Sports Betting and Step Stepping

StepBet

Week 5 of 6 is completed with StepBet and I'm still in the running.
I made sure to knock out everything I needed before the SuperBowl so that I could have a nice relaxing day.  After the Superbowl I still had to do a 45 minute walk to make sure I got my 10k in but all is good.  I am keeping track of my Steps for the year in a separate tab that you can get from the main page or you can follow it here. I am updating it weekly to make it easier for me to keep track of.

Self Improvement Spreadsheet

I'm not sure what to think as it has only been one week.  After finishing the first week I was at 71% which is about what I'm supposed to aim for.  Anything less means it is too difficult and once you are hitting 90+ consistently then it is too easy.  I feel that leaving my goals at what they are for the entire month I'll jump up to that 90 percentile but at the same time I don't want to start changing them just to make it more difficult on myself.   There were several spots that I missed only due to illness or just because I didn't feel like putting my focus in that direction and changing two things would have put me in the mid to high 80's.
Whatever, this is a learning process and I'm along for the ride long haul.
I don't want to dig too deeply into it and I figure I'll do that after the first month.



The Super Bowl

I hadn't placed a sports bet for a while and I was not planning on betting on the game but the day before the Super Bowl my mother called me and asked me if I was interested in betting on the game.  At first I thought she meant that she wanted to make a wager against me for something but after a brief conversation it turned out she was interested in putting money on the actual game and wanted to know if I'd go in on the bet with her.  Her only other previous bet was a random occasion when she gave a friend $10 to place a future bet on the Steelers to win the Super Bowl and that just so happened to bet the year that we went and beat the Cardinals so her bet paid off.

However, she knows nothing about sports betting so I had to explain some things to her.  She told me to think about it and get back to her with whatever bet I wanted to make, she would leave that in my hands.

At the time we had that conversation she was talking about each of us putting up $50 and just seeing what happened so when I called her back and said i'd be willing to place the $100 bet she said "ok, $100 for each of us" and I'll be damned if I'm going to let my mother seem like she has more balls than I do so I agree'd to it.

I told her that I decided I wanted to bet the Eagles on the money line just because I felt like either team could pull this game out based on their offenses and that the bet had the best payout odds. I had thought about parlaying it up with the Over but my balls were not big enough to do that with a $200 bet which was by far the largest I have ever wagered on any game or even spread out over all my bets at one time.

I'm happy to report that everything worked out well in the end and now I just have to wait until I hit up a Station Casino so that I can cash out my winnings and pay my Mother off.

Hope y'all are having a great week and hopefully I have something more entertaining to write about than this boring crap next time my fingers get the itch.

Day 4 is an Asshole

Dear Day 4,

You and I don't have a very good relationship.  I've written this note in the past, but never published, so I now want to come out publicly and let you know that I'm not a fan.

Days 1-3 were nice to me and helped me along my path just fine but you, you sir, are a complete dick.

What is with this unnatural craving for BBQ that you have presented me with? What is this temptation?  Why not a nice casual reminder that I can get a salad made out of my favorite sub from Subway because it is healther, loaded with veggies and has a low calorie count?  No, there has been no mention of that from you at all.  instead you have me sitting here drooling over the possibility of a slab of ribs smothered in BBQ sauce or a Famous Dave's Devil Spit Burger complete with extra Hellfire Pickles and Jalepeno bacon dipped into an extra heaping of get off your fucking diet now you are going to be fat forever BBQ sauce.

Day 4, I'm not sure we can be friends any longer.  I tried to figure a way through this day.  I tried to tell myself that tomorrow I could leave you for something nicer to me and prettier.  I tried to talk myself into it by thinking it would be your hotter sister but then I just started thinking that your hotter sister likes fat bald white guys with grey beards and said fuck it, then I went to the pizza joint and pigged out.

Yeah, that is Day 4 in a nutshell.  Breaking down my defenses and letting me think that I'm making progress.  I can see the scale giving me a slightly smaller number every day and then Day 4 show up and tells me that I'm pretty and that I deserve to eat a meal with a calorie count as high as my daily total.  In fact, go over it.  This is a reward.

Day 4, I loathe you.  I despise you.  I wish you were never born and that Day 5 was here already.

