Arv' Musings

discussion

The drama triangle and other stories

Learning to separate facts from stories is imperative. Hold on to your stories with curiosity. Your stories are your framings from your limited perspective. Many a time, your stories are triggered by implicit memories from childhood which you haven't addressed.

daily9

How to tackle stress eating

In the short-term, when stressed, the stress response curbs appetite. Why? Because getting out of the stressful scenario is immediately relevant. You've seen this in action when you are working on an important project and have skipped a meal.

habits

You have a hydration problem

Your body is mostly water. Your body needs water for proper function. It seems simple. Trivial. And yet, do you know if you are drinking enough?

challenge

10 tips to ensure you hit your 2023 goals

Wanna improve the probability of hitting your 2023 fitness and health goals? I have 10 tips for you!

books

Books from 2022

This year has been one of me figuring out my work day, as I changed it rather dramatically when compared to the past 10 years. After attempting various systems of efficiency and being dissatisfied with all of them, this book caught me at the right time.

guilt

On visceral reactions and understanding them

Ideas are useful. Ideologies are restrictive. Useful. But restrictive. My opinions and previous learnings are ideas. They are a torch to find a path. They are not the path itself.

framework

How much is too much?

Having too much is a confounding method of copping out from figuring out what I need to be doing.

discussion

The KB swing is awesome but is it awesome for you?

The complication is the fine print. You need good technique. To get adequate benefits. And you need GREAT technique to compound the benefits over time. The movement is not as important as your ability in the movement.

challenge

Weight loss isn't the hard part. Weight maintenance is.

There is a limit to how much time we can hold our breath underwater. We need to come up for air. There's a limit to how much time we can do something unsustainable.

coaching

The bane of weighing yourself

But the association of how good a person you are, how good you should feel about yourself, how much you should berate yourself, how much harder you should work at the gym, how much starvation you are going to endure - that's all coming from somewhere inside of you.

discussion

The issue with advice

When you ask for advice, know that no one can or should be able to answer this question for you. If someone attempts to, it is a good litmus test (that you should be warier of what they are saying.)

ArvTraining

Brain fog and slow days

It is easy to skip a workout. It is easy to say "I don't feel like it today" and vegetate. But when we get into the habit of showing up to the gym and doing something - as little as a set or two, we make a huge change.

habits

There's a cost to everything, including passion. Especially passion.

There is a cost to everything we do. Knowing the cost is important. Knowing our values and our end game, equally so. And then, we can start working on ensuring that we aren't fucking ourselves up while narrowmindedly going towards a goal that does NOT encompass all of us.

challenge

Keep doing more of this with the goal of stopping

And so, we are all stuck in a fucktarded trap. Where we all think we will find salvation by doing more of this and we'll get out of here where we can start doing less of this, once we get there.

activity

Start with recovery: 7 strategies to feel amazing

When you are unwell, you feel like staying in bed for longer. You want to push work away and instead vegetate on the couch, watch some mindless TV. That's your body getting what it needs - minimal calorie expenditure and lots of rest.

discussion

On why we are bored and dissatisfied

One is to keep accumulating new experiences. There are infinite options out there. This intuitively sounds silly. If you got bored with the first 20, the next 200 will lead to the same end.

discussion

To stand still against the current

Recently, I had the chance to do something interesting - to eat by myself. I thought I could do this anytime. But that's because I did it while reading a book, which for some reason I didn't think was the same as a distraction like watching TV. It is, as much of a book snob, as I might be.

books

Five Books that I Love

A powerful lesson from the Stoics, for example, is to control the controllable. We lose our shit all the time by trying/wanting to control something that is out of our control.

discussion

A few fundamentals we shy away from

the unfortunate definition of a blind spot is that you don't know what it is. By asking for feedback from the people I spend a lot of time with, by journaling and by reading those journals, I've been able to decipher these rather fundamental things.

coaching

Books, Challenges and Tools

Hacks and ShortcutsWe want insights. We want hacks. We want shortcuts. We want packaged knowledge. Books are a great example of an attempt to impart knowledge and wisdom. They encapsulate the author's journey in understanding something. And their attempt at putting together the learnings.

coaching

Learn How to Score your Eating and Improve your Diet

Does maintenance mean one slice of cake a week? Or three? What if you are on vacation? Is this what adult life is about - rationing treats?

framework

Listening to your Body

When you are angry, your body feels a different way. You feel the rage heat up inside you and it pours out of you as expletives at the jackass who cut you off on the road. Every emotion, every feeling, every thought, every arising has a longer tail.

activity

A Workout Routine for Beginners

Unsure how or where to start your fitness routine, or get it back on track. Here's a "sensible and boring" routine that will inevitably prove to be a shortcut for you.

diet

Why carbs are NOT the enemy but you still need to eat less of them

What's the deal with demonising carbs? This is the article that explains why that's flawed and what the real issues are

discussion

Zooming out and a sense of time

One limitation in our progress is our handicap of looking at time. Using one hundred years as a lifetime, we tend to focus on short durations. The disruptions we are producing i.e. the variables in the system we are affecting are unbeknownst to us.