2017 Phase 8 Goal Accountability: Finally Dialed In

At the end of June, part of the way through this year’s 7th goal accountability phase I decided to finally get my shit together.  I carried that momentum into the 8th phase.  I haven’t done too many summaries this year, since I’ve mostly been sucking wind, but I have been keeping up my daily grading.  Now that I’m dialed in from the goal perspective, so too will I be dialed in on reporting it. I am happy to report straight A’s across all my goals, finally!

To recap, the five goals I’m actively grading myself against are:

• Goal 1: Dial in the diet to be ~80/20 rule plant based whole foods diet.  Think “Eat-to-Live” mainstream diet method.
• Goal 2: Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
• Goal 3: Physical activity levels such that either get 10K or more steps in a day or burn more than 2800 calories. This translates into either moving more or working out or both.
• Goal 4: Daily calisthenics (5+ minutes) or yoga (15+ minutes)  in order to increase agility, muscle balance, and strength.
• Goal 5: 15+ minutes of Meditation in order to increase mental acuity and relaxation

For each day I give myself a grade on a standard school-like four point A through F system for each category.  The grade for the day is the average of those five grades.  At the end of the Phase I tally up the average of each goal’s grade across each day, and then get the overall GPA by averaging those:

• Goal 1: Average grade  was 3.92 (A-).  Eating this 80/20, usually more like 90/10, whole foods plant based diet has not been as hard as I thought it was.  I have used my weekly free days but they haven’t been the total gorge fests like in previous years.  Instead it’s just letting things go slack a bit.  I now feel like I can sustain this diet mode easily.
• Goal 2: Average grade was 3.95 (A-).  Again, sleep hasn’t been a problem even if it has been inconvenient to get to bed early enough to hit the 7 hour mark.
• Goal 3: Average grade was a 4.00 (A).  After coming back from my trip overseas I decided that I was going to make getting my butt moving a top priority since it was one of the big things I always procrastinated on.  I’ve been hitting that target every day since, even getting a some running in too.
• Goal 4: Average grade 3.86 (A-).  Again, getting my butt moving is something I have struggled with so getting daily calisthenics has been important to focus on.  I’ve hit it pretty much every day, but don’t have the perfect score I had with my movement goal.  Still I’m seeing progress in the number of reps I can do of pull ups, push ups, etc.
• Goal 5: Average grade 3.73 (A-).  Probably the easiest thing for me to do but the one that I faltered at the most.  I still squeaked out an A-, but barely.  I have found that it’s much harder to do this at night.  Once I get it dialed in more I think that’ll mean I probably should do it at night because I need it there more.

So my GPA for 2017’s 8th Goal Accountability Phase is 3.89, a solid A- and by far the best grade I have gotten to date.  I am really pleased with my performance and hope to continue that into Phase 9!  Along with actually doing these things have been some great benefits in terms of my biomarkers, which I’ll probably detail separately Here is the graphical view of the monthly and daily grades through the end of Phase 8.  On to more success!