The year-end provides a time for reflection regarding what happened in the last 12 months. From a travel perspective, not much travel this year, with two trips to Finland for business, and a trip to Cape Cod during the Thanksgiving holiday, where I staying at the Chatham Bars Inn. The Chatham Bars Inn is renowned for its Thanksgiving buffet, which I attended with a good friend of mine and his family. It certainly lived up to its reputation, as the buffet has a huge range of high-quality foods, like lobster tails (for those who like seafood, which I don’t), turkey, roast beef, assorted breads, prosciutto, a huge assortment of desserts, etc. It was fantastic, and if you are looking for a Thanksgiving destination, one would not go wrong with the Chatham Bars Inn — but you must book in advance, including for the buffet.

For much of the year, I have been dealing with various orthopedic issues. I had a torn meniscus, which required surgery, and I continue to have osteoarthritis in both my knees, which will eventually require knee replacement, but for the time being, I get bi-yearly injections to help lubricate my knee joints and reduce the discomfort. In the latter part of this year, I developed a case of Morton’s neuroma. Morton’s neuroma is a thickening of tissue around nerves leading to one’s toes, and you can feel a sharp burning pain in the ball of one’s foot and toes. Needless to say, it has been a challenge this year to play tennis regularly, or even walk, and I have become an expert in applying KT tape. Fortunately, I can still exercise on my recumbent bike for one hour every day without too much discomfort, but without these other activities, like weekly tennis, I have not been able to make a dent in my weight this year, as it essentially remains the same as it was in December 2022. Hopefully, in 2024, these orthopedic issues will not be so prominent, and greater weight loss will be realized.

As I do every year, I went to the US Open, and had a great time with friends and family. That will happen again in 2024. Also for 2024, I am considering purchasing a new car, as my current car is getting a bit old at 11 years old, and is increasingly costly to repair. There is a big push for BEVs (battery electric vehicles), but in my view, they are not ready for everyday use and travel, with many downsides (like increased insurance, lack of range, difficulty recharging on a trip, and high repair costs), so my next car will still be an ICE (internal combustion engine) car.

Like I did in 2012, when I purchased my current BMW, the plan would be to pick up the new car in Spartanburg, SC, at the BMW Performance Center. It is a great experience, where BMW puts you up for free for a night at a hotel, you get track time in a car just like your new car, there is a museum tour, and you pick up your car in its own bay, where a specialist goes over all of the car’s function. After the orientation, you drive your car out of the bay, and start your trip home. That should be a lot of fun, and likely to happen around summertime.

I am looking forward to a more prosperous, enjoyable, and healthy 2024.

I thought I would briefly go over some of the things that have happened this year. Ever since Covid started, I have limited my travel, but this year, I dipped my toe in the water, and started traveling again. In June I attended the Canadian F1 GP in Montreal, in August I traveled to Finland, and then in September, like ever year, I attended the US Open. This year I have now lost 22 lbs., which is the first time in 3 years that my weight has gone done. To help me loose weight, I reached out to the NYU weight loss clinic, and they put me on OZEMPIC, which has seemed to help.

I continue to exercise for at least an hour every day on the recumbent bike, and play tennis at least once a week. Also, I do stretches every day. The element that I am still missing is working out with dead weights. I have knee issues, and shoulder and arm issues, which make it challenging to work out with weights, but for 2023, I am determined to make a more concerted effort to work out with weights at least once a week.

Also, I have tried to eat earlier in the day. I read a research article this year, which talked about how eating earlier in the day helped weight loss. The article is the following: Metabolic Effects of Late Dinner in Healthy Volunteers—A Randomized Crossover Clinical Trial. Gu, Bremerton, et al. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 105, Issue 8, August 2020, Pages 2789–2802, https://doi.org/10.1210/clinem/dgaa354, Published: 11 June 2020. Maybe that is something you may want to incorporate into your routine.

That is it for now. For 2023, best wishes for health, happiness and prosperity.

First off, I am not a doctor, and I am not providing any medical advise, only my opinion. Second, what a person decides, whether to get a Covid vaccination shot, is their own choice, and should be made in consultation of their doctor. As for myself, I decided to get the vaccine, and also got a booster shot. The only side effect has been a sore arm for a few days, and I did a double on the same day, with both a Covid and Flu shot, one into each arm. The Covid shot arm was sorer longer, and that was the only side effect.

