I turned 26 in February. At my 25th birthday, I expected to have a bit of a quarter-life crisis, and that never really came. However on the first anniversary of my expected quarter-life crisis, I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s important to me. One of my recurring thoughts relates to health.

I thought I would share some of those thoughts here:

• I’m in the prime of my life.
• As I age, it will never be as easy to accomplish goals of physique than it is today.
• There’s no reason I should fall short of those goals. Weight loss isn’t easy, but it’s not that hard either. It’s about diligence and continued determination to accomplish a goal.
• Health is one of the key pillars to happiness. My singular goal in life is to be happy.

The idea of setting health goals for a year isn’t entirely new to me. I ran a marathon two years ago driven in many ways on some of these same premises, it’ll never be easier to finish one than it is now; and last year I set out to benchpress more than 215 lbs. I think it’s true that physical feats will never be easier than they are now, but in no way do I feel my time to be fit and active is approaching an end. My friends and I have many more of those years, and it would be a shame if I squandered them.

Given these thoughts, I’m determined to have my fitness reflect my “life-primeness”, and am setting monthly goals to have it reflect that. While weight certainly is not the sole or defining metric for health, I intend to achieve my weight goals through exercise & healthy eating which presumably will increase other health KPIs like resting heart-rate, blood pressure, etc., so it’s a reasonable proxy.

I am perhaps less hesitant about sharing my weight data than others might be. That being said, this post puts me at considerable exposure to you, who is reading this and can follow up and validate whether or not I’ve achieved the goals I’ve set out for, so I still feel quite vulnerable in exposing the following data.

Many like to discuss their newest weight loss endeavor. That desire comes with good reason: a healthy weight, even the thought of it, makes us happy. Of my friends who have lost significant amounts of weight, I have been surprised how clearly invigorated they are by their downward trending weight. You’ve likely had similar encounters where you can’t help but notice how vibrant your friend is as they make this change in lifestyle.

I want that to be me, and if you have a similar ambition, for that to be you. I hope my effort is successful and if nothing else, inspires others to make progress on their health goals.

Below, please take a look (or monitor as I will be) my progress over the next few months in my achieving my fitness goals.

Here are some goals of mine for 2018:

• End the year with a weight below 165 lbs
• In a half marathon, run in less than 1hr 40 mins (last:1 hr 48 mins)
• If doing a full marathon, run in less than 4 hours (last:4 hrs 8 mins)

There are three graphs displayed:

1. Weight Over Time. Showing my goals and progress towards decreasing my weight.
2. Pushups Over Time. This is something my college roommate Collin Moran and I did my freshman year of college. At a target pace of about 100 pushups a day, we set a goal to do 20,000 pushups over the course of the school year. Thought I’d do this simple exercise as a part of casually ensuring I am making healthy decisions daily.
3. Miles Over Time. It’s starting to get warmer, and I want to spend much of that time outside. I’d like to run about 10 miles a week on average.