2025-05-18 02:39:11
I sat outside in a chair I recently wouldn’t fit in to record a video update. I’ve been having a lot of complex feelings about my journey thus far. While I’ve made fantastic strides in mobility and functionality, I’ve found myself often dwelling on what still can’t be done. In response to this, I decided it was time to revisit some of the content I have from when I started this journey.
I have a folder of published and some unpublished vlogs, audio recordings, and loads of photos. At the end of 2023 I shared my frustrations and goals for making 2024 a year of change. Changes really started small. I began focusing more on swimming and using floaty weights but I knew a lot needed to change to truly make lasting progress.
Unable to avoid the fact that my out-of-control eating habits were holding me back, I decided to write out all my known troubles with food. to try to come up with strategies to tackle them. By the middle of 2024, I got a very lucky break. Already focusing everything I had on making change, I was ready for bolder steps. I decided to hire a trainer for guidance and to rebuilt my mobility. Cautiously optimistic, I realized that this could be the pivot point where I finally begin to see lasting results. Armed with a scale I could actually weigh myself with, I was able to accomplish my first recorded weight loss in a long time.
Of course, this important step didn’t erase all my existing troubles. So much of starting out, and continuing from here is a significant struggle with problems I’ve developed over the years and the consequences of my size. It was enlightening to go back to the start of my journey to reflect. I still very much have many of the same problems and complaints, but I can see the many improvements.
In an early example of gratitude I wrote out the many things I look forward to, some I’ve accomplished already.
Milestones
Activities
- ✅ Going up stairs without a thought
- Biking
- ✅ Getting better at cooking
- ✅ Comfortable with long walks
- ✅ Doing more things away from home / less hesitant to go outside
- Visiting friends abroad / being able to travel generally
- Taking on more physical hobbies and crafts
Body-weight exercises
- ✅ Lunges
- Pull ups
- Push ups (Working on it!)
- ✅ Plank
- Hand-stands
The little things
- Being able to move without having my own body in the way
- ✅ Standing for longer periods of time
- ✅ Fitting in ordinary bus benches
- ✅ Not having to lean on things while doing basic tasks
- ✅ Getting in and out of cars easier
- ✅ Putting on shoes & socks
- Staying in a clothing size long term
- ✅ Easier hygiene
- No longer living in fear, regret, and pain from my size
Under & Over
- ✅ Under 500lbs
- Under 400lbs [ALMOST! (ETA: End of May 2025)]
- Under 300lbs
- ✅ Over 100lbs down
- Over 200lbs down (ETA: Summer 2025)
- Over 300lbs down (ETA: 2026)
- Leaving Obesity Class V
I wish I had more writings from these early days. Even now I’m much more comfortable writing out thoughts than being on camera. I’m very glad I decided to start my Walk with me series where I casually share monologues on my journey. In some ways I find myself having less and less to say, things are moving along and I just need to keep at it. I’m very grateful that many people have found these updates interesting or comforting.
It’s great that I at least have a fair bit to look back on. It seems that I should have done a serious retrospective earlier. I am so happy the warmth and sunshine is back. Thanks for following my updates, and if you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out!
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2025-05-08 22:47:29
This morning I went for a short walk and recorded some of my current feelings about my weight loss journey. Things are going well, but I’ve got a lot on my mind of late. In this walk I share how I’ve been reassessing recent changes to try to regain focus and drive. I’ve come far enough to not be able to ignore that I’ve made progress, but also far enough to be a little disheartened by what remains. Listen to me try to be patient with myself as I come up with new avenues to tackle these problems.
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2025-05-07 05:57:14
The hidden service (on Tor) for this site has been migrated to gabriel262me3lgv3w7xohtesg3laoojmtye644pwirhdm73qmedmsqd.onion. The previous address was on 3ah6l32ons2mzb65rchl3uz7nrgkecfof4eey7dwmamt5fcvok4h2yad.onion so it’s nice to have a more recognizable one. I’ve set the old .onion to redirect to the new one so there shouldn’t be any issues for visitors. I’m not sure how RSS readers handle 301 redirects, but I assume anyone who pulls RSS via Tor can figure this out.
The documentation on the Tor Project website recommends mkp224o to generate vanity addresses. The tool generates as many .onion keys as possible and saves matching domains to a folder. The longer your desired prefix, (called a filter) the longer it’s going to take to ‘find’ matching addresses. There is a feature that allows you to search for multiple ‘filters’ at once, so it’s best to think of as many acceptable variations and alternatives as you can for longer filters.
You can simply run mkp224o yourprefferedprefix if you like, but there are a variety of useful options worth considering.