All during the pandemic, it has been reported that people who are obese, are at a higher risk to get the virus, than those who are not obese, and the obese are more likely to be hospitalized or die. It is not bad enough that the medical community uses BMI to classify people as obese and morbidly obese (as I have written previously, the BMI classification system has many problems), but now, with Covid, what can you do immediately to lessen your chance of getting Covid and getting hospitalized or dying from the virus, if you are overweight? It is not like any of us can lose weight immediately.

This blog was started to provide people with the inspiration, advise and some tools to make impactful changes to themselves and improve their lives. But what can be done right now to help protect yourself from getting Covid, aside from vaccinations, other medical treatments, social distancing, etc.? Losing weight does take time, and it is a process, but there are baby steps that one can take to strengthen your body’s ability to fight Covid.

On thing you can do immediately, is that start exercising, to build up your body’s cadiovascular capacity, and also strengthen your breathing. Covid attacks the respiratory system, so it makes sense, if you heart and lungs are strengthened by exercise, they can better resist the virus. With any exercise program, first consult your physician, but generally, start slow and build up from there. Most cardiovascular benefits come after at least 20 minutes of exercise, and done 5 days a week. For the 11 years, I have been exercising at least 1 hour a day, 7 days a week. I am also a fan of non-impact exercise, so I prefer the recumbent bike and elliptical machines, rather than treadmills, and walking outside is very beneficial. You have to be more careful with running, since that is a very impactful exercise.

Another thing you can do, is cut our refined sugars, or sugar substitutes. For me, I have not had a soda, regular or diet, in 11 years. Alternatives are unsweatened ice tea, water with natural citrus flavoring (lemon, lime, or orange juice), or sparking water. Is this the magic bullet, no, but what these steps do is provide you with a means to improve your health, and take control of your life to a certain extent, so you might better to combat this virus. Exercise, and improving your diet, can help you fight off the more severe outcomes from this virus.

When I first started this site, many people suggested I develop an Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter account feed for this website. That seems to be SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for most websites, but I have many reservations about these social media sites, and after much thought, I did not believe it was a good thing for me, and on balance, it is my view that social media is doing more harm than good. Look at how, over the last few years, social media companies have been actively censoring some content, yet allowing seemingly outrageous, and/or abusive, content to continue without any restrictions. Also, how about all the cyberbullying going on.

My new weight loss program has unfortunately not been progressing as I would have liked, so I have been thinking back what has worked before, and look to duplicate same. In the last few years, I have gotten used to eating the pressed fruit bars (like That’s it, and the Kind pressed fruit, both pictured above), and Neuhaus dark chocolate. Both delicious, and a quick and portable snack, but they all contain sugar — either added for the Neuhaus, or natural in the pressed fruit bars. I have also been eating dried fruit, which concentrates the fruit’s sugar, as compared regular non-dried fruit.

When I was really taking off the pounds, I did not eat such items, and limited my chocolate intake solely to the Lindt 99% bar (also pictured above).  I am concerned that all this sugar intake is throwing off my system, so I am now cutting out these fruit bars, all chocolate besides the Lindt 99% bar, and all dried fruit. We will see in the coming weeks if that helps. It is also important not to eat too late, and unfortunately, I have gotten in a bad habit of having a snack latter in the evening when watching TV. I am working on eliminating those snacks, and eating earlier in the evening.

Lack of sleep, has been identified as a contributor to weight gain, and I have not been sleeping well for years. To address that issue, some people have suggest I take sleep aides, but i refuse to do that, as I have never taken any kind of sleep aides, and believe these drugs are dangerous. I have been noticing that my mattress is too hard, and when I come home from tennis at night, for example, and my legs are sore, sleeping on my bed compounds the soreness. So instead of buying a new mattress, I instead, I just purchased a gel mattress cover which provides a softer surface to sleep on. So far, it seems to be working as I am not getting us as much at night, and waking up later in the morning, which for me is 5:30 am instead of 3:30 am.

I am sharing these tweaks in the hope that readers of this blog may be inspired to make similar small changes in their life that may help them lose weight and feel better. We’ll see how things go a month from now.

