Comment by hluska

It’s not so much a secret as a set of tradeoffs. A few years back, I learned that I had made the wrong tradeoffs - I was unbelievably obese and got to spend a week in a cardiac ward because of a whole lot of bad choices.

My kid was only 16 months old at the time. So when I got out of the hospital, I got to deal with the guilt at almost leaving her fatherless through terrible decision making.

So now I make better decisions. Running early works best for me (and I collect an immense amount of data so I can prove that). I’ll usually go to bed at around 10:30, sleep until 4:30, do my exercise for the day, have breakfast and get to work. I snack on proteins, have a very small meal for lunch and then take a nap. I’ll usually walk in the afternoon or maybe play some pickup tennis in a nearby park, rinse and repeat. I have a very full life, enjoy every moment of it and can work with the schedule I have.

It’s just a tradeoff. Angiograms suck and I don’t recommend them. Having limited unstructured time isn’t great, but it beats the hell out of a poke in the heart. :)

The 4:30 part helps me with performance in a roundabout way. One of my weirdo obese habits was this messed up relationship with productivity, where I had all these great resources to learn how to get fit but wouldn’t do it because it took time away from work. Dropping pounds and adding in running boosted my productivity a lot - I could do much more in fewer hours. With morning runs, I get a nice little productivity hit that makes exercise even more habit forming because I get the reward mechanisms from the exercise, those boost productivity which gives me another set of reward mechanisms later on in the day when I’m starting to wind down. I’m really just an addict chasing different highs.

A different time might be better for you - the key is to do something, be consistent, turn it into a habit and slowly improve.