One Year of 30-Day Lifestyle Experiments

Posted on January 3, 2013 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

In the heat of a narrow but exciting Kickstarter success followed by all the things that come with starting a small business, I neglected to do a proper recap of my year-long series of 30 day lifestyle experiments. Now that life has returned to a manageable pace, I’ve decided to return to the blogosphere and continue the project that I started over a year ago.

Back in July 2011 I had been talking with some friends about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as well as This Guy in New York City who went an entire year without producing any trash at all. Both topics are at the extremes of environmental sustainability so it got me to thinking, “How reasonable would it be for a yuppie in Boston to go just 30 days without producing any trash?” It was certainly a challenging experiment and I ended up with a small amount of trash at the end (filled a 1 quart ziplock bag) but it taught me to live with minimal impact to the landfill. Many of the behaviors I picked up during this lifestyle experiment I still continue with more than a year later (French press coffee instead of drip or D&D styrofoam cups, worm composting food scraps, stainless steel travel mug, and others).

Throughout the course of my first experiment, my family and friends suggested other “lifestyle experiments” that I thought would be interesting to try out. So I decided that I’d keep going until I didn’t feel like doing it anymore. As a result, I’ve spent the past 12 months trying new things, meeting new people, and learning a lot about myself in the process. I can definitively say that each experiment has resulted in new behaviors that have crept their way into my daily life and I’m a better person a year later because of it. I’m not sure if 30 days is the magic number or not, but from my experience it seems to be just long enough to make an impact.

Courtesy of Google Analytics, I spent some time going through my most popular blog posts from each 30 day lifestyle experiment. I was shocked to see that my most popular month of blogging (by several hundred views) was my short story reviews on my train commute to work. I attribute this to all of those high school students looking to get away with not having to actually read the story. I would say shame on you but I did the same thing in high school so there you have it. A close runner-up was my new exercise each day, it was also the most fun so I’m glad that people enjoyed reading about it.

I had a great time going through my old blog posts so I’ve included a summary of the most popular posts from each month here, check them out:

Day 18, Compost Construction for City Slickers (August – Life Without the Landfill)
Mrs Smiling Traveller Mom (September – One New Conversation per Day on Public Transit)
Hiking Mount Carrigain, My 48th 4,000 Footer (October – A Randomized Photo-Journal of my 5-9 Life)
Clothing Inventory and Mini Purge (November – The 100-Item Challenge)
My First Vegetarian Christmas (December – Meat Eater to Plant Eater)
Day 27, Paid Someone’s Bill at a Dunkin Donuts Drive-Thru (January – Daily Random Acts of Kindness)
The Lay-Z-Boy Transformer Adventure Man (February – 8 Hours of Sleep per Night + a Dream Journal)
Seven Tips for How to Live Young, Urban, and Totally Sober (March – Young, Urban, and Totally Sober)
The Nightingale and the Rose by Oscar Wilde, a Short Story Review (April – Short Stories on the Train Commute)
P90X Shoulders, Biceps, and Triceps (May – One New Exercise per Day)
Urban Meditation Week 3, Aligning My Seven Chakras (June – Daily Meditation)
Writing a Press Release for Your Kickstarter Project (July – Launch a Kickstarter Campaign)

I found that these experiments have improved my lifestyle in many ways so I plan to continue. However, for 2013 I’ll be focusing my lifestyle experiments on a new-ish topic that I’ve become very interested in: The Sharing Economy (i.e. cohousing, carsharing, community supported agriculture, bartering, and more). I’ve been carsharing with Zipcar since the company started 5 years ago and it has been great, but the sharing topic has exploded since then and there is so much to learn, do, and write about.

As for the writing of the blog, I plan to deemphasize the “daily” aspect as compared to last year. Writing each and every day about my exercises, meditations, dreams, meals, readings etc got to be a little overwhelming at times so I’ll plan to write at least once/week to keep track of my experiences. I do have a full time job and I just started a company on the side so scaling back the rate of blog posting will help to improve the quality of the posts as well as keep my sanity in check. I’ll also be tweeting about my experiences as often as possible. So Like My Facebook Page for the weekly-ish blog updates and Follow Me on Twitter if you want to keep up with my experiments in real-time.

