cons: It's still a credit card, and inability to discipline yourself with a credit card may be what got you in a bad financial situation in the first place. If you max out every card you get your hands on, this option probably isn't for you. And if you don't have extra money to pay it down figured into your budget, how would you pay it anyway?

What's the best one? Who knows. As you can see, they all have their advantages and disadvantages. What you should think about is what type of system you used before you changed your financial outlook, and try to recreate that without the pain.

For example, if a $300 payday loan usually took care of you, then wait for a month where you didn't need to get one, and set aside the $300 you would have given the payday loan company if there'd been an emergency. Now, the next time there's an emergency you can borrow from yourself. If you have the discipline to pay yourself back as faithfully as you would the payday loan company, you'll never have to use them again.

As for me, I'm trying a combination of the three. I have a certain amount factored into the budget for unexpected expenses. Since I don't know how soon I can scrounge up the $1,000, for right now I have a credit card with a low interest rate and a $500 limit I know is there for me. Once I scrounge up the $1,000, I'll probably stick with that--the $200 or so dollars a year in interest it costs me is worth it to be able to sleep at night without worrying about what I might have to pay for tomorrow.

Sunday Book Review

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It's easy to review these two books together, because they're so similar. It's obvious that Dave Ramsey had seen Bill Phillip's excellent Body for Life when he wrote Total Money Makeover. The layout of the two books is the same, the nuts-and-bolts, no-frills, no "trick" advice is the same, and the solidity of the facts is the same.

Bill Phillips was a pro bodybuilder who decided to start a fitness company for the average Joe. Body For Life is a distillation of his bodybuilder knowledge compacted into a program that you or I could do.

Dave Ramsey has dabbled in all kinds of financial techniques, from "Nothing Down" real estate to day trading, and has finally settled on a batch of basic, no-risk financial fundamentals. And I do mean no-risk--there are no get-rich-quick schemes here. He likes to brag he gives, "The kind of financial advice your Grandma would give you."

If you want the two books that best combine the most basic of foundations with the most solid production of results, they're probably right here.

Both books dedicate long sections to dispelling "Myths" about health and finance, ideas that are considered to be sane in the conventional wisdom, but are actually nonsense. These chapters alone are valuable to anyone who's just starting on a fitness or financial journey and trying to get a handle on what's true and what's not.

But these books don't just toss around ideas--they're also handbooks. They contain step by step instructions on how to implement the ideas they teach. In other words, they tell you what to do, today, to find yourself in a better place, physically or financially, than you were before.

Both books were also originally marketed as "contests," and the people who got the best results were given prizes--or will be, because even though the deadline for Total Money Makeover has passed, the winners are still being decided.

I don't agree with everything in these books, and some of it may not be practicable in your current situation. For instance, to do the Body For Life workout as outlined would require access to dumbbells. Canceling the gym membership was one of the things I did to save money. But with his explanation of principles, it becomes easier to adapt the program to my (or your) current situation.

It was Body for Life, along with The Business Plan For The Body that helped me lose nearly 50 pounds two years ago. Look for a review of the second book in a few weeks, but in the meantime, here's the first one.