Imagine waking up every morning and feeling like you have been hit by a freight train. You take naps throughout the day, but to no avail — you feel worse when you wake up than when you went to sleep! Every time you eat, no matter what you eat, you feel as if you’re slipping into a coma.

It’s hard to concentrate for more than a few seconds; writing anything more than two sentences is almost too much effort. You can’t remember anything and begin to slip on making appointments because your brain is so foggy. You find yourself constantly glancing at your calendar for fear you have missed another appointment. You are invited to social events, but can’t muster the energy to go. Even taking a 20-minute walk makes you feel like you need another nap. (more…)

Does the “amazing liver flush”
really work? My detailed review.Many of you have been following me on Twitter and requested a full blog post about the effects my liver flush (also known as a liver cleanse or gallbladder flush) had.

Background

For years, I have been suffering from myriad stomach problems — namely gas, bloating, and cramps after eating. After keeping a food journal, I discovered that garlic, onions, red meat, and milk were bothering me the most. Sure, I could use Pepto-Bismol or Lactaid pills, which cured the symptoms, but the only foolproof way to avoid painful cramps was simply to avoid these foods.

Red meat and milk weren’t too bad to cut out, but the garlic and onion problem really bothered me. I enjoy both foods, and garlic in particular is used to flavor a lot of food. If I ordered an entree with garlic, I’d simply pop a couple Pepto pills and suffer, since I liked it so much.

Then, while I was browsing Steve Pavlina’s forum, a few people mentioned that they had done liver flushes. I had never heard of a liver flush, but it immediately jumped out at me as something I needed to learn more about. (more…)

In which I eat “rabbit food” for a month
in my quest to feel better.Most of us who are business owners — and even those who are happy hard workers — seem to have a disconnect between our personal lives and our business. We work late into the night, eating fast food or microwaving something “quick”. In many cases, we don’t have time to cook healthier food or even go to a restaurant and sit down to eat.

We also skip routine health checkups and don’t go get health problems looked at unless they are acute (a.k.a. affecting our work!) Our bad diet and stress are huge risk factors, but since many health conditions take years to show up, we rationalize and assure ourselves that we’re “fine.” (more…)

Since it’s been several months since I first started laser hair removal here in San Jose, California, I figured now would be a good time to update.

I’ve had 7 treatments on my legs and stomach, and I added in underarms and my bikini area a couple months ago for good measure. I’ve so far spent about $1500 for my legs and stomach, plus another few hundred dollars for the first few treatments of my bikini and underarms.

First, I want to answer the question everyone has been asking me: Is laser hair removal worth doing? (more…)

For the past week, I’ve been exploring some new techniques to rearrange my time so that it is used most effectively. This follows my realization in What’s Most Important? (my previous entry) that time will become my most valuable resource.

I have several goals:
1) Make my time at the office of maximum effectiveness, as I want to be in the office no more than 8-9 hours a day. (No more 12-hour days every day, please.) Putting the same amount of work into an 8-hour day as I had in a 12-hour day seemed hard, but I’ll tell you how I successfully managed to do it.
2) Free up some time to exercise for 1/2 hour or more at least 3 times a week.
3) Get rid of side projects that were taking up my weekends so I could have weekends free to read, brainstorm, hang out with friends, go shopping, and catch up on TV and movies.

I started reading The 4-Hour Workweek, which is an interesting book that I’ve seen mentioned on several blogs lately. I expected a bit of an ego trip from the author, Timothy Ferriss, and there was a bit of ego there, but what I found most interesting were the radical changes he made in his life that simply weren’t obvious to most people (including me). For instance, he sets aside 1 hour every day to read and respond to email, and keeps his email client shut off the rest of the time.

I implemented a variant of this, deciding to keep my email client off during the day except for predefined times that I would have it on. I was moderately successful: I immediately noticed my productivity spiked, but since I didn’t set aside a time to respond to email, some emails did not get responded to. I’m going through this weekend and responding to them, but that is obviously sub-optimal. Next week, I intend to set aside a time every day to respond to emails and ensure that all emails from that day are responded to on the same day, as well as just reading them and sorting my inbox.

The biggest change I made was inspired by Timothy’s book, however, and this improved productivity dramatically: I stopped reading blogs at work. That was a huge difference. I didn’t realize how much time reading blogs took. Timothy points out in his book that “batching” saves an incredible amount of time. That is, instead of taking 5 minutes 20 times a day to read email, you can “batch” and do the same amount of email reading and responding for 1 hour. 5×20=100 minutes; 1 hour=60 minutes.

Reading blogs, for me, turned out to be the same way. I typically now read them at night when I get home — I can read them more effectively once a day instead of 10 times a day. Plus, most blog posts aren’t that time-sensitive. I sorted my RSS reader into two categories: Daily and Occasional. I put all the blogs I wanted to read on a regular basis under Daily. I put everything else (mostly news aggregators like TechCrunch) under Occasional. I stopped reading blogs at all when I was in the office, and also asked my friends to email non-work-related blog entries to me on my Gmail account instead of IM’ing them to me. I read the Occasional blogs only when I have plenty of extra time.

Those 2 changes allowed me to squeeze about 2 extra hours out of my day. I’ll continue to work on other time-saving changes. But 2 hours was enough for me to move on to the next phase of my plan…

Today I signed up for a gym membership at a local gym. I’ve listened to lots of friends who talk about gym memberships and the most common reason the memberships fail is that the people sign up for a gym membership with no set plan of action. I didn’t want me to be a gym membership failure, so by the time I walked in to the local gym today, I knew what I wanted: a reasonable monthly rate; to do Pilates; and to have a personal trainer do several sessions with me to get me up to speed on all the machines and design a workout plan that I could do effectively. I also committed to myself to pay for additional personal training if at any point I felt like I was falling off my goal of exercising at least 3 times a week. Finally, I know that gyms are fairly negotiable up front, but once you sign, you’re in — so I went in knowing I wanted to negotiate.

The gym I went to offered a free month of Pilates training (cool!) and 4 free personal trainer sessions if I signed up for a 1-year commitment and paid $65 monthly and a $75 signup fee. They also offered free daycare, and I didn’t need free daycare, so I negotiated another 4 free personal trainer sessions instead (that’s about $265 according to their list prices, by the way.) Included in the monthly fee is unlimited use of the gym and nice pool, plus free group workouts every day. I looked at the group workout calendar and immediately determined that I would be best served by signing up for the “core strengthening” session twice a week. I figure the 3rd time every week will be what the personal trainer wants me to work on solo; if that doesn’t work, I’ll reassess later.

I have just allocated $855 for fitness over the next year (plus any workshops I decide to do, like continuing Pilates, tennis, or dancing lessons), so I need to be committed to this. I am open and flexible to design a fitness plan that works for me, but I also know I’ve spent some money now, so I must follow through and work diligently on achieving my fitness goals for the next 12 months. I plan to go in at 9 or 9:30AM 3x a week (this means getting up earlier than I am used to.) I’m pretty sure this will work. I’ll keep you all posted. 🙂

I talked about goal #3, eliminating side projects, at length in my previous blog entry, so I don’t have anything new to report there. I’ll keep posting more time-saving tips as I find them.