Day 1 – New Years Day, My First Piece of Meat, and a Hand Written Thank You Note

Posted on January 5, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

Life has started out pretty good in the New Year. Last night I hung out at an old friend’s house in Maine drinking bourbon, playing board games, lighting a bonfire, and drinking champaign well into the night. Today I woke up early (earlier than my body wanted me to) to go play ice hockey for two hours. Every year on the 1st, one of my old hockey coaches rents out the rink and a bunch of us play until the zamboni kicks us off. After playing hockey we immediately went to my aunt and uncles house for a barbeque (50+ degrees on January 1st?!?!). This is where I had my first piece of meat in over a month. It was great, but again I didn’t really have a craving for it like I thought I would so it was a bit anti-climactic on that front.

Me scarfing a burger after 30+ days of no meat.

The jury is still out as to whether I’ll continue to eat meat or not. I imagine that I will eat meat, just less of it than my lifestyle demanded before December’s vegetarian experiment. I wasn’t quite sure what to do today for my random act of kindness. Is it still random if I plot it out ahead of time? I think the point is really to do something out of my way every day to make someone else’s life better. Also, if I plan to do it every day, I should have a few ideas up my sleeve so a day doesn’t sneak by me. I think I’ll be able to get to sleep at night even if it’s not a truly random event.

We spent the afternoon (sweaty and smelly) eating food, catching up, and watching the Patriots game on TV. We definitely had a blast because it’s not that often that everyone can make it home to Maine at the same time. So spending the day playing hockey and visiting with family was great because both things I really only get to do a few times per year. With the thought of my Random Acts of Kindness experiment in the forefront of my mind I was constantly trying to find the perfect scenario to help out. I offered to help with grilling the meat but my uncle had it under control and it would have been a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen scenario anyway. I also thought about offering to do the dishes but they had indeed already been done by the time I thought of it. Soon thereafter I went into a food coma from the burger, cake, and cookies and napped for about an hour on the couch. Then before I knew it we were on our way home, it was getting dark, and I still hadn’t done anything yet.

We were almost home when it dawned on me that I should get a thank-you card and write them a note; thanking them not only for having everyone over but also for feeding me the first piece of meat I’ve eaten in over a month, the end of what has been a great experience. It turned out that my Mom already had a stack of nice blank cards so I used that to write a note and then mailed it to my aunt and uncle.

A hand-written thank you note to my aunt and uncle for having my family over for a BBQ.

They indeed went out of their way to invite us over for food, fun and football and we had a blast. As I said earlier, it’s not that often that my family is all in the same place at one time. So the fact that we could all get together meant a lot. Normally I would have just said thank you, hugged everyone goodbye, and then went on my merry way back to Boston. However, this time I took the extra few minutes to write them a thank you note and drop it in the mail. No matter how advanced our communications technology is getting, there’s still something special about getting a letter in the mail.

Olive Garden, Panera, and Otto’s Pizza (Otto’s Wins)

Posted on December 30, 2011 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

The past few days at work have been pretty slack so we’ve taken a few extended lunches out in town. Early in the week one of my coworkers brought in a $25 gift card to Olive Garden so thanks to her generosity we engorged ourselves with never-ending soup, salad, and bread sticks (also a glass of wine, Tuesday is the new Thursday right?). For a full meal and a glass of wine with a tip we ended up paying about $12/person, not a bad deal.

Had four or five breadsticks, two bowls of minestrone soup (pasta, beans, tomatoes, and other veggies), a few plates of salad, and a glass of wine. Definitely went into a coma when we got back to work.

Going out to restaurants has been interesting as a vegetarian. You try and comb the menu for the one or two items that don’t have meat as an ingredient. For example, at Olive Garden I definitely could have gotten almost any pasta dish and been fine. However, as for the soup/salad/bread combo I only had one choice of soup out of five possible soups. It has definitely become clear to me that we live in a culture that favors meat over veggies. The vegetarian is indeed the minority (even at an “Italian” restaurant).

