2025-04-10 19:29:52
I hope you’ll enjoy joining me on this walk where I talk about my recent struggles and successes. These are off-the-cuff talks while I go on walks that are lightly edited. Recently I’ve started using DenoiseIt to clean up the background noise, so listening quality should be reasonably acceptable.
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve hit a very exciting milestone. In many ways I can say I’ve already transformed my life in a very short time. My quality of life is substantially better in so many ways after a few months of very challenging work. I’ve hit the low 420s after being as high as the mid 570s. I’m excited to keep pushing hard to reach this year’s ambitious goal of being below 300 by the end of 2025.
Smaller things are starting to fit and things I’m used to wearing are becoming far too big to wear comfortably. I love that I’m spending less time thinking about walking relatively short distances, giving me a better sense of agency day-to-day. Currently, I’m working on progressing towards being able to do push-ups. I am really enjoying the opportunity to grow much stronger while making radical changes to my body.
I’d like to thank everyone who has shared some kindness and encouragement my way because it has absolutely made what is a very difficult road much easier. I’ve learned so much even just getting to this point. I really enjoy your thoughts & questions a great deal because I know I have much more to learn on the long road remaining. I especially appreciate book recommendations and make sure to add them to my growing “to read” list.
In case you’re not familiar with my story, I’ve shared how I got so big and just how bad my eating troubles were.
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2025-03-29 23:35:58
I continue to make progress despite being incredibly beaten down emotionally, physically, and mentally. I’ve successfully reached this month’s target of beating the previous month’s weight loss. I’ll be down over 20lbs in March, beating February’s 15lbs. Even better, I’m finally on track to meet my annual goal of losing 200lbs in 2025. As I’m writing this I am just under 50lbs down for the year already, a quarter down in a quarter.
Swimming is also going quite well. I broke a new record for continuous swimming time last week. I was able to swim at a consistent pace for 43 minutes straight. It was difficult, but showed me I’m able to accomplish much more than what I think is possible in the moment. The plan is not to push for a whole hour, but be able to at least hit 30 minutes of continuous swimming twice a week.
If none of this was ambitious enough, I’m also working towards a new goal: attempting push-ups. I’m very far from being able to move the full range of motion, but the hope is to be able to complete them in the future. Recently I’ve been not only doing modified push ups with a bar, but also attempting to move from a plank position downwards. I estimate I’m only moving down an inch or so, but it is something I’ll be working to improve on as time goes on.
I wish I could say I feel good and/or accomplished. Truthfully I’ve been feeling absolutely terrible lately. I’ve been so worn down to the point it’s been difficult to think at all. It reminds me of a quote from my World of Warcraft days: “If your WoW (World of Warcraft gaming) interferes with your life that’s one thing, but if your life interferes with your WoW you have a problem”. It seems that in trying to push myself as hard as I could, I may have been characteristically impatient about it and pushed too quickly.
Recovery is very much my Achilles’ heel when it comes to overall health. It’s the first thing I ‘put on the backburner’ and the last thing I tend to improve. It’s clear that my pains and exhaustion are a consequence of not prioritizing proper recovery for the workload I hoped to take on. I was actually in denial about it for quite some time. I took for granted that at my size, I was unable to actually push myself “too hard” and that I was very far away from ever actually pushing my limits. It seems the problem is not with the targets themselves, but how I’ve been pacing myself.
The first thing I noticed as things started to take a toll on me was that it was incredibly hard to focus on anything. The only lucid moments that remained were when I was doing my exercises. Then I noticed that my performance was dropping, but I was quick to attribute it to other causes or blame myself for not trying hard enough. Eventually, I would begin to get more and more sore and hear pops and cracks in places I wasn’t before. One would think all this would stop me, but it was only once I bough wrist weights for walking and using them made me a new level of sore that I began to realize I had pushed too hard.
While I am glad I’m able to push very hard, I struggle with accepting that I have limits. To many it would be intuitively obvious that someone my size would have hard limits, but I’ve come so far that I’ve been so used to pushing harder and getting more out of it. I am determined to keep pushing hard, but I am deciding to give myself a large break this upcoming week to prioritize actual recovery. I am hoping this temporary cut-back will give me the time to be recharged to push hard consistently again. I want to make sure that this setback doesn’t deter me from my ambitious goals, but I take as an instructive failure to teach myself to recognize when my actual limits are near.
