1. Change eating habits before exercise habits

Many will join the local gym and exercise like crazy as they try to achieve their weight loss goal. If this is your plan, stop right now. Get your diet in order before you dive heavy into exercise. If you start with exercise, you’ll likely be hungrier, which means eating too many calories and too many of the wrong calories. Form good eating habits first, lose some pounds in the process, and then move on to exercise (see #6).

2. Aim for a realistic, healthy and sustainable goal

You may think you want to lose 50 pounds in two months, but I can say it won’t be realistic, healthy or sustainable. Simple online tools to help you determine the weight range you should be in and how many calories you should eat each day include:

• How much should I weigh?
• How many calories should I be eating per day to lose weight?

These tools don’t take into account all the variables. They also don’t take into account things like body fat targets, waist size reduction, and overall fitness. Use the outputs as guidelines and a place to start rather than the answer to questions of your ideal weight and calorie needs. The idea is to set healthy goals that you can achieve and keep up over the long run.

3. Cut carbs drastically at the start

This one is likely to irritate some folks but I’ve found it helps kick start weight loss. Follow the first 2-week phase of the Atkins or South Beach diet. You’ll ween your body off carbs and most processed foods. Think of it as a smoker quitting smoking cold turkey. You’ll likely feel sugar withdrawals and swear that you’re dying but after about a week you’ll condition your body to be satisfied with more nutritious food. After the two weeks, start to add healthy carbs back into your diet, but limit starchy foods like regular pasta, white rice, and white breads. Whole grains are the suggested replacement. Just be careful not to fall for the marketing use of the term “whole grain” prominently featured on many food labels these days. You’ll need to checkout the ingredients to be sure it’s the real deal and not chock full of garbage in addition to whole grains.

4. Track what you eat religiously

I used DailyBurn to track my meals each day. Doing this made me conscience of what I was eating on a daily basis.  It showed how many calories, carbs, fat, protein, etc. I was taking in. Make what you eat in your face even after you’ve stuffed your face. You’ll find it changes your eating habits almost immediately.

5. Drink at least 64 oz. of water per day

This is good to do in general but especially important when you’re trying to lose weight. Our bodies need H2O. Drinking lots of water can also help control your appetite.

6. Develop a sustainable exercise routine slowly

My secret weapons to sustaining an exercise routine. Sled dogs.

Being overly ambitious at the start of a big goal or project is common. When it comes to losing weight this (too often) means a killer exercise routine that inevitably burns out quick with zero positive results. Once you’ve established better eating habits (see #1) then start to establish a sustainable exercise routine. This means finding what works best for you. Can you only afford 30 minutes a day a few days a week? Find exercises that allow you to get a good workout in that amount of time. Only join a gym if you are going to go on a regular basis. Most people will not go to a gym if it’s an inconvenience. My wife goes to the gym regularly and I think it works for her because going to the gym is an enjoyable break away from the kids. I don’t care for the gym. It’s a hassle and exercise machines are boring to me. So I go on long brisk walks instead. That works for me. Find something that works for you, start slowly and ramp it up gradually.

7. Tell others about your goal

If you tell people your goal then you’re more likely to stick to it. I was encouraged and teased relentlessly for announcing my goal and progress on various social networks once a week. I would remind myself of the goal and give an update on my latest weigh in. I found my friends’ and family’s feedback helped me to stay disciplined.

None of the points above are ground breaking. There is no silver bullet. It’s hard work but does get easier as time goes by and new good habits replace the old bad ones. I hope it helps someone out as they strive to drop some pounds and develop a healthier lifestyle. If nothing else, I’ve now got this post for friends to shove in my face if I ever gain back the pounds I lost. That’s what I call motivation!

Chad does not copy and paste code. He will re-type code in because he has been bitten by copy and paste so many times. I’ll never forget the day I was sitting next to Chad and watching him meticulously type, character for character, a method into his class that was displaying on his second monitor. I said, “Dude, what are you doing?!” Everyone around us started laughing. They knew exactly what Chad was doing.