-d {folder} puts all the generated folders into a specific location-f {filter file} matches ‘filters’ in a file, one per line-S {seconds} prints statistics every x seconds, such as how many addresses are searched per second.mkp244o -f filters_file -d vanity_addrs -s 360
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2025-04-28 05:30:29
I’ve deliberately avoided using denoiseit to clean the background noise because it would feel wrong to remove the birds singing. I hope you’ll enjoy my off-the-cuff walking monologue about my ongoing journey. I’ve had a difficult start to Spring, but I’m really beginning to rebound. I’m looking forward to making the best of May.
Unfortunately, April is definitely not as successful as March was. Last month I was down 20lbs and this month I’m only down 11 so far. I can think of quite a few reasons why that was the case. I’ve been pretty stressed, and I’ve been finding it more difficult to control portions. Some good progress has been made correcting these mistakes. Spending time focusing on improving my rest and stress management has made a significant difference on my mood, motivation and drive.
It is clear that I need to re-balance my energies to continue to push hard in a balanced and reasonable way. I am facing significant life challenges outside of this journey at the moment, so my ability to withstand pressures is absolutely being put to the test.
I recently wrote about hitting a wall of soreness that kept me down quite a bit. It was quite the challenge to learn to rebound from a funk of disappointment and difficulties. Beyond unrelated stressors, a lot of my frustrations have been centered around feeling disappointed in myself. While I’ve made massive strides in strength, mobility, and weight loss, many things I want to do feel out of reach. I’ve vastly underestimated how much difficulties still remain in this difficult road.
I can walk for a decent amount of time and do many things I couldn’t before, but I struggle to properly appreciate these smaller wins. I am so fixated on what I still can’t do that it’s very difficult to have the required gratitude for the situation I’m in. When I really think about it my quality of life has been transformed in many ways since last Summer, but that’s not the same as being finished. While I certainly understood I would still have weight to lose by this point, I fully expected to be able to move better in this body by now.
I’ve seriously underestimated the challenges of being 400lbs while also overestimated the mobility and strength progress that could be made over the last few months. These mismatched expectations have had me languishing in frustration and despair. As shocking as it may seem to those who follow these updates, I am regularly feeling like I may never escape these troubles. It is clear to me that the important progress that remains is going to take quite some time. Day to day, I have an arduous struggle of trying to constantly remind myself that things are changing and real progress is taking place. With the understanding that I haven’t given myself enough time to grow, I really need to practice patience and gratitude to keep my head in the game.
In addition to all that, I’ve been having very extreme swings in my body image feelings. Some moments I’m feeling like things are all coming together and I just need to be patient, and other moments I feel like nothing has changed at all. Despite losing over 150lbs in total, it is still often quite difficult to recognize the progress. I think part of it is that it’s only a quarter of my highest body weight, and less than half of what I need to lose in total. Again, it seems that my mismatched expectations were the driving cause of my frustration over the last few weeks.
I can definitely say the difficulties of this journey make it immensely difficult to have a positive self-image. Many of the wide variety of things that are still out of reach for me are all very quick reasons for me to feel useless or like a waste. I have found that working on stress management and getting better sleep does make a big difference. It absolutely makes how hard all this is crystal clear to me. It is very easy to spiral into a typhoon of terror, denial, and self-loathing when things aren’t going well.
Something that helped a lot recently was being able to comfortably fit into 4XL clothes, down from 6XL. I effectively ‘skipped’ 5XL because I don’t really intend on buying every size down to whatever I end up at. I underestimated how staying in the clothes I started in for so long would make it harder to appreciate the change. I’ve noticed that feeling comfortable in the smaller sizes does quite a lot for physical and even mental comfort.
One advantage to doing this as long as I have is that I’m beginning to recognize some patterns and cycles. I always get nervous when my weight trends closer to my 2-week moving average. This is because I essentially take it as a sign I’m losing momentum. For the last few days, I’ve met and gone above the moving average. One of the patterns I need to resolve is stressing out about stress. Whenever my weight isn’t comfortably below the moving average, I begin to worry and then worry about worrying which makes things so much harder.
Thankfully this time around, I’ve noticed that this exact scenario has happened before. At the start of Winter I can see a very similar pattern where I poke above the average for a brief time. It is reassuring to know that I have faced this before and it does not need to be an unbearable crisis. I guess the transition between seasons is just always a tricky thing for me in this process.
It was really helpful to remind myself that as awful as this all is, it’s not permanent. By rediscovering the gratitude for the fact that I can change this situation I am feeling better about this difficult time. I’m trying to really put my problem back into perspective so that I can be happy about incremental progress again.
I’d really like to know what active hobbies you enjoy! I’ve been thinking about how it’s difficult for many people to stay active with busy lives so I’m very curious to hear about how people overcome this.
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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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