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Update [October 11th, 2018]: Although this is a late update, Slim Fish has completed on schedule!

My original plan was to train for eight weeks, but I unfortunately only ended up training for five, as you can see in the workout log. The reason for this is unfortunately due to a minor incident that happened to my shoulder then, and I needed to rest to get it back in shape.

For the past few weeks I've been reading a lot more on nutrition, and I currently following a moderately low carb diet. It has felt really great, and has definitely helped me in slimming down, as can be seen in the before/after shots below:

I think it's clear here the progress made to trim down body fat. There's some muscle loss that's visible as well, but I'd say it's insignificant.

Following the success of Medium Fish and Small Fish, it's now time, yet again, to start fitness project #3. This one I code-named Slim Fish because, unlike the previous two projects, it has an emphasis on reducing my body fat %.

I'll be following this guide by Calisthenics Movement. I switched fitness plans twice in Medium Fish, until I found Calisthenics Movement and was very happy with their fitness routines.

This time around, Slim Fish will be both shorter and lighter than Medium Fish. I felt that Medium Fish dragged on for too long and I was losing momentum a bit towards the end. In some ways, Slim Fish will be a light break in between larger fitness projects.

I'm planning for eight weeks for this project. Rather than working out for five times a week as with Medium Fish, I'll be reducing it to three times a week in this program. In addition, I'm doing a sixteen hour fast (from early evening to late morning). I've been on this diet for nearly a week and it does feel much better and isn't difficult to follow at all.

I'll be recording all my workouts here. However, almost all the workouts are time-based rather than rep-based, so logging the workouts will just make references to the workout manual I have for the project. As always, I'll post more updates towards the end of the project to observe results.

I would've loved to measure my body fat before and after, but I unfortunately don't have access to the right equipment while here in Egypt and Lebanon. I'll resort to empirical observation from pictures when the project ends.

Deadline: September 18th, 2018 (my birthday!)
Current Progress: Done!

صار لي في مصر ١٠ أيام بالتمام و الكمال، و حينما أسترجع في ذهني أحداث تلك الأيام أندهش من كم الأحداث التي مرت. الآتي هو بعض أحداث الـ١٠ أيام الماضية:

- بدأت مرحلة صيانة لجسمي. ذهبت في أول ليلة لي في مصر لأنظف أسناني. خلال التنظيف اكتشفنا تسوسا في سن من أسناني الأمامية و تمت معالجته. ذهبت أيضا إلى طبيبة تقويم الأسنان لتصحيح تقويم أسناني الأماميّتين، و خلال أيام سيكون المُقوّم جاهز للاستعمال. و أخيرا، ذهبت إلى طبيب أذن لأعالج أذني اليمنى، و التي كانت تشتكي من ألم يراودها بين الحين و الآخر منذ أشهر، و لكن للأسف عجز الطبيب عن فهم السبب.

- أنهيت سلسلة من دورات تعليمية على موقع كورسيرا في مجال الـDeep Learning. بدأت هذه السلسلة من الدورات من ٣.٥ أشهر تقريبا، و أخيرا تمت و أستطيع القول أن مدى فهمي للمجال قد تقدم كثيرا.

- قابلت معتز عليوة و قضيت معه وقتا مليئا بالمناقشات العميقة و الممتعة. أعارني كتابا اسمه Homo Deus، و هو كتاب لمؤرّخ يروي تصّوره لمستقبل البشرية، و بالتحديد كيف التقدم في مجال الذكاء الاصطناعي سيؤثّر على قيمة البشر الاقتصادية و عواقب هذه التطورات على نفسيتهم و إحساسهم بالذات. كان هذا الكتاب يتماشى يدا بيد مع دورات الDeep Learning التي كنت أدرسها، و لا أنكر أن ذاك الكتاب قد شكّل في ذهني اتجاه مهَني أريد أن أسلكه. سأتحدث عن هذا الموضوع بتفصيل أدق في المستقبل القريب.

- قمت ببعض الأنشطة الاجتماعية و الثقافية و الرياضية. أمثلة:

كاياك في النيل مع معتز و أحمد عادل، زيارة مسجد عمرو بن العاص و مصر القديمة، لعب كرة القدم مع مجموعة من الأصدقاء (لم ألعب كرة القدم منذ زمن)، الذهاب إلى معرض الفنون "كايروبوليتان"، زرع بعض الأشجار في مزرعة في الهرم، زيارة مزرعة aquaponics، و أخيرا و ليس آخرا زيارة أثينا في اليونان لبضع ساعات في طريقي لمصر.