As I’ve experienced, there are three types of pain one gets from regular exercise. The first is the intense pain one experiences when they begin training part of their body that has never been used like that before. In my experience, this is the worst of it. It’s unavoidable, and as I’ve shifted my focus from lower-body to upper body I’ve had to face it all over again and it feels like it just never ends. The good news is that it does end and gradually shifts into the second type of pain. As the body gets used to strengthening particular muscles, the pain shifts from an intense cold sharpness to more of a dull warm firmness. This isn’t fun either, but is at least an order of magnitude easier to deal with. The last type of pain is from outright injury. Doing some kind of structural damage generally impairs you one way or another. I am glad that I haven’t had any injuries that have impaired my ability to keep going, but I’m learning that I do need to be careful.
Personally, I can’t quite trace it but physical and emotional pain are inextricably linked in my mind. If I’m feeling sore, I am compelled to feel like I am worthless. I speculate this manifests from my learned helplessness. If I’m in pain from trying to do something and fail, it must mean that I am deficient and therefore a problem or a burden. I am still working to improve this, but progress is quite slow. I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve found ‘recovery days’ to be so much harder than training days because I feel stuck with the pain but none of the sense of accomplishment. This has created a vicious cycle where I’m too worn down to do things on rest days, so I feel even worse about them. Moving forward I’m going to try to use my ability to focus on non-exercise related things as a barometer for how well I’m recovering.
The present moment is very hard for me, but I am quite optimistic I will come out of this much better. Learning to grow stronger has taught me that pain often isn’t a “no” but a “not yet” signal from the body so long as one has reasonable expectations. It seems that just as I need to be patient for weight loss to happen, I also need patience for giving my body time to adapt to new changes. I will admit, it’s very disheartening to have regular, stark, painful reminders that I’m still so far from being able to accomplish so many ‘basic’ things. It’s genuinely very frustrating to have come so far and still feel the frustrations and limitations of my size.
I’ve been disappointed in myself for not getting much done outside of my exercise schedule. Part of this has also been to me being stressed and frustrated about things not directly related to this journey. I’ve been quite worried about the whole USA Canada trade war thing that’s whipped up Canadians into fake-patriot fury. I feel entirely burnt out of my capacity to participate in wider discussions. This is in part because I’m really reflecting on lessons I’ve learned over the last few years, and many of them are no joy at all.
I’m grateful that this journey has taught me many things, but it also brings many difficult feelings to the forefront. I hate still being this big. I can’t stand not being able to do the things I’d love to do and continuing to feel so far away from it. It makes the serious progress I’ve made feel so bittersweet. Every bit more I can do makes the sting of being unable to do other basic things much harder to endure. With all this, I’ve been doing a terrible job at managing the stress of it all. I’m thinking in the future I need to come up with more proactive stress management strategies, rather than just addressing things when they get too difficult to deal with.
I stumbled on Nick’s video How Hard Is It to Lose 100 kg (220 lb) in a Year? He’s done a great job documenting the journey and brings up many things that are incredibly familiar to me. I appreciate Nick putting his journey out there and sharing the highs as well as the lows. I’ll admit it was quite hard to watch this because it felt very much like looking in the mirror with all the similarities. When I remember having some nit-pick disagreements with some of the things he said, but I’ll chalk that up to us being different people. What I would absolutely echo Nick on is that it is an incredibly tough journey that is challenging as well as rewarding. Maybe once I’ve made it to where I want to be it would be neat to talk with Nick sometime.
If there was anything that really clued me in to the fact that I have to really focus on my moderation when it comes to pushing hard it would be the NASM talk Optimize is a 4-Letter Word. Consistency is the name of the game, but Darlene Marshall does a great job of asking ‘what is enough?’. The talk was a great reminder that chasing perfection and optimization can often sabotage satisfaction and even results. It was quite timely for this to come out when it did because it’s helping me refocus my energies on appreciating the wins and prioritize longer term progress.
Since reading Food Politics I’ve been reflecting on the broader concerns related to the intersection of health, business, and politics. NASM hosted another talk on The Truth About How Supplements Are Regulated. The talk includes many warnings to consider when one is trying to get into using various health supplements. The most obvious concerns being does the supplement contain what it claims to, are there additional additives, and does it actually work? As far as I understand it, this isn’t easy territory to navigate.