Another day we went to Panera for lunch. I had brought my lunch (Anne’s Pasta, loaded with Frank’s Red Hot, Mmmm delicious) but I decided that it would be good for my vegetarian challenge to go out to lunch again and to relive what it means to be a vegetarian in the USA. Again, almost everything on the menu had meat in it. There were a few sandwiches (out of dozens) that were veggie-only and only a few of the soups were veggie. Here’s a picture below:

Tomato, mozzarella, and pesto sandwich with french bread and brocolli and cheddar soup.

This is something I probably never would have ordered eating out. When standing in line I thought to myself “Eh, I’m not much of a soup guy”. But why not? I think that just by default I go for the meatiest meal on the menu, something with grilled chicken or three choices of meat, then throw on some bacon and call it good. It sounds bad but having soup and bread for lunch isn’t something that I would have seriously considered before this month. It ended up being delicious, filling, and warming. If anything, this month has helped me expand what I might add or have for a meal besides meat. Meat doesn’t need to be in every single thing that I order but in the past that’s been the case. Why order a veggie pizza when I can order veggie pizza with buffalo chicken on top? Why does my pasta always need grilled chicken? Why are my sandwiches always Italians with double meat? I think from now on having a veggie wrap or a bowl of soup for lunch will be a totally reasonable choice for lunch.

One day after work I headed out to Harvard Square to feed my outdoor gear addiction at Eastern Mountain Sports (safety gear only, anchor building stuff and a new med kit #100TC). More often than not while I’m out in Harvard Square I’ll stop by Otto’s Pizza. Not only is the pizza delicious with a 50/50 selection of veggie pizzas but it’s also based out of Portland, Maine. So every time I eat there I feel like I’m supporting my motherland by eating great pizza, that’s a pretty solid feeling to be supporting Maine economy by scarfing pizza. I largely prefer Otto’s over Upper Crust (also in Harvard Square), it actually tastes better, there’s more of a selection, and it’s more convenient. Otto’s is right next to the T whereas Upper Crust is a bit farther removed from the center of the square. So why walk the extra quarter of a mile out of the way when you can eat at Otto’s instead?

Otto's Pizza - Vegetarian Pizzas on Top, Carnivore Pizza on Bottom.

Left - Roasted Tomato with Ricotta and Basil. Right - Three Chese Tortellini with Tomato Sauce.

I asked the two guys working there if I could take a picture of their store to put it on my blog and they said absolutely. Then they immediately launched into questions about my blog like what I’ve done so far, what was the hardest/easiest one, and what I’m planning to do in the coming months. We brainstormed a few new ideas and spent a good 5-10 minutes talking about it. They copied down my blog’s name, so shout out to the two guys from Otto’s in Harvard Square, if you’re reading this, feel free to leave me some suggestions for future challenges.

Later on in the week I got pizza again but from a the suburbs of Boston. It was definitely less gourmet than Otto’s but it still hit the spot. I’ve definitely copped out a bit this month just getting pizza when I don’t feel like making my own food or getting a veggie salad/wrap. Again, being vegetarian is not synonymous with eating healthy :) This place was owned by a local family so again I feel good about putting money back into the local economy. However, there’s a line between eating local because the company is local and eating local because the ingredients are local. I doubt the ingredients from this pizza place in suburbia are local ingredients. Ideally I’d like to spend my money on a local businesses who use local ingredients, but given the choice I think I’d rather spend my money at a Mom and Pop shop that gets their ingredients from Star Market vs a massive chain restaurant who probably does the same thing.

Cheese Pizza at a local Mom and Pop shop. No idea where the ingredients came from but I like the fact it's a locally owned small business.

Only a few more days left in my vegetarian challenge. It definitely took a few weeks for my body to adjust to my new food group (vegetables) all in all it’s been a great experience. A lot of people have asked me what my meat-snack at 12:01 on New Years will be. Honestly I haven’t even thought about it at all, I haven’t craved meat one bit. I think it was mostly just habit that kept driving me toward meat, not necessarily having a craving for it. Sure I like hamburgers, steak, and bacon as much as the next carnivore, I just haven’t felt any cravings this month. So from my first-hand account, I’ve found that it is indeed possible to not only live as a vegetarian but to also workout and lead an active lifestyle as a vegetarian. This sounds obvious but I just had to prove it to myself more than anything.

Next month’s challenge starts on Sunday and I honestly have no idea what I’m going to choose. I’ve got 4-5 concepts floating around in my brain but I haven’t picked anything yet. Either way I’m excited to see what the next 30-days will bring.

My First Vegetarian Christmas

Posted on December 27, 2011 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

One of the first things my Mom said to me when I told her I was going to be vegetarian for the month of December was, “Well, what about Christmas?”. I grew up in a family that was more carnivore than omnivore with meat, pasta, and potatoes as our main staples and my Mom would make sure to add in a veggie or two. Even if we had a salad I’m not sure any of us would have eaten it. That was just the culture of my family and we’re not unique in that by any stretch of the imagination. Holiday dinners always included a turkey, chicken, or ham. The thought of not having meat as the centerpiece of a special family meal was something that I had to come to terms with and many friends and family (myself included) found it hard to understand. A Christmas dinner without turkey?!?!

I headed up to Maine for Christmas and I knew I would be in for a vegetarian adventure. Come to think of it, I think I only know two vegetarians from Maine, neither of whom still live there (one is now in Boston and the other in San Francisco). Immediately after arriving at my parent’s house we traveled north to visit some extended family. We stopped at a gas station in northern Maine (one of the only places to get food in the area) and planned to grab some snacks (they had a diner there too but we didn’t have that much time). Normally I wouldn’t notice this type of thing but here’s a picture of some questionable (or not so questionable) food:

Pierre's Jumbo Flamebroiled Bacon Cheese Burger (location, almost Canada), yikes. I would have in the past said that this food is questionable AT BEST, but after taking a step back to think about it, I'm sure it's just plain terrible for you. I can hardly imagine tracing this food back to its source.

While at the gas station I almost bought a bag of beef jerky. Normally when I’m traveling I’ll nom nom nom on some beef jerky while I’m driving but I picked up this package and slowly realized that beef jerky is indeed made of beef; bummer, no jerky for me this Christmas.

Beef Jerky in the same gas station as the picture above.

It was interesting being home (in a house of carnivores). I ate a lot of cereal, eggs and toast because breakfast foods are typically vegetarian anyway unless you go for bacon and sausage which is usually too much effort for me anyway. When we were young our parents made us salads but we just simply wouldn’t eat them so they resorted to sneaking in one veggie at every meal. From talking with friends of mine from home, this is pretty typical. Even at dinners with our extended family my Mom used to make salads but they would go relatively untouched. That is simply the culture that we lived in: meat, potatoes, pasta, and some veggies here and there, I can’t ever really remember eating a salad on its own while growing up, even when one was staring me back in the face.

I made a bunch of eggs for various meals (technically vegetarian but vegans would argue otherwise). I tried to check out where the eggs from came from (besides Shaw’s) but their origins where nowhere to be found on the carton which was a bit disconcerting.

12 Fresh (by what standard) Grade A Eggs (from where?). I was unable to find out any information on the box about what farm (or not farm) these eggs came from, no luck.

I did some searching online and was still unable to find out where these eggs came from. I was only able to find where they were distributed from (Minnesota) which is largely not the same thing considering they are labeled as a product of the USA. Using “USA” as your farm of reference could really mean a lot of things, I wish they would be more specific. The Shaw’s website is largely ambiguous about a lot of things as well. They make sure to leave no trace of where its food comes from or what kind of food they carry. They offer a lot of recipes and information about the differences between organic, free range, and grass fed, but they neglect to say anything about their supply chain (I’m sure that they’re probably better off as a business for doing so).

We grew up eating local potatoes harvested from my grandparent’s farm, and we even had a 50lb bag of potatoes in our kitchen this weekend (12 of which I took back to Boston with me). When my parents were growing up they used to get 2-3 weeks of school vacation in August to go pick potatoes on the farms up north. We had around a dozen baked potatoes in the fridge to munch on all weekend which were delicious. My brothers cut them up, heated them in the microwave and chowed down while I just ate it with the whole potato in one hand and a bottle of ketchup in the other (again they were baked not raw, I’m not THAT much of a hick). However, for dinner we decided that we would try out a new local dish. The “local” potatoes were from Mars Hill in Maine and we were just interested to see how they tasted.

"Naturally Potatoes" (in a box and highly processed).

