May 17, 2026 · Health

100-ish days

Yes this is a fitness post, I'm so sorry.

My body and I have always had a love-hate relationship, and if I'm being honest, the love part was the hating. Not love for my body, but love for the fact that I had something so convenient to hate. A reliable, all-purpose scapegoat. Not confident enough in conversation? That's the weight. Bailing on the hike, the pickup game, the trip to the lake? Weight. Never approaching the person I keep noticing across the room? Obviously, the weight.

And to be fair, being uncomfortable in your own body really does grind down your confidence and your appetite for putting yourself out there. That part isn't a lie. But it also handed me a clean, no-questions-asked excuse to never look at the other stuff, the real stuff, that was holding me back. Fear of being seen. Fear of being boring. Fear of rejection. Much easier to point at the scale and call it a day.

And I've tried to lose the weight before. I've even pulled it off, more than once. Every time I did, the confidence shift was real. I went out of my comfort zone with more ease, more joy.

Seven years on the scale.

As you can see from the chart, it's been a yoyo for longer than I can remember.

The pattern started in college. After watching Jim TEAR weight off his body by going Keto, I did what I usually do, which is follow him into it. And BOY did it work. The problem was, it kept working, then unworking, then working again. A couple of years of bouncing up and down the same 10-to-20 pounds. By my last semester in 2019, I wanted real stakes, so Jose and I made a bet: we'd weigh in every week for 12 weeks, and whoever had lost the most proportional to their bodyweight would win. A little game to get us both more intentional about it. I became OBSESSIVE, and hopped on the Keto diet again.

If you've never gone down this road: Keto drops your carb intake under 20g a day, which "tricks" your body into burning fat for fuel instead of carbs and glycogen. It's restrictive, but not in the way you'd expect. Instead of counting calories, you watch macros, and you can eat as much protein and fat as you want (helllllooooo, bacon). The dream, right? And it definitely worked too! I cut sugar entirely, ate to my heart's content, ran five times a week, and shed weight fast. But I felt awful. However, the transition into ketosis brings brutal flu-like symptoms, and I spent most of those weeks miserable. I also wasn't doing any strength training, so nothing was protecting my muscle from getting burned for fuel along with the fat. By the end I was lighter yet somehow less capable of doing the things I actually wanted to do. The opposite of the point of actually investing in my body.

Then summer hit, the bet ended, and the structure went with it. I slid right back into old habits, and during a particularly stressful stretch living on Ryan and Jose's couch, I put nearly 25 lbs back on my frame in 3 or 4 months. Evidently the whole thing wasn't working that well.

The next swing was the best one. I moved in with a roommate who was way out of my league. I started a master's program that wasn't all that demanding. Suddenly I had the time, the focus, and (ahem) the motivation to take it seriously again. Over the next 3-4 months I dropped close to 30 lbs and started doing class HIIT workouts with said roommate. I felt stronger and more confident than I ever had. But the diet kept fraying. I'd run keto 95% of the time, then there'd be a binge day. A weekend of carbs, or a night out with friends (reminder that alcohol is basically all carbs, and I'd just turned 21). Which led to more restriction, then more shame, then more restriction. The classic pitfalls of unsustainable weight loss, right?

Well, who knows if it was sustainable, because then COVID hit. I went from cooking every meal and working out five times a week to Uber Eats-ing every meal and rotting on the couch for the better part of a year. In 2020, in the middle of a burgeoning relationship, I put on almost 80 lbs, and it wasn't gains, I can tell you that. By early 2021 I was 270 lbs, a BMI of 35.6, morbidly obese.

After a bad breakup and a move to California to be with friends, I tried again. Clean eating, a few weeks of slow loss, a few pounds came off, and then I just... stopped. I wasn't as fat as I'd been, and I genuinely accepted that this was where I was now. Being obese was simply part of who I was. After years of failed attempts, I was tired of all of it. My mental health was improving. I was cooking for friends more than I had during my isolated DC year. The rest of it, the weight, the gym, I let go of for close to two years.

Then, about a year ago, I quit my job, and lost the excuse. For close to 10 years I'd told myself "if I didn't have a job or school or obligations, I'd hit the gym every day." Now I either had to admit I'd just been lazy that whole time, not actually short on free time, or I could... you know... go to the gym. So I did. Half-heartedly at first. For about six months, from when I got back from some traveling into early 2026, I'd show up MAYBE once or twice a week when I was feeling ambitious. It didn't really do much. A lot of 20-minute YouTube workouts I'd quit halfway through, some easy cardio. But it kept me feeling like I was building toward something, and it was easy enough that I kept coming back.