Tomorrow might be another day but I will always remember how much I hate you Day 4.

So, the funny thing is that there is this other project that I am kind of working on, one that I started back in like 2011 but ended up not really going anywhere for whatever reason, and I was trying to dig up some information for that project when I ran across a document titled "Dear Day 4."

Now, when I'm feeling particularly creative or I have an idea that I think I might be able to take somewhere at some point in the future I open up my Google Docs and type a little bit out hoping that I'll come back to it at some point.  "Dear Day 4" was just kind of sitting in there and as I was scrolling down the list of documents curiosity wanted me to open it up.

This was an entry (which is partially included above but now has modifications made to it) in which I was complaining about how I was on a diet but the smell of BBQ from Famous Dave's set my salivary glands off and all I could think about was eating something really unhealthy for me.

So, since I started trying to count my calories again just recently in an effort to get better control of my weight and allowing myself to still enjoy eating things I really like on occasion (just have to teach myself that not every single day is an occasion) I decided to look back and see what day I really just pigged out even though I knew it was a bad idea.

Right now it will come as no surprise to y'all that it was also day 4.

Now, that day (which is in all actuality this past Thursday) I had a headache pretty much all day long so I convinced myself (even knowing that I was really just lying to myself so that I could pig out) that I needed some "real" food and an energy drink and that would help my headache because, dammit, the whole reason I have this headache is because I am denying my body what it truly wants, what it truly craves, what it truly NEEDS by George!!

So, I went to the pizza place in my working plaza which is one of those create your own pizza places that you get a pizza made for two, unless you are a big fat guy like me in which case you just devour the whole damned thing yourself and hope that those around you aren't judging you silently.

Yeah, I even looked up the calories for the pizza that I was going to create (on MyFitnessPal) before I went over and STILL told myself that it was OK and I'd be able to survive it just this one time  because I was only doing it because of the headache.

Yes, Day 4 gets me every damned time.

I am weak.

I am trying.

I am improving.

I am taking this one day at a time, just like I did the last time I dropped a significant amount of weight.

So, Day 4, you are officially an asshole and I abhor you.

You are my nemesis but hopefully this is my last day 4.

Hope all of you are sticking to your goals and making improvements in life.  I know I am.

The Road to Self Improvement

Here I sit and January is winding down and my main goal coming into this year was self improvement.  In fact I just got done with a 4k step walk to make sure I hit my minimum goal so that I didn't fail for the week.  I am dedicated and I am going to make this work.

I want to get all of my finances in order, I want to improve my health, I want to become a better person in general.   How do I plan on doing that?  Well habit and routine.

It is easy to do something when it is a habit, when it is part of a routine.  Did I get fat because one day I decided to pig out and have cake, ice cream, pizza and a ton of Taco Bell?  No, I got fat because I decided that if I did that one day I could do it as often as I wanted month after month, year after year and decade after decade.  I got (and maintained) fat because I have a lifetime of bad eating decisions in my rear-view mirror and these decisions are very routine for me.

Oh, I forgot to pack my lunch and bring a healthy sandwich to work?  No problem there are a million places that I can eat within minutes of work and they are all (well, all the ones I go to) unhealthy and should be avoided.   These are the routine decisions I make every day and my mentality, my habits have been holding me back.

So, 2018 I wanted to start developing healthier habits in a slow and gradual road to self improvement where a lot of my decisions will center around getting healthier.  This is where my 10k Every Day challenge started.

10,000 steps is a recommended amount of steps for reasons I don't care to know.  What I do know is that on the days where I am working I do not have any issues hitting 10,000 steps.  The only days that I have issues are the days where I am not working and I am just sitting around the house being lazy, playing video games and watching TV with the family.   10k Every Day is me getting into the habit of going for walks and getting more exercise on my days off.   I once had a friend tell me that something becomes a habit after doing it without fail for 28 days.   Being that I have 2 days off per week then this officially will not become a habit for me until I have been making sure to get my steps in for 14 weeks.  Until then I am just trying to get into the routine and turn it into a habit.  I will get there, baby steps.