This January, I checked off one of my long-time bucket list items — attending all four grand slam tennis tournaments.  So I have now attended the US Open (attend every year for the last 30+ years), French Open (2012), Wimbledon (2013), and now the Australian Open (2018).  Some of my other relatively recent checked bucket list items include getting courtside subscription seats at the US Open, attending the F1 Grand Prix of Monaco and at COTA, skydiving, surfing (which I did at Bondi Beach in Australia, on my recent trip), SCUBA diving, going to the Americas Cup (2017 in Bermuda), watching the Ryder Cup (2012), racing cars on various tracks around the world (Nurburgring, VIR, Limerock, Pocono), attending ski camp in Deer Valley with the Mahre brothers, driving around Europe after taking European Delivery of my new car, etc.  Of course, a major item was losing weight to get down to my law school weight after my girlfriend passed away.

A good list, and there are more items to check off — go to Hawaii and Alaska (the only two states I have not visited), camera safari in Africa, attend various tennis tournaments and F1 races around the world (e.g, Barcelona, Spa, Rome, Silverstone), see polo being in Argentina, attend Carnival in Brazil, visit Japan, pick up another new car in Europe, etc. I also want to again be in a committed relationship, but that is a bit more challenging, since it takes two to make that bucket list item occur, and it is not completely in my control.  Another current item is to lose the weight I put on after my rotator cuff surgery, by my 40th high school reunion, which is in October of this year.

I think it is extremely important to have aspirational goals in our lives, as it focuses and motivates us in our lives, and helps inspire us to fine that inner drive to make impactful changes in our lives.  It also helps us to focus on the bigger picture of our lives, and not to get too immersed in the day to day challenges in life. In coming up with these bucket list items, it is helpful to try and be as specific as possible about what you want, and then start thinking about and researching the steps needed to accomplish a goal.

Keep in mind, it will take time to accomplish some of these goals, and maybe years to plan. For example, my trip to the Monaco GP took almost of two years of planing to pull off the way I wanted. Which brings up another point to consider, once you set a bucket list goal, think about how you want to implement that goal. For me it was not just watching the race from a grandstand, but from one of the premier hotel in Monaco, which in my case was the Metropole. Well, to book a room for the Metropole hotel, during race weekend, must be done a year in advance, and payment made in full at least 6 months before the race. So I set about saving money for this trip years in advance, and a year prior to the race, made my hotel reservation. As the old saying goes, the fun is in the journey, and it is.

So start setting those bucket list goals, and setting about checking them off in the upcoming days, months and years.

In a May 2017 post, I set a goal of losing 30 lbs by year end, to again get down to the 190’s. Unfortunately, that did not happen, and I actually gained 5 lbs from my year-end weight in 2016. Objectivity is an essential component of any successful endeavor, so this is as good a time as any to take stock what happened, and what might need to be done for 2018.

I track my weight every week, so since 2012, my end of year weight was the following: 195 (2012), 199 (2013), 200 (2014), 225 (2015, this was after my shoulder surgery in May 2015, where I lost much muscle mass and was limited in my exercise), 230 (2016), and 235 (2017). So excluding 2015, I have had an incremental gain average gain of around 4lbs. per year, with 2015 being the outlier. During this time, my exercise level has either stayed the same or even increased (averaging 2 hours a day, 7 days a week), and objectively, I really do not see much room for a further increase in my exercise level.  Although I could workout a bit smarter, I firmly believe that the real solution is food intake, and getting over a bit of the anxiety with overcoming the big jump that occurred in 2015.  Historically, otherwise large amounts of food, have not registered with me as too much, since growing up, our family eat an abundance of food.  My sense, I am particularly guilty of eating too much at breakfast, and while watching TV, and for 2018, those are two areas I will try to stay focused in avoiding. Also, instead of setting a ambitious goal of losing 30lbs in the year, I am just trying to focus on losing some weight by the end of 2018.

Looking at my weight chart for 2017, I got to a low of 224lbs. in April, but gained weight the following week, and the year sort of played out like that, in that I lost week one week, then regained weight the following week. I was unable to be consistent, and that is something I plan to focus on in 2018.

Otherwise, there were some exciting things i did in 2017. Some of those things included going to the Americas Cup in Bermuda and also playing golf, ski camp in Deer Valley with the Mahre brothers (see above picture), sat in the Paddock Club for US F1 GP at COTA, played a round of golf at Baltastrol, went to tennis camp in Stowe, won my group at a BMW autocross event, and attended racing school at BMW’s facility outside Munich. For 2018, the year will start off with a bang, with a trip to Australia, where I will complete my tennis grand slam (US Open, Wimbeldom, Roland Garros and the Australian Open), climb the Harbour Bridge, and take surfing lessons at Bondi beach. Also on tap, is to join a friend, on his 60’s birthday, driving a Ferrari on a race track. Honestly, not such a big deal for me, as my own car is almost as fast any current Ferraris, but this has been a deam my friend has had for a while, so I thought it would make a great event for the both of us. And I’ll see what happens from there. On the social front, still nothing lasting, so maybe 2018 will change all that — still trying.