The Bioneer takes on the difficult topic of Fitness and Mental Health. He does an excellent job talking about the limits of oversimplified advice on exercise and lifestyle. I like how he does a great job drawing the fine line between “training to live” vs “living to train”. He points out there are many phenomenal benefits to exercise, but it’s far from a ‘silver bullet’ that will cure all your problems in one simple stroke. He directly takes on the concern that for those who are stuck in ‘bigorexia’, or just the perception that more muscle is better, can fall into the trap of abusing performance enhancing drugs.
This doesn’t come from nowhere. Many of the people I take seriously in the fitness space will decry how influencers are often damaging to the cause of helping people take care of their health. Lyle McDonald explains how Fitness POISON is Everywhere and how it effects those trying to start their journey. Lyle points out that the hypocrisy and judgement prevalent on social media is often counter-productive and ultimately harmful. It’s a little amusing to hear this because I see the same patterns in the areas I pay attention to, it seems that no niche is safe from this problem. Money, politics, and status-seeking behaviors all impact conversations online and one always has to be careful where they put their trust.
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2025-03-17 04:17:12
Watch video on PeerTube or on Substack.
I’ve recorded a stream of consciousness about my situation. I share my recent progress and changes I’m trying to make. Things are going quite well, but I’m finding it all quite difficult. I’m really trying to learn how to keep the intensity up without sacrificing consistency.
I was able to filter out a lot of background noise with DenoiseIt. I was pleasantly surprised at how it turned out and I’m considering using the script on my future walk with me installments. Unless you really like having the ambient noise, if so let me know.
Reading Food Politics by Marion Nestle was quite the eye-opener. As somebody quite new to understanding basic nutrition, it was fascinating to get a look into some of the contentious issues. It was interesting to learn about the ‘food fight’ over the USA’s Food Pyramid, as well as other more nuanced issues like food fortification and supplement regulation. The book introduced me to the complicated politics surrounding nutrition, which opened my eyes to the fact that even basic health has been political for longer than I knew.
This is something I want to learn all I can about, given that it seems that health is only going to become more political over time. The push to collect health information for the purposes of integrating healthcare with AI is a non-trivial concern that seems to have principle relevance to Canadian health care. If nothing else, it is clear that food and nutrition will not be spared from mass surveillance and control. Just as it is important for us Free Software advocates to consider how governments and Big Tech imposes a worse digital landscape, we should consider how “Big Ag”, Pharma, and governments are interested in shaping the future of food.
Reflecting on it, I think the book is very helpful for anybody interested in a more nuanced perspective on nutrition. In a time where many people are getting their information from sub-optimal sources, it was nice to get a perspective from somebody who worked ‘inside the system’. I certainly have different preferences than the author on many things, but I found the book very useful for understanding the broader context. In some ways, it has changed how I look at other issues I care about.
The author has quite a few talks and lectures on YouTube, which I’ll share for context. I feel the need to point out that with an open mind, one doesn’t need to agree with her politics or dietary preferences to learn a great deal. I have my own strong disagreements with the author on many things, but have learned a great deal about how we’ve arrived where we are.
I do really appreciated having the opportunity to learn from someone with a radically different background and perspective. I’ve still got a lot more to learn. I’ll be on the lookout for more resources on nutrition and the broader health picture. I would really appreciate any recommendations! I’d be especially interested in suggestions on books that cover overall nutrition or even specific questions like GMOs.
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2025-03-05 04:16:19
I spent some time reading through Lyle McDonald’s Training the Obese Beginner series. While I’ve got a few months of training under my belt, this guide certainly did a great job reminding me that I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to training. While not a surprise, I had already been considering that I need to understand more to push my strength training to the next level.
In his series of posts, Lyle McDonald explains how the goal for any beginner, but especially obese ones is to train to train. It’s counter-intuitive, but if you’re completely out of shape, you need to rebuild a foundation to truly launch from. I’ve underestimated the difficulty of this alone. A part of me fully expected to be done all that by now. Reading through that guide definitely put how far I truly am from that into perspective.