Wireless power. Chad was evangelizing an incredible new invention he just heard about to everyone at the office. No one believed him. I’ve been told (since I didn’t work there at the time this happened) that Chad said you would be able to get wireless extension cords at Radio Shack in the not so distant future. I don’t know about wireless extension cords, but it appears Chad has the last laugh as wireless power is definitely real, no matter how funny it sounds.

“My integration tests won’t run.” This is a legend to me. I wasn’t there to experience this one, but there are a number of people who witnessed this one a few times. Why wouldn’t Chad’s integration tests run? Good question. Apparently, it helps to have WebLogic started when your integration tests depend on WebLogic in order to run.

It takes a very confident man to wear white Don Johnson, Miami Vice style pants to the office. Chad did this not that long ago after returning from his vacation in Mexico. Apparently, he hadn’t left the spirit of the beach behind. I remember seeing Chad walk past my desk in his ever so stylish white pants. Out of shock and instinct I called out, “Hey, Panama Jack.” The best part is that Chad turned around immediately. It was as if my words brought him back to reality. He was no longer strolling the beach with a Corona. He was back at work. He proudly told me that he wore those pants all the time while vacationing in Mexico. I don’t believe he’s worn them to work ever since.

Hot Pockets. When I first started working at the Joplin office I could’ve swore Chad was on a Hot Pocket diet. I thought maybe he was some sort of Hot Pocket version of Jared, the Subway guy. I haven’t seen Chad tear into a Hot Pocket in quite some time. I think it has something to do with my virally spreading the video clip of Jim Gaffigan’s stand up routine on Hot Pockets. I had everyone watching that video clip, where Gaffigan makes fun of Hot Pockets and makes us all laugh in the process. One day, after seeing that video for probably the 20th time, Chad turned around to all of us in the room and vigorously defended his beloved Hot Pockets. Chad couldn’t understand what Jim Gaffigan could possibly have against such a tasty treat.

Chad is a good guy. He’s a good developer too. I wouldn’t give him such a hard time in this post if I didn’t think very highly of him. I wish him the best of luck at his next job.

It is easy to remove oneself from the discussion of mediocrity and place the focus on everyone else, but I can’t let myself off the hook that easy. I’ve certainly created more than my fair share of mediocre (or worse!) software. I’ve only put in mediocre effort into any number of tasks over the years. I can probably come up with many arguments to justify my mediocre efforts. I won’t do it. The point is not to justify the behavior but to examine why it happens and take action.

This week at work seemed to be one invite after another to perform mediocre work. Tasks needed to get done but it was difficult to get excited about them. Situations like these often get my checklist approach. Don’t get me wrong, checklists are not bad. But, when I get into “checklist mode”, it typically means I’m trying to make myself feel as though I’m accomplishing something even when I’m not particularly proud of the work. Sometimes there are things you just have to do. You can only change so much at one time and the changes that have to wait their turn often result in falling into that category of things that have to get done but whose quality, creativity, and inspiration will suffer as a result.

The work week ended with learning about my official responsibilities as a career counselor. I have seven people assigned to me that I’m responsible for serving as their career counselor. I’m there to listen, provide coaching, and do my part to help further each individual’s career within the company. I’d like to think that’s the approach I take regardless of whether I’m an official career counselor or simply doing my job. That last statement is one that leads me to justify mediocrity when it comes my duties as a career counselor. Telling myself that I already do the job let’s me off the hook in my own mind. I can scoff at the apparent corporate bureaucracy surrounding the career counseling program and get into my “checklist mode”. After all, I already do the job so these new activities are nothing more than overhead, right?

I decided on the way home from work on Friday that I wasn’t going to settle for mediocrity. I wanted to make the career counseling activities meaningful and fun for everyone involved. I decided right then that I wasn’t going to fill in the blanks on the career counselor intro email template that was provided. There is nothing inherently wrong with the template, but for me to simply fill in the blanks and send out the emails would certainly not meet my goals of making the career counselor activities meaningful and fun for everyone involved. So I brainstormed a bit and came up with a quick video that I’m sending out to all those I’m a career counselor for. The video isn’t the second coming of Citizen Kane, but it is completely different than the email template and (I hope) sends the message that I’m not just going through the motions; rather I’m committed to the role and the people I’m serving as their career counselor. Plus, I think the video conveys that we can all have some fun along the way. We don’t have to begrudgingly go through this process. We don’t have to settle for mediocrity, even when it can feel justifiable to do so.