That’s it for now. Looking forward to Australia.

As you can tell from previous posts, I am passionate about cars, driving, and motorsport. That is why I was fascinated by a November 16, 2017 New York Times article entitled “The Near Future of Driving: Eyes Forward, but No Hands at 10 and 2.” The article discusses how the author, Neal Boudette, was driving on an interstate in Michigan, with the car doing all of the driving for long stretches of time (acceleration, maintaining speed, braking, and maneuvering), with no driver input, and his hands off the steering wheel (“hands-free driving”). This feature was not in some futuristic car, but in a Cadillac you can buy right now.

Full autonomous vehicles are coming, and offer many advantages — one being that people with diminished capabilities or senses will be able to drive (e.g., older drivers who no longer have the capacity to drive, or physically challenged individuals who could never drive before). Now they can use a car to get around, without relying on others, or alternative transportation. Another advantage is that such cars can counter distracted driving, for example, when someone is bored, and stuck in traffic, the car can take over, allowing the driver sit back and enjoy the ride, rather than having to be constantly alert and stressed by the traffic around them.  Potentially, linked cars, with smart roads, will be able to diminish highway traffic flow, while also improving safety.

However, there are some significant drawbacks. One being the further loss of privacy since, for these autonomous systems to work, the car must constantly be updating its position, and transmitting that information to some central location. Big brother will always know where you are. Which points out another drawback — since these systems are computerized, they are also susceptible to hacking, so one or many cars could be hacked and intentionally crashed. Just recently, I read an article of how car thieves were using an electronic device, positioned near a car owners house, to amplify the signal from the car owner’s key fob inside the house (which is always broadcasting), and use the amplified signal to open, start and steal the owner’s Mercedes S Class, which was outside the owner’s house. Imagine the disastrous results if something like that happened on a large scale, and while cars are moving on a road.

A few years ago, my work took me to Microsoft’s cyber-security division in Washington State, and the topic of autonomous vehicles came up.  It was a meeting of attorneys, and my question was on the liability side of whether the car manufacturer or software supplier would be liable for crashes, and also, how would the car make moral judgments. Regarding the latter, consider the following scenario: your large SUV comes across a patch of black ice, loses control, and is headed for a head-on collision with an oncoming small economy car with a baby on board. In your car is you and a passenger, and you car’s computer decides it can take 3 courses of action to try and mitigate the carnage of the upcoming accident. The first action will avoid a full head on collision, but will likely get you killed, another course of action will also avoid a full head on collision, but will like likely kill your passenger, and the third course of action will leave you and your passenger injured yet alive, but the other car’s occupants will likely be killed. What will you car be programed to do?  That question is being hotly discussed by some people, and seemingly ignored by others.

These are just some of the issues society will be grappling with in the coming years. Right now, I am very happy to still have control of my car, but have the ability to engage or disengage driving assist technology (e.g., auto-cruise, lane departure warning, automatic braking, blind spot detection). By the way, the article’s author was wrong about one thing, right now it is best to keep one’s hand at 9 and 3 on the steering wheel, rather than 10 and 2 (as he suggests) and which has been taught in the past. What is current convention wisdom is that 9 and 3 provides better control of the car (that is why most steering wheels have indents at 9 and 3 for the driver’s thumbs), and also since upon deployment of steering wheel airbag, hands at 10 and 2 will be pushed into the driver’s head, whereas at 9 and 3, the drive might still be able to hold on to the steering wheel, and at worst, their arms would be pushed sideways. As an aside, I read an article by AAA which proposed holding the steering wheel at 8 and 4, which is also good should the airbag go off, but is an awful position for controlling the steering wheel, and in my opinion, should be completely avoided.

I am arriving at the realization that time is a key component in online dating, and is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, it takes time to get to know someone, and in John Van Epp’s book, “How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk”, McGraw Hill, 2007, he advises it take three (3) month to get to know someone sufficiently in order to have some indication if they are a good match for you. However, with regard to online dating, it is challenging to get past even the first date, and make a determination if a second date makes sense. Also, as we get older, three (3) months is a good chuck of time, and if after those three (3) months, it does not work out, it takes precious time from dating someone else who might be a better match.