With the knowledge that this was my goal I took it one step further and joined StepBet which is me gambling on whether or not I would hit my goals and, in fact, increases my goals and makes it more of a challenge.  I can dig that.  I put up $40 of my own money for a 6 week journey and the program tells me that 2 days I week I have to hit 18.5k steps, 4 days I have to hit 15.5k steps and I get one "free" day where I can relax and kick my feet up (however, I still have to make sure I am hitting at least 10k for my own personal goals).  StepBet has definitely increased my activity and my motivation.  I plan on jumping from one game to the next for the entire year with the exception of the 3 weeks I am on "vacation' when we have our Baby Girl in April.  New year, new goals, new attitude, new determination, new me.  Bet on it.

There are other areas of my life that I would like to focus on as well and it all kind of fell into place when I started listening to a Podcast called Go Hunt Life which I really don't know how I stumbled across.  However, when I did stumble across it the latest episode, episode #85, had a guy on the show named Sebastian Marshall who talked about routine and habit and I figured that this would be great to listen to because it is talking about things I am trying to do.  During his conversation he talked about his Lights Spreadsheet where he has a list of daily goals and simplifies it all down to:
Green: Yes I did the goal today.
Red: No I did not do the goal today.

Simple, easy to read, understand and track and most importantly easy to look back over and see patterns.

The gist of this spreadsheet as I currently see it (and I just listened to this podcast and downloaded the sheet today) is that you start by giving yourself a few daily things you want to work on and achieve.

For instance, a couple of the things that I have put on my list are:
1 - Wake up by 6 am every morning.
2 - Drink 64 ounces of water every single day.
3 - Weight myself.
4 - No Fast Food.

These are all little, simple things that I can check off with a yes/no (pass/fail) every single day to help get me into healthier routines.

The introduction tells you that you should start with 10-15 goals at the most and by the end of the week you should look to have a success rate of 70-80%.  If you are constantly getting over 90% success then you should add some goals or make some of your goals harder (the goal is self improvement after all).  If your success rate is low then you should make some of them easier or remove so.  One of the easiest ways to improve at anything is to have success.  Success is a huge motivating factor.

So, my spreadsheet will have a start date of Monday January 29th 2018 and I chose that for the simple reason that my StepBet weeks start on a Monday.   Yes, one of my goals is going to be to get my steps in so I can check that off.

Another recommendation is that you look over your spreadsheet at the end of the week and see where your strong points and where your weak points are.   What are you struggling on and how can you work to improve that.   For instance, if I see a lot of red around drinking 64 ounces of water every single day then I need to come up with a solution to make sure that I am getting that precious liquid into my body more often so that I can hit my goal.  Maybe I'll force myself to start every morning by downing an 8 ounce glass before I do anything else.  Maybe I have to make sure I drink 8 ounces every time I take a break at work. 

It is an interesting idea and obviously just listening to Sebastian talk about it on this podcast got me excited enough about the idea that I downloaded the spreadsheet when I got home.  Now, come Monday, I'm excited to jump into it fully and work on some of the things that I want to improve about my life.

You don't know this (unless you read what I am about to type) but I wrote all of the above a few days ago when I was just in a mood to type and now I am coming back to it at 11:30 pm Sunday night and tomorrow is the 29th.
While I was getting my last steps in to make sure that I hit my weekly goal I realized that my spreadsheet was going to start tomorrow and that I had not published this post but saved it as a draft instead.  So, I passed along that mental note to myself that this needed to be completed so that I could start tomorrow fresh.

My spreadsheet is complete as well and I feel it is a good first draft.  I have 14 items on there and looking over the list I know that some of these are going to be easy to nail every single day and some of these I honestly feel like I will have struggled with by the end of the week.  In that context I do believe that it is a successful attempt because the goal is not to be perfect, the goal is to work harder and improve.

I do have a couple of loft goals in there as well that have room for me to interpret (at least for the first week or two) but will become more difficult as time goes on.
I look forward to getting through this first week and then reporting back on how it went.

It's funny, one of my goals for the new year was to write more mainly in the form of this blog.  I wanted to do one entry a week but slowly I am giving myself reasons to write more often and that is something I quite enjoy even if y'all don't find every topic that entertaining.

Hope you all had a great weekend and I hope this next week is all shits and giggles!