To really get the most out of it, I need to focus on measuring progression in an objective and consistent way. I also need to plan out my workouts rather than just doing what I feel like doing once I’m there. Another thing I need to get better at is pushing exercises towards failure. I’m starting to recognize that at my phase, the priority is to practice the many movements, rather than necessarily push numbers.
The intricacies of actually learning to use your own body is something I’m only beginning to understand. Understanding theory only goes so far, putting it into practice is the important part. It’s totally mind-boggling to realize how little body awareness I’ve started with and how slowly it develops. There is a lot to look forward to, and I’m excited to learn along the way.
I’ve hit a pretty emotional milestone. Since I’m down over 120lbs now, I decided to try on some of my old clothes that I grew out of in the last few years. Getting more clothes to fit to only grow out of them is a pretty brutal emotional process, reversing this is very gratifying. I remember tearing up a little bit as something I remember being too tight and uncomfortable actually feeling loose. It sounds weird, but these clothes are stark reminders of all I went through in them. Being able to put things on that didn’t even fit when I bought (and couldn’t return) them was quite the experience.
Almost everything I started this journey with is incredibly loose and oversized. I am absolutely ecstatic to begin the spring with better fitting shorts! I’ll admit, I still struggle to feel the progress I’ve actually made, but wearing some pants that certainly wouldn’t fit before definitely makes it feel more real. I’ve kept a decade’s worth of my old clothes, so I’ll have tons to get through and look forward to on the way down. It’s certainly helpful that I kept my old clothes, because I wouldn’t be able to afford getting new clothes at this rate!
To get control over my intake, I leaned quite a bit on having one-meal-a-day (OMAD) for convenience and simplicity. People regularly recommend intermittent fasting as a weight loss strategy, but I came across some information that changed my mind. It logically follows that your body can only turn so much protein into muscle (or repairing muscle) in a given amount of time. This means that when you fill yourself with your daily protein all in one meal, it’s possible that a non-trivial amount of that protein is ‘wasted’ to be burned for energy.
When I began switching to trying to equally distribute protein throughout the day, I was stunned at how quickly and ferociously hunger appeared. Instead of being perfectly satiated with a single large meal until the next one, I was immediately catching myself counting the minutes until the next meal. This intuitively makes sense. As less protein is available for energy, the body is being forced to lean more on burning fat and bringing in other sources of energy. At least, that’s the situation as I understand it. It could be entirely placebo, but I can say I definitely feel quite differently after making the change.
I’ve been taking this as an opportunity to really face my hunger head-on. I’ve mentioned before that the more I exercise, it’s really the physical pain that is a bigger challenge than hunger at this point. My hope is that if I can continue to push through this, I will be in a better position to tackle the inevitable increase in hunger signals as I leave obesity and become merely overweight. I can say, I’m glad I’m so neurotic about all this, because I’ll have a great deal of trial-and-error to share with anyone who is curious.
What’s really stunned me now that I’m below 450lbs now, is that I’m not that far from being below 400lbs. At my current rate of progress I’ll be below 400 in less than three months. I have so much to look forward as I continue to push through these milestones. It’s quite funny how day-to-day I feel like I’m not loosing enough, but when I think about how I really only began making measurable progress last September, it hasn’t been that long at all. After building a bit of a runway to get started, I feel confident I can soar higher than even I thought possible. It’s actually quite surprising to me how quickly I’ve blasted through the 400s in a relatively short period of time. I definitely expect the 300s to be slower, but also a lot more fun.
I’ll be working hard to reach my ambitious targets and share the challenges and reflection along the way. I greatly appreciate the attention, encouragement, and kindness from those following my journey. One of the things I’ve begun to understand is how applicable much of what I’m doing is to other problems in life. One of the things I’ll never forget is how much a difference a little kindness makes.
I’ve started adding various weight loss & fitness resources to my knowledge graph. The hope is to eventually put together a full picture of the process as I understand it, but in the short term it will be where I put links and references as I discover them. I have a weakness for informative information delivered via humorous cartoons. Trainer Winny is a great YouTube channel I’ve recently stumbled on. You’ll hopefully like 5 Things I Wish I Knew When I First Started Lifting.
I spent some time browsing to see what I could find. I found it fascinating how many of the ‘motivational’ memes out there are just about getting rich and ‘getting it all’. I appreciate the many examples where they show that there is more to this life than just that. Feel free to browse the entire collection
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2025-02-27 08:00:00
2025 is off to a great start. I am now quite confident that I’ll be able to continue to make progress despite Winter. With Only a month left of the season, I’m very happy that it has been a victory. All the effort facing the cold has absolutely paid off. I’ve recorded this vlog to share some of my recent thoughts as I hit this milestone. By weighing in at 449 yesterday, I’ve successfully lost more weight this month than last, which is my metric for success this month. Naturally, the goal for March is to lose more than February.
In the last year, I’ve made a remarkable amount of progress on mobility. When I first started at the gym, it would be difficult for me to stand still for more than a few seconds. Getting off the floor wasn’t something I could do without help. Now I’m able to do so much more! Getting stronger and more active has transformed my life in many ways and has certainly helped me feel more confident and capable.
I’m really starting to enjoy getting stronger. Maybe the addiction is already starting. 😅 One can hope… While I’m very far from where I would like to be, I feel better in many ways. Getting stronger involves quite a bit of pain, but I’m learning to withstand that more and more. This trial-by-fire has done wonders for my mental state and I am very grateful for the chance to make radical changes.
Semi-recently I read Becoming a Mentally Tough Motherfcker: How Elite Powerlifting Made Me a Better Person, Parent* by Sumi Singh. I’d wholeheartedly recommend it for anyone. It’s something I plan to revisit many times on my journey. It’s a short but invaluable guide on how to take on difficult challenges, and is very applicable to my situation.
I’m halfway through reading Food Politics. I’ve learned a variety of interesting points of contention when it comes to nutrition and public health. I’ve been slacking a bit on reading lately, but I’m looking forward to finishing it. The main take-away from the book I have so far is that the conversation is so much more contrived than I had initially assumed.
I’ve decided to start (slowly) adding weight loss and fitness information to my personal documentation. The idea is to at least record resources I’ve found helpful or informative. This will also help me see if I understand the problem well enough to build up my own mini-wiki about it.
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2025-02-23 08:00:00
Feel free to listen to this off-the-cuff rant & reflection of my recent progress. These monologues are recorded primarily for my own benefit. Very light edits are done to remove some pauses and repetitions, but the audio itself is very raw.
Despite recent challenges, things are going quite well. I’m sore and quite tired a lot of the time, but I’m definitely reaching ahead. I’ve successfully completed three weeks back to my fall schedule of being active 5 days a week. It’s certainly very demanding, but looking at my weight loss spreadsheet I can see the difference. I have a daily loss averaged over the last month and it’s gone from 0.5/lbs/day to 0.7 since the start of February.
I’m very close to being below 450. This is incredibly exciting to me. Not only does this mean I’m down over 120lbs, but I spent a long time around 400lbs during my adult life. Getting consistently below that will be a concrete sign that I’m making serious permanent progress. Just the other day, I realized I can finally fit in the bus stop seating. As I’m writing this, I’m wearing a 4xl t-shirt I was gifted from the gym I signed up at. I can put it on without stretching it! Meaning I’m down from 6xl.
In the recording I spend some time explaining why I feel the need to push as ambitiously as I can. In short much of it has to do with having the privilege of being able to focus on this as my top priority. The other major factor is just the fact that I’m sick of being this large and helpless. The progress I’ve made so far have really just given me a taste for a more capable life that I am desperate to start living. While I may be pushing hard, I know I’m quite far from any serious hard limits. I’m seeing that what I’m able to do is still far less what what I’m likely able to safely do. So I continue to gradually and methodically test my limits while trying to do the best I can to take care of the basics.
I think the biggest paradox of weight loss is the advice “Don’t sweat the small stuff, then it’s all small stuff”. It’s genuinely important to not obsess over minute day-to-day stressors, but to begin making changes one does have to focus on basic living choices. So while starting out, it seems like you’re doing nothing but ‘sweating the small stuff’. Eventually, you can build good habits that begin to build the foundation for a better lifestyle. At that point, then you need to tune out “the small stuff” and stay focused on consistency without being completely derailed by stressing out about some small failure or setback.
📉 Weight Tracker |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Weight | Current Weight | Weight Lost | Goal Weight |
| 576 | 419 | 157 | 15% BF |
2025 Goal: 200lbs challange30%
This year's goal is to lose 200lbs in 2025! |
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| Last updated: 2025-04-15 | |||
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