Every so often I go out and do a search for cross platform web conferencing and normally come up empty handed. Sure, there are plenty of solutions that give you cross platform viewing of web conferences, but the holy grail is being able to transfer screen sharing functionality to anyone on the web conference, regardless of whether they’re running Windows, Linux or OS X. I think WebHuddle may have hit this holy grail. No, it’s not the fanciest product. Nor is it likely to win any awards for user interface design. But based on some early testing, it does what most other tools in its space cannot and that is provide true cross platform web conferencing.

P.S. Yes, I know about Yugma. I liked Yugma quite a bit. It was quick, easy and cheap. Keywords there: “liked” and “was”. Then version 3.0 came out and I’ve had enough problems with it to give up on Yugma entirely. Three different web conferences I attended/hosted with Yugma 3.0 and all were plagued by a variety of issues. I ran out of patience.

Today, I finally broke down and tried video conferencing to do some meetings. There were two of us in the Joplin, MO office and up to five people in our King of Prussia office. We were doing a team formation meeting and a backlog selection/planning meeting. It’s amazing how much of a difference the video makes over just using the phone. And this was using web cams, Skype, and normal phones, none of that fancy stuff Cisco and others are peddling these days.

At the rate I’m going, I fully expect to be up to the year 2008 in about 6 or 7 years from now, which means I’ll be actively networking with Facebook, watching HDTV, navigating with GPS devices, browsing the web on my mobile, and driving a hybrid.

Without further ado, here’s the recipe for squash stuffing. Enjoy!

• 1-1 1/2 lbs. sliced & steamed yellow & green squash
• 1/2 cup finely diced onion
• 1 grated carrot
• 1/4 cup margarine
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 can cream of chicken soup
• 2 1/2 cups Pepperidge Farm or Brownberry stuffing mix (not cube type)

Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees.

Saute onions and grated carrot in margarine. Put the sauted onions and grated carrots in a bowl and add sour cream, cream of chicken soup, squash and then mix together. Next add 2 cups of stuffing mix and mix together. Put in baking dish (the Hoover family has a special dish made of granite, quartz, and rare jewels in the shape of a hobbit’s head – good luck finding one.)  Top with 1/2 cup of remaining stuffing mix.

Bake for 35-40 minutes just until hot and delicious.

P.S. One of the developers at work commented the other day that my recently injured ankle is likely a result of how large my head has become; i.e. supporting all that weight can’t be good for my ankles. I’m guessing this post will only add to support that opinion. Such is the life of the Renaissance Scrum Master.

I can’t vouch for the shirt personally. Although, I did purchase one for my biggest fan, who is always going out of his way to tell people that I have a blog. Some might say he’s mocking me when he does this, but I know that deep down inside he is my biggest fan and supporter. He knows it. I know it. (I’ll pretend I didn’t hear rumors of him contemplating going around downtown Philly and having various odd ball characters off the street pose in the shirt as he captures their photo.) Unfortunately, my biggest fan does not have his own blog, so I can’t point you to his gushing reviews of the shirt he received this week in the mail.

So, instead of surprising your kids with that Nintendo Wii they’ve been asking for all year long, how about you give them the gift that keeps on giving? What better way to say “you mean the world to me” then to send an i must be an acrobat shirt to all your friends? And don’t forget your co-workers. Nothing expresses your gratitude quite like a shirt that has joshuahoover.com on the back in a 200 point sized font. Go on, make this holiday season extra special.

1. To convey information about; make known; impart: communicated his views to our office.
2. To reveal clearly; manifest: Her disapproval communicated itself in her frown.

American Heritage Dictionary definition of communicate