زراعة الأشجار في مزرعة في الهرم

كاياك مع معتز و أحمد في الزمالك

صورة مع الأكروبوليس في أثينا، اليونان

التدليك السمكي للقدمين في أثينا

Yesterday was a slow day. I remember waking up close to 9.30, cooked a bad-tasting musli for breakfast, finished an assignment on Neural Style Transfer for my Convolutional Neural Networks course on Coursera, made eggs for lunch, watched a video where Elon Musk talks more about the Boring Company and tunnel-digging, then went off to watch more videos related to that topic. The video about the Boring Company and its technology was an inspiration, and I wanted to learn about how Elon Musk is able to apparently master so many different disciplines. Here's Elon Musk replying to a Reddit AMA about how he learns:

it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

I noticed that I've been starting to adopt a similar style as of a few days ago. While I am studying a topic on Coursera, I'd start by creating an empty sheet for the topic, starting with a question (e.g. what is neural style transfer?), answering that, and in the process more questions come up, and I answer those, etc. I was essentially creating a tree, as Elon Musk was suggesting.

As an example, here's a snippet I wrote while studying Neural Style Transfer:

Mine was top-down as opposed to bottom-up. I'd like to fuse both approaches together.

Later in the day, I decided that I wanted to read more about this topic, and then I landed on a book called "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning". I didn't end up reading the book, but viewed a summary of it online. The concepts in this book were complimentary to my earlier thoughts:

• People often get confused between fluency and mastery. I can read about a topic several times, but when I keep reading, I am just remembering words and lingo related to the topic. I get the illusion that I've mastered it just because the words seem familiar, but in reality I've just become "fluent" in it.
  • In some way, I've done this for big parts of my deep learning specialization courses online and I want to change that.
• Retrieval is a far more effective technique than rereading. It feels harder, but that's to some extent the point. Challenging yourself in retrieving the content you learned, by testing yourself or writing about it, greatly accelerates the learning.
  • I feel this myself consistently. I remember a few years ago I joined a learnathon where I read and made a five minute presentation about how the GPS works. And, yes, I can still do a similar presentation today as I did then. Going through that process made the concept of a GPS really stick in my memory.
• Interleaved learning is more effective than sequential learning. Say I'm learning soccer, I can practice by playing some penalty kicks, followed by a few corner kicks, etc. The author here argues that this isn't as effective as interleaving these activities together. When I repeat a micro skill over and over, I get the illusion that I am mastering it, but in reality I am relying a lot on short-term memory. It's more fluency than mastery.
  • I am not sure I fully agree with the author on this concept actually, but will let it sink in more.
• Growth mindset is key. Believing that you can has a psychological boost to help you learn the topic at hand, and that's certainly something I felt first-hand.

I likely did not mention this in public posts earlier, but from the end of November and till about 3 days ago I was involved nearly full-time on a project that had great potential to be a business. In a way, had this project succeeded, it would've filled part of the dreams that I had.

About 3 days ago, however, I reached the conclusion that this project is deemed to fail and paused working on it. Having it fail was partially my choice - I could've chosen to work on it longer but, for reasons I won't get into in this post, I decided not to.

Which leads me to the state I am in today. I am in the dark ages again of being thoroughly confused about what to do. The last three days were quite stressful, but I am glad to report that I feel quite relaxed and accustomed to the new state of affairs.

I say that I am in the dark ages "again" because there was another dark age last year when I also was very unsure of what to do, and that was from the time I left Lebanon last Summer till about early December, when I started committing myself to the business project I mentioned above.

During that time, I was moving around a lot (mostly in Europe), and was very unclear on what to do. There weren't specific objectives, but I came out of it with a new way to structure my projects like Small Fish, as well as other project ideas I've been meaning to pursue.

What I have continuously realized that in times like these I tend to think too much before making a move. Whenever an idea comes to mind that seems interesting it's always "too hard" or "too much competition" or "not in my field" or "isn't financially viable", etc.

Rather than focusing on ideation, I'll be focusing on learning for the next little while. What has become evident to me is one of my greatest joys is learning. For now I'll focus on learning things I find interesting, with no particular path, and see where that leads. I have some thoughts on how to add some structure to this, but I'll leave that for another post.

