🐶Eating Your Own Dog Food - Ep. 1

Metaphorically Speaking

This is the first article in a series I plan to write on this topic. The content might not be interesting for everyone, so I’ll include “Dog Food” in the title so you can easily skip if it’s not your thing 😉.

Background

“Eating your own dog food” (or “dogfooding”) is a phrase we used at Microsoft related to product testing. When major updates and product launches were a big deal, they would force the employees to use beta versions to work out bugs before products were released to the public.

I guess the idea was that if you are going to feed something to your dog, you should taste it first to test the quality. The CEO of Kal Kan Pet Foods reportedly ate a can of their dog food at a shareholder meeting to prove the quality - which seems kind of extreme but you get the picture (I hope).

How does this relate to Thrive A/F? Well one of the things I’m trying to do is take lessons from the podcast and apply them to my own life. If Lou and I believe our product (podcast and Substack) are beneficial for other people, we need to be willing to “dogfood” it ourselves.

So I created some goals and for the past month or so I’ve been using tactics and strategies from the podcast and documenting the results. Since the foundation for the podcast has been the Levers from Lou’s book Thrive: A Physical Therapist’s Guide to Longevity, I’m going to use the same framework for my goals and combine some of the Levers for maximum impact.

In this article I’ll cover the Levers I’m focusing on and the methodology I’ll be using. Future articles will go deeper into technology, goals and my experience with tracking progress and results.

The Levers:

• Sleep: if you are a podcast listener you know that in our sleep episode, I talked about shifting from a passive mindset to a more active approach based on Lou’s book and research from other experts. I am going to use my fitness tracker to try and improve sleep consistency and reduce my sleep deficit by implementing strategies we discussed. This dovetails with a more active approach to recovery in general.

• Movement & Exercise: My movement & exercise focus has been centered around CrossFit training with sporadic bursts of running and some sports like volleyball. I want to keep my CrossFit focus but take a more disciplined approach to include more zone 1 & 2 training across running, rowing and cycling to support a more balanced approach with an eye towards longevity.

• Nutrition: I’ve had short-term success in the past with different nutrition plans and diets but have never been disciplined enough to stick with one thing long-term. We eat pretty well in my house (my wife is an excellent chef), but I’m hoping to make some small changes and find some opportunities for improvement that I can stick with. I’m also going to experiment with logging my food and creating a more direct connection between nutrition, training and goals.

My main objective here isn’t to “optimize” myself into oblivion. I really just want to try and follow the advice and support the ethos we are establishing for Thrive A/F with small, incremental changes across different Levers that work together to improve my fitness across several categories (without making myself or my family miserable in the process).

I also want to discover things that I can incorporate into daily life that are sustainable and can be turned into healthy habits (Lever 8). And underneath all of it is a shift in mindset that is one of the most powerful levers available to all of us.

The next article in the series will be about the technology I’ll be using. This will align really well with the conversation we will have in episode 7 of the podcast.

Thanks for coming along for the ride, and I’d love to get your comments, questions and stories along the way!

Keith | Thrive A/F Team