41 ingredients in these "naturally" (different than natural?) potatoes.

Most of the ingredients in these potatoes I couldn’t pronounce and have no idea what they are. The only one I decided to look up was Titanium Dioxide because it seemed relatively obscure. Titanium Dioxide is a pigment found in paint, plastics, papers, ink, toothpaste, sunscreen and processed foods. It’s used to make products look white, I’m not sure why it was used on potatoes considering potatoes are already white naturally. I tried the pre-mashed potatoes and they tasted fine, but they were nowhere near as tasty as the local baked potatoes we had in the fridge.

For Christmas dinner I decided to make a salad. I had come up with an idea earlier in the week but forgot (or was too lazy) to send it to my parents to pick up at the grocery store before Christmas (all the grocery stores were closed by the time I got there). So I had to improvise with a bag of salad we already had. I added some walnuts and dried cranberries to spruce it up a bit with some dressing made from scratch.

Unfortunately, the dried cranberries came in a bunch of bags within a larger bag as a "snackpack". Also, this picture has a nice butt shot of my younger brother in his pajamas, OWNED!

For convenience, the craisins came in 6, 1oz baggies. So I opened each bag and dumped in the dried cranberries. I have to admit that a package of packages is quite bizarre.

Next was the pre-washed bag of salad. It was distributed from California but I’ve learned that bags of salad can often be grown in Mexico, so honestly, who knows where they came from. I checked out the website for Fresh Express but again like Shaw’s there wasn’t any info.

Iceberg, Romaine, Carrots, and Radishes. I'm glad that industrialized food also includes organic veggies but it becomes confusing when you then add in the concept of carbon footprint. Eating veggies is good for your body, yes, but is eating veggies from Mexico good for the planet, no.

In theory eating local food is the way to go, but in practice it actually seems to be very difficult. At the end of the day do I really care where my food comes from? The answer is yes. However, in reality I’d still probably still end up buying the lettuce from Mexico (or oranges from Argentina) anyway, I would just think twice about it and probably do it less often. Eating local has become very confusing, you have to go way off the beaten path in order to join something like a CSA (community supported agriculture) in order to get good local food. My parents commented on how that’s how it used to be at the supermarkets back in the mid 1990′s. All of your produce was local (at least where I grew up in Maine). It’s just that the farm labels were slowly removed over the next decade or so and replaced with industrialized fruits/veggies from other states, countries, and continents. The supermarkets look exactly the same today as they did in the 90′s so not many people noticed the transition (tricky industrial food people).

The following is an image of my first Christmas dinner as vegetarian (will it be my last? I’m not sure yet). All in all it was pretty tasty. I had a couple helpings of the same plate pictured below; salad, pumpkin bread, green beans and potatoes. Also a few glasses of cabernet sauvignon from California. It’s interesting to note that the makers of wine pride themselves on where it comes from. Where and how you grow your grapes can make or break your brand. Now if only farms took the same pride in where fruits/veggies/meat came from.

My first vegetarian Christmas dinner.

Here’s the Christmas turkey (location is again unknown). It smelled amazing but honestly I didn’t really have a craving to eat it. I expected that I would have to try really hard to restrain myself from devouring the turkey but that wasn’t the case at all, I was somewhat indifferent to it. I was plenty full with my salad, potatoes, pumpkin bread and wine that I was content not having any turkey.

My first Christmas dinner without eating turkey. I thought the turkey would mock me more than it did, I was honestly pretty indifferent about it.

Only two of us touched the salad: me because I’m vegetarian, and one of my brothers because he felt bad that no one else was eating it. I don’t want to paint a picture that we grew up with an unhealthy lifestyle. That’s not the case at all. Out of all of us we are fit, athletic, played varsity sports, some college sports, hike/bike/climb/etc, one is in the military, we are in good health, and the list goes on, we just don’t eat a lot of veggies. It’s definitely been a learning experience for me. In the past I took the “if it’s not broke don’t fix it” attitude to my diet but I’m starting to see the light. If I take anything away from this month’s challenge it’ll probably be a diversified diet including more veggies/fruits as meals and snacks and also a larger appreciation and respect for those who are vegetarian, but particularly local vegetarian.