2026 is the year the first of my friends turn 30. Jose last December, Unwana this March, Ryan this July (send them thoughts and prayers). And 2025 was the year a bunch of my best friends got married. Watching them go through these life events inspired me to build toward something that wasn't just my career. Honestly, I've always been worried about aging, and the spectre of turning 30 still stuck in a body I hadn't loved or respected with my time and effort just wasn't something I was okay with. So in February, I decided to make a permanent, fundamental change. Not another diet. Not another six-month sprint. A real overhaul of how I eat and how I train, into something I could actually keep doing for the rest of my life. I wanted to build a body I could love. A body I could nurture. One that would grow with me as I age and keep up with my dreams. Dreams of playing sports with my nieces and nephews, and with kids of my own someday. Dreams of bike treks, of hiking and backpacking through California's national parks without cursing the name of whoever invited me. Dreams of finding someone who sees me for who I am, and not just the first impression my body gives.

I've always felt like being fat and out of shape was something I'd never get past. And given some of the other blocks I've hit in life lately, throwing myself at something I'd deemed impossible felt like exactly the thing to give me the energy to fight my other demons.

And so, on Feb 3rd, I set out to design a system that would make this sustainable. Something built for me, tailored to my needs. And I really, really, realllllly hate to say it, but I was able to do it thanks to AI (I'm really sorry, lol).

How

Sanat (I think?) once said to me "There's people who are number autistic and people who are word autistic, you're definitely number autistic". And (while not legally) I definitely, definitely am.

In college, Ryan kept a "spreadsheet" where he tracked his drinking to prove (mostly to himself) that he was not, in fact, an alcoholic at the time. (Can you really be one in college?) I thought back to that and figured: alright, what if we pushed that to the extreme? The only thing that was going to keep me from doubting myself, doubting the whole process, was to back up every move with DATA. So that's what I did. I started recording everything. Every (edible) thing that entered my mouth. Every workout. My sleep, my drinking, my smoking, everything.

What started as a hand-filled spreadsheet quickly became a series of Claude skills I'd use to generate text I could copy and paste into a master sheet. After a couple of weeks and a few trips that exposed the limits of that setup, I just decided to build the thing properly: an app I'd self-host alongside my other lionel.place services (peep the plug).

See in the past I had tried things like MyFitnessPal or Hevy to track gym logs and food intake, but the barrier of entry of needing to format everything just right, never being able to customize anything, meant I was rarely consistent. I'd lie a little, cheat a little, cheat myself in the process. So I built a parser that scoops all my data into a huge context and chucks it at whatever frontier model is cheapest alongside my request. The perfect low-activation tool, one that lets me focus on actually sticking to the diet and the training, not the tracking itself.

And owning the data meant I could do what I wanted with it. Running OLS regressions on my weight curve to project when I'd hit a goal. Pulling a 7-day average on my protein intake. Calculating my TDEE to the Calorie. Things that were never possible inside someone else's app. It tickled the autistic part of my brain that just loves numbers.

So what did I do differently this time? Well a few things:

  1. No restrictive diet. Count calories and macros, but don't label any food as "bad" or treat it as inherently evil. No list of Okay foods and NOT Okay foods, no assigning moral value to foods. Just hit my targets every day: 1,850 calories, 140g of protein (0.7g per pound of bodyweight).
  2. No cheat days. That doesn't mean being perfect, it means removing the whole concept of cheat meals from the plan. Instead of telling myself to wait until Saturday if I was craving something, I'd listen to my body (within reason) and not gorge or binge on any given day. I still went out. I still missed targets. But the leniency was spread out instead of earmarked, and as a result I've been kinder to myself about it.
  3. Strength training, and strength training hard. This was the biggest change bar none. Lift 5-6 days a week, lift weights, lift heavy weights, repeat. Cardio is a nice-to-have, not a "I can't wait to see how many calories I burned running these last 3 miserable miles."
  4. Telling my friends. When I'd cut weight in the past, I'd been ashamed of it, hiding it from people, telling them I was on Keto for medical reasons, or just being quietly sad I had to do it at all. This time I shared it with my close friends from the start. The support they've shown me has been absolutely indispensable.
  5. Listening to my body. If I'm not feeling good, I'm not doing good. The number on the scale going down doesn't mean much if I feel like shit.

