The Moderate Method

Diet

Diet is crucial because you need to eat to live. Most people eat at least three times a day, plus snacks in between. That’s excessive if you think about it. We eat too much.

Humans are animals like any other. In the wild, you likely wouldn’t wake up and immediately eat. The only food available might be what you killed or scavenged the day before. Generally, there would be nothing.

I’m not saying you can’t eat breakfast, but humans probably weren’t meant to. No other animal does this. At best, other animals start their day foraging or hunting, which isn’t the same as our routine of having a bowl of cereal, cooking up eggs, or grabbing a snack bar before heading out. Many people even stop by fast food places for breakfast.

The type of food you eat is more important than how much. As you’ve heard, processed food is not good for you. You can eat three meals a day plus snacks, be carnivore or vegan, follow keto or high-carb diets—the specific diet doesn’t largely matter. There’s a diet for everyone. The important part is knowing yourself and how your body responds to different foods.

For me, I found that I feel best when eating one main meal per day around 4:00 pm. This meal usually includes some kind of protein (beef, pork, chicken, or fish) and a vegetable. I may have fruit for dessert. Around 8:00 pm, I might snack on nuts and cheese. Sometimes I’ll eat breakfast or have ice cream instead of fruit. Occasionally, I’ll have popcorn or potato chips in the evening. But most of the time (97%, I’d estimate), my diet is as described.

I’m 57 years old, 5′ 11″ tall, and about 170 lbs. I’ve maintained this weight for about five years. Before that, I was stable at around 185 lbs for 20 years. Before that, I was about 195 lbs and knew I had to lose weight. I unknowingly adopted intermittent fasting by only eating when I was hungry. I discovered I was never hungry in the mornings, so I cut out breakfast. I then realized that if I was busy and drinking coffee, I didn’t get hungry during lunch, so I dropped lunch. I fell into eating only dinner by listening to my body. This simple act dropped my weight from 195 lbs to 185 lbs. Five years ago, I prioritized protein and drastically reduced sugar consumption. This change has kept me stable at 170 lbs. I discovered my preferred diet is Low Carb combined with Intermittent Fasting.

Diet fads come and go. Don’t believe any single diet is perfect because none are. Each has its shortcomings. Don’t believe any influencer or diet guru claiming to have a magic diet that works for all. It’s a fantasy. It’s up to you to find out what works best for you.

Exercise

I’ll be brutally honest: I hate working out. I’ve never liked it. I played sports when I was younger but was never an athlete. I was the kid who discovered computers and preferred staying inside to learn BASIC or play video games on my Atari rather than joining my friends for sports.

There are physical activities I enjoy, like gardening and hiking. I had a beautiful vegetable garden in Chicago and have a smaller one where I live now. I moved to Georgia in 2020 and have had the opportunity to hike in the North Georgia Mountains. Growing up in Chicago, I didn’t hike much; it always required a several-hour drive to find a good hiking spot.

I know gardening and hiking aren’t enough to provide the strength, flexibility, and balance I need as I age. Maintaining muscle tone and flexibility in your joints and tendons becomes more important as you get older. One of the most common injuries for older people is breaking their hips or other bones when falling. If you maintain muscle tone and balance, you have a better chance of an injury-free fall and might even lessen your chances of falling in the first place.

My exercise program is modeled after the P90X program from Beachbody. You might have heard of it; it was all the rage in the early 2000s. The workout consists of six days of active exercise and one day of stretching or rest. I completed the entire 90-day program over 10 years ago. The problem I had with it is that the daily exercises are too long—each one is at least an hour and they are exhausting. I don’t like to feel exhausted.

I tried other programs, including variants of P90X from Tony Horton, but none were as straightforward as P90X. They always had gimmicks or exercises I didn’t like. So, I found a solution that worked for me.

I took the DVDs from the program, ripped them to my hard drive, and edited each workout down to between 30 and 40 minutes. I put those files on a USB drive, plugged it into my TV, and continued the program in a compressed format. I found it much easier to continue. I think if I hadn’t done that, I would have quit working out.

I’ve been exercising almost daily since then. I’ve developed my own workouts, primarily the same every week and still patterned on P90X. My workout schedule is linked here. I take Sundays off and don’t even stretch on those days.

I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t interested in looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack LaLanne (if anyone still remembers him), or even Tony Horton. It’s too much work for me. I’m perfectly happy maintaining my weight and being a little soft around the middle. Exercise is for body health: muscle tone, bone structure, cardiovascular health, and anything else physical that isn’t weight-related. Never exercise to lose weight—you’ll only lose time and effort.

Life

Out of the three steps, this is the most difficult because it’s the part you have the least control over. Relationships, jobs, kids, mortgages, pets, and other close aspects of your life require your time and energy. We don’t even need to mention external factors like politics, inflation, wars, and pandemics. It’s challenging for people to separate themselves from these issues and focus on what is most important, which varies from person to person. I approach life by looking at spheres of control.

You can’t control what others think and do; you can only control your actions and reactions. This is key to living a more peaceful, balanced life. There will be people who test you and push your buttons just because they can. It’s extremely difficult to ignore them, no matter how hard you try—I should know.

I was a hothead for about 40 years. I had a temper as a kid and would have huge outbursts of anger and sometimes violence. Not violent enough to land me in prison, thankfully, but violent enough that people were a little afraid of my reactions. Most of my anger stemmed from my inability to understand why people did things that were obviously wrong. Whether I was wronged or others were, I couldn’t stop it. It seemed to me that people in positions of authority or higher status liked to use their power as a weapon. I hated that and always pushed back against it, making me pretty miserable for a long time.

In my late 40s, as my kids grew up and moved away (my wife and I started a family early), I stopped pushing back against people I couldn’t change. I changed my reaction to them rather than trying to force them to my way of thinking. This made me calmer and had a calming effect on others. I still didn’t agree with what they were doing; I just chose not to participate. It’s both easier and more difficult than it sounds.

Letting go of what I couldn’t control lifted a weight from my shoulders. When I did that, I could more clearly see the things I could control. You may not be able to control directives from your boss, but you can control your performance or non-performance. You can’t control the Federal Reserve raising or lowering interest rates, but you can control how you structure your finances to best take advantage of the current economic climate. You can’t control your children when they are away, but you can influence them when they are home.

Approaching life using the Circle of Influence concept is life-changing. It gets you moving in the direction you wish to go. Once you shed the weight of the world, your world becomes easier to manage.