Today has been a pretty active day. Work and workout aside, I joined Zack, Audrey, Myriam, and Sofian to the beach to surf. Zack has been teaching surfing and was generous enough to teach us today.

It was sunny, but very cold and very windy, so that made it a bit more challenging, but was definitely fun nonetheless.

You know what's one thing I would like to change about myself? I think too much. I wanted to write a short update about today and I am spending too much time thinking about what to actually write, how to structure it, what's worth writing and what isn't. The result? Well, as you can see, that not as much writing is going on anymore.

So I decided with this post to do the exact opposite. To write exactly what comes to my mind word for word, even if it doesn't end up making sense.

I am still in Sidi Kaouki, and I'd say today was a good day. I ended up going to Essaouira today with Sofian, Islam (the girl), Hadeer, and two other girls that joined our house two days ago.

The main reason I went to Essaouira today was to visit the hospital to get a tetanus vaccination. I bruised my knee and both my palms two days ago while I was running (slipped on the road), and Matthias, one of the roommates in the house, advised that I should get a tetanus vaccination if I hadn't taken it in the last 10 years.

Today I experienced what a public hospital in Morocco was like. I was originally skeptical, but was delightfully surprised of the great treatment I got. I wouldn't say it's like a hospital in Canada, but they were very quick, efficient, and, most surprising of all, did not charge me money! I am very surprised by that. I was chatting with one of the doctors and he started showing pictures of him participating in triathlons - what a great crew!

Anyways, earlier in the day we went for lunch at the nice terrace of مطعم البركة. Here's a picture of the crew:

PS: The flow of this post doesn't seem so bad given I was putting zero thought as I was writing. I should do more of this!

I wrapped up week 1 of the updated version of Project Medium Fish yesterday. Overall, I am very happy with this new version, and I am quite confident that this is the version I'll stick with until this project is taken into completion.

Reflecting on this week, here's what I like about Calisthenics Movement Level 2 so far:

1. Warming up is first class. In all other workout programs I had seen, warming up was only an after thought and mentioned very casually in the workout plan. I like that, with the current, there's a comprehensive workout routine that I follow prior to every workout.
2. Focus on mobility. Immobility was the primary reason I dislocated my shoulder back in 2014, and I love the mobility exercises that I do on off days and how they make me feel.
3. Mix of Calisthenics and HIIT. One day in the week is focused on HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) where I do sprints, which is a welcomed change given that I haven't done that kind of training in a while.
4. Taking it slow. In all exercises, there's a lot of emphasis on getting the correct technique and doing it slowly. Pullups, for example, are four seconds each: 1 seconds up, 1 second hold, and 2 seconds down.

Anyways, here's my exercise log for week 1.

A few things to note as I am going through these notes:

• While here in Sidi Kaouki, I am doing pullups on a large wooden bar with an open grip, which means that pullups are a bit more difficult.
• Squats are way too easy for me at this point. I went up to 50 in one of the sets and I stopped only because I got bored. The following week I'll do a more difficult exercise: close squats.
• Deep Squat internal rotations are not so deep for me, but I got better over the course of the week.
• I don't have a good setup for doing dips. I am now doing it in between two branches, and this is hurting my performance especially with the supporting leg raises. I'll try to adapt or find an alternative.
• I am not entirely sure if I am doing arch ups correctly. Need to look into this a little bit more for week 2.
• I got tired very fast when sprinting, but that's expected given that I haven't done this kind of activity in a long time.

خواطر كثيرة تراودني هذا الصباح. استيقظت اليوم الساعة الخامسة ليلا (و أقول ليلا لأنني لا أرى بشائر الفجر حتى الآن، و الساعة الآن ٥:٤٥). خواطر نحو عائلتي و نحو حياتي و عدم استقراري أصبحت تراودني. وصلت البارحة إلى قرية سيدي كاوكي بالمغرب، و هي قرية نائية على ساحل المحيط يقطنها ما يقرب من ٤٠٠٠ شخص.

لم يكن هناك سبب قوي بالنسبة لي للذهاب إلى المغرب. لمدة شهر سأسكن فيها هنا مع مجموعة من ١٠ أفراد في بيت كبير في أرياف هذه القرية، لعلها تكون فرصة للتعرف على حياة الأرياف و توابعها.

استغرق الطريق من القاهرة حوالي ١٧ ساعة. القاهرة ثم الدار البيضاء ثم مراكش ثم الصويرة و أخيرا سيدي كاوكي.

هذه صور التقطّها وقت وصولي هنا: