Tag: Fitness

The Good Hydra

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 2

I just finished Josh Kaufman’s How to Fight a Hydra. It’s a short fable about facing an ambitious, terrifying challenge — the kind where you cut off one head and two more grow in its place. The hero enters the arena not knowing if he’ll survive, gets staggered, recovers, and keeps swinging.

I recognized the arena. I’ve been in it for 138 days.

But here’s where my story breaks from Kaufman’s metaphor. His hydra is made of problems. Fear, uncertainty, risk — heads that are trying to kill you.

My hydra is made of good things.

Two novels. A daily blog. A Bible illustration project. Music. A nonfiction book outline. A teaching series. A certification to study for. A distribution strategy to build. A platform to grow. Every single one of them is something I care about. Every single one of them deserves my time.

And every time I finish something, two more ideas grow in its place.

That’s the version of the hydra nobody warns you about — the one where you can’t cut a head because none of them are the enemy. The problem isn’t that the work is hard. The problem is that there’s more good work than there are hours, and it feels wrong to set any of it down.

But the hero in Kaufman’s fable doesn’t fight all the heads at once. He’d die. He picks one, fights it, recovers, picks the next.

That’s not elimination. It’s sequencing. And sequencing requires a harder kind of discipline than grinding — it requires you to look at something you care about and say, “not yet.”

For Round 4, I’ve locked two heads. Get ready to sit my CDMP exam at the end of June. Get Phase Defiant in front of more people. Everything else — the other novels, the teaching series, the nonfiction — stays alive, but it waits.

The hydra isn’t going anywhere. Neither am I. But I can only swing at one or two heads at a time and expect to survive.

What Twenty Minutes Will Tell You

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

It’s 80 degrees. I’m in jeans and a black shirt, walking downtown in full sunlight with a balding head, talking into my phone passing a bus stop at 12:45 in the afternoon. I’ve got about 14 things on my to-do list and I’m trying to unload my brain before it gets any fuller.

I’m equal parts grateful and overwhelmed, and I can’t figure out how both of those things are true at the same time.

I’ve been feeling behind. Not in a dramatic, everything-is-falling-apart way. More like a low hum in the background — the sense that I should be further along, that I haven’t done enough, that time is slipping and I’m not keeping up.

So I started talking. Just listing things. What have I actually done this year?

I wrote a novel. Edited it from 105,000 words down to 60,000. Published it through Kindle Direct in March. Five months from manuscript to published book.

While I was editing that one, I wrote another one. 45,000 words. It’s in revision right now.

I’ve blogged every single day this year. Over 130 posts.

I’ve read 13 books and I’m working on my 14th.

I’ve written new songs and produced a companion album for my first novel.

I started a Bible illustration project on January 1 with zero followers. Instagram is at 6,300. One video hit 300,000 views.

I’ve maintained seven daily habits across three 40-day rounds. I’ve walked so much I’m on my third pair of shoes. I’ve lost over 23 pounds and gained 10 pounds of lean muscle. My metabolic age dropped 20 years.

I’ve worked with my wife to put together her garden, and she likes it. I’ve been in the gym with my son three nights a week. And I’ve done all of this while working a full-time job.

Somewhere around minute fifteen of this walk, I heard myself say it out loud: I think I’ve been seriously deluding myself that I haven’t been doing enough.

That stopped me.

Because the problem was never output. The problem was that I was so deep inside the work that I couldn’t see the shape of it. I was measuring myself against what I hadn’t done yet instead of what I’d already built.

Twenty minutes of talking into my phone at a bus stop fixed that.

So now the question changes. It’s not “am I doing enough?” I am. It’s “how do I get what I’ve built in front of the people who need to see it?”

That’s a different problem. A better one. But it’s still a problem. I don’t have the answer yet. I’m one person producing more than I can promote, and the gap between what I’ve made and who’s seen it is real. The overwhelm doesn’t go away just because I’ve named it — it just shifts from “I’m not doing enough” to “I don’t know what comes next.”

But I know where to start. And I know I’m not doing it alone.

Thank you, God. I am so grateful.

What the Scale Wasn’t Telling Me

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

For about six weeks, the scale stopped moving.

I’d been showing up every day. At least thirty minutes of exercise on regular days, an hour or more on 7-40 Challenge days. I’ve gone through two pairs of running shoes this year — the kind that are supposed to last four to five hundred miles each. Both pairs are blown out. I’ve been doing the work.

The scale didn’t care.

I started the year at 289 pounds. I’d dropped to 273 a few weeks ago. Then I added back muscle and the number on the scale crept up to 276. Anyone watching the scale alone would have said I’d plateaued — or worse, regressed. So I stepped onto the Hume Pod scanner this week to find out what was actually happening underneath.

The scan goes back to June 2025. That’s when I got the device. That’s the real baseline.

In June 2025, I weighed 299.6 pounds.

This week, I weighed 276.2.

Twenty-four pounds in ten months. Roughly two and a half pounds a month. Not biggest-loser numbers. But I’m not doing biggest-loser things, which I happen to think are harmful for the body. The math works. The program is working. The scale just couldn’t see all of it.

What the Scale Couldn’t See

In June, my body fat was 31.6 percent. For a guy four ounces short of three hundred pounds, that’s essentially a hundred pounds of fat I was carrying around. This week the scan put me at 21.7 percent.

Here’s the part the scale was hiding. While I was losing fat, I was also gaining muscle. Fat mass dropped from 94.6 pounds to 59.9 — almost thirty-five pounds gone. Skeletal muscle went up nearly ten pounds.

That’s why the scale stopped moving. Fat was leaving. Muscle was arriving. The two were trading places, pound for pound, and the scale couldn’t tell the difference.

The visceral fat index — the dangerous fat around your organs — went from 20 to 13. My heart rate during the weigh-in dropped from 104 to 85.

And the metabolic age. The Hume Pod’s algorithm puts your body’s functional age against your actual age. In June it told me I had the metabolic age of a fifty-five-year-old. I’m forty-seven. That number frustrated me when I saw it.

This week the same scanner put me at thirty-five.

I’m walking around in a body that’s functioning twelve years younger than my driver’s license says.

The Honest Part

I have to tell the truth about something.

In Round 1 of this challenge, I was rigorous about calorie tracking. Every gram. Every meal. No drift. Round 3, I’ve loosened up a little. I’m still eating responsibly. I’m still inside the range I know works. But I’ve been less precise than I was four months ago.

If I’d held the same standard I held in January, that scan number might be a little lower. Some of the recomposition would have been more weight loss instead.

I’m not going to pretend I executed perfectly and the data is the result. The data is the result of a system that absorbed some slack and still produced a result. That’s a different thing to learn from.

The lesson isn’t be perfect or it doesn’t work. The lesson is the foundation is more forgiving than perfectionism wants you to believe — but it has to be a real foundation. Daily exercise. Honest food, even when it’s not measured down to the gram. Hydration. Sleep. Showing up. The system can metabolize a few weeks of looser tracking. It cannot metabolize quitting.

What If You Don’t Have a Hume Pod

Most people don’t.

You don’t need one. The Hume Pod is useful because it shows you the layer underneath the scale, but the layer underneath the scale was always there. You just have to learn to read other signals.

The mirror is honest if you let it be. I took a photo of myself the first week of January that I didn’t like — bloated, soft, uncomfortable in my own skin. I looked in the mirror this morning and I could see my abdominal muscles. That’s not a Hume Pod measurement. That’s a bathroom in my house.

My belt notch moved. My pants size dropped. My son got me into a six-week ab challenge in March, and my core feels different now than it did then. None of that required a scanner.

Use what you have. Trust what you can verify with your eyes and a tape measure.

Lead vs. Lag

In data work, we talk about lead indicators and lag indicators. Lead indicators predict outcomes — calories in, exercise minutes, hours slept, reps completed. Lag indicators report results — body weight, body fat percentage, what the scale says on Tuesday morning. Lead indicators are what you can do something about today. Lag indicators are what shows up later, after the leading work has accumulated.

The trap is that the lag indicator feels like the real thing. It has a number. It’s on a screen. It seems precise. So we obsess over it and ignore the leading metrics that actually drive it. And when the lag indicator stops moving, we conclude the work isn’t working.

The scale is a lag indicator. The work is the lead indicator.

I still weigh 276 pounds. My knees still hurt. My back still hurts. I’m not in the shape I want to be in. I’m still experimenting on myself. But this isn’t look at how good I’m doing. It’s look at this guy who almost weighed three hundred pounds — if he can do this stuff, why can’t you?

The data didn’t surprise me because I worked harder than anyone else.

It surprised me because the scale by itself was lying about what kind of work I’d done.

He Fell the Wrong Way

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been posting daily Bible illustrations for four months now. One image per chapter, every day, using AI to generate scenes from scripture. This week, a video of David and Goliath crossed 110,000 views on Instagram. I’ve gained over 1,500 followers in a week.

And at least ten people have told me Goliath fell the wrong way.

They’re right. The Bible says he fell forward. My video shows him falling backward. I can read scripture — I do every day. But the spirit of that image wasn’t a forensic recreation of which direction a giant’s body hit the ground. It was a young shepherd standing in front of something impossibly bigger than him, armed with a sling and a rock, and winning.

Someone else pointed out that Goliath was nine feet tall, not thirty. There’s actually theological debate about whether he was nine feet or thirteen. But the point was never the exact measurement. The point was scale. Goliath was over twice David’s height and many times his weight. He was a warrior above all warriors. The exaggerated size in the image captures something a historically accurate rendering might not — how it must have felt to stand at the bottom of that shadow.

Not just David. All of Israel. They stood on those sidelines for forty days, paralyzed. And in an instant, God used a shepherd boy to conquer what an entire army couldn’t face.

That’s what I want people to see. Not a Bible diagram. Not a historical diorama. I want people who have never been exposed to these stories, or who’ve heard them a hundred times but never really pictured them, to see differently. To feel the dust. To sense the weight of the moment.

Will I get every detail right? No. But I’d rather make someone stop scrolling and think about a shepherd boy’s courage and his reliance on God rather than produce a technically accurate image nobody pauses for.

Goliath fell. That is what I was trying to show.

The Hidden Cost of Starting Over

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to build better habits for years. Long before the current challenge I’m in — a 280-day experiment in showing up every single day — I tried other versions. Different names, different structures, same intention. And every single time, the thing that killed it wasn’t a lack of motivation. It was the restart.

I’d get a streak going. Two weeks, maybe three. Then life would interrupt — a trip, a bad week, a day where I just didn’t feel like it. One day off became two. Two became a week. And when I came back, nothing was where I left it. The rhythm was gone. The writing felt stiff. The habits that had started to feel automatic suddenly felt like lifting furniture again. So I’d white-knuckle through a few days, lose steam, and stop. Then start over. Again.

I’ve been thinking about why this time is different. Twenty-two consecutive days. No breaks. And what I’ve realized is that the streak itself isn’t the point. The point is what the streak protects me from: the tax.

Every time you stop and restart, you pay a cost. A one-day break costs almost nothing — maybe an hour of finding your rhythm again. A week off costs a full day. Two weeks off and you’re spending three to five days just rebuilding what decayed while you were gone. The project goes cold. The voice drifts. Arguments lose their edge. You’re not warming up anymore. You’re reconstructing.

That’s why the person who writes five hundred words every day beats the person who writes three thousand words twice a week, even though the weekly totals look the same on paper. The daily writer never pays the restart tax. The other one pays it a hundred and four times a year.

I know this because I’ve been both writers. The version of me who worked in bursts always felt like he was grinding harder and producing less. He was. Not because he wasn’t talented or disciplined, but because he was spending half his energy getting back to where he’d already been.

Twenty-two days in a row doesn’t sound like much. But twenty-two days with zero restarts means every ounce of energy has gone forward. Nothing spent rebuilding. Nothing lost to friction. Just momentum, compounding quietly, one day at a time.

Consistency isn’t discipline theater. It’s tax avoidance.