Training

In late 2024, early 2025 I was inspired by Jim, after seeing his jacked af arms to start learning how to properly lift weights. I joined a weightlifting class and became friends with Jules, an ex-powerlifter who, over 6 months, helped me build some technique foundation and helped me learn how to properly perform lifts. He and I worked out together outside of class as well, and I helped him transition out of coaching and into working in tech, and grew to love the camaraderie and the work as well. However, at the time I really wasn't happy in my job, and my nutrition wasn't dialed in at all, so while I had fun and learned technique I really didn't see any progress.

My new plan was the following: 6 days a week, two push pull legs cycles with a rest day on Sunday. Definitely not forever sustainable, but as of right now, when I wasn't working and didn't have any responsibilities, it felt like the best time to go hard or go home. Jules helped me build a program amidst his wedding planning, and I started working out again, with a set of rules:

  1. Only good cardio is enjoyable cardio. To be real, I used to run, and man, FUCK running. I hate it. It wrecks my joints, I've never gotten the runners high, I've gotten injury after injury (shin splints, hip abductors, twisted ankles you name it), and frankly, I just associated it with "thin people activities" and wanted to associate with that right. So I decided that I would only do Cardio I enjoyed: Walking, Hiking the beautiful vistas of the Bay, going on bike rides with Ryan, and most importantly swimming.
  2. Cardio for cardiovascular, not for burning calories. I really wanted to go in this without falling into my old patterns of doing an hour on the elliptical every day to burn as much calories as possible to see the scale as low as possible the next morning. Instead I wanted to do cardio to supplement my workouts, make me feel better, and more capable at the other activities I wanted to do.
  3. Weightlifting above everything else. Aside from stretching and mobility, I really wanted strength training to be the main focus of this cut, and I wanted to recomp my body more than anything else really as opposed to what I've done in the past where I've focused on fat loss without considering muscle at all.
  4. Progressive Overload. Every Gym session needs to be as intense or more than the last. It could be increasing weights or increasing reps, but I pushed to match or outdo myself everytime, and to do that I needed to
  5. Religiously track workouts. Similarly to food, to know if I'm getting better and stronger, I needed to see the data, and not cheat myself of potential gains left on the table.
  6. Consistency over perfection. I don't need to hit every workout hard, or do every day I originally planned, I just needed the general trend to be something I could be proud of
  7. Creatine, that's it.
Every day, what got done.

Following these rules, I quickly saw myself progress at the gym AND on the scale, and I must say my strength gains and muscle definition definitely bring a euphoria that's higher than seeing a number drop on the scale. And training became a routine, get it done when you wake up and then have the whole day feeling accomplished and on track. I managed to fit in imperfect but present workouts when I was traveling, and I've started enjoying the process and the mental benefits it brings.

I've always been someone who's way too in his head. I always thought that the only way to slow my brain and stay out of my way was either substances or burying myself in passion projects. It turns out the two hours a day I'm lifting weights or in the pool quickly became the hours I could think the best, where I was able to clear my mind and focus, and this really helped (on top of all the benefits) with my mental health. In the pool, with no headphones in and just the sound of the water around you, I really found a sense of peace in a way I'd been having a really hard time with over the past year or so. I swam almost every day after my workouts, flushing the lactic acid out of my body as best as I could and getting my heart rate high enough to reap the benefits of Zone 2 training without wanting to commit suicide via treadmill.

You often hear that you "can't outrun a bad diet" and I think this is very true, most weight change is made in the kitchen. However, I think if you do have your nutrition dialed in to what you want it to be, working out will make such a difference in both the calorie and therefore weight deficit you end being in, but also and more importantly, it makes sure that your body isn't burning its muscle stores to fuel itself, but fat instead as muscle constantly under stress will use resources to grow or at the very least keep its size. My total deficit since starting this in February is about 100 000 calories, which at 3500 calories per lb of fat is ~30 lbs! And almost a THIRD of that was through moving more instead of eating less! Now granted these calorie burn numbers are just estimates, and if I didn't have the bandwidth to focus on both areas, nutrition would obviously take priority, but man I think it makes a world difference, especially in your ability to move and feel good outside of the pure weightloss aspect of a transformation

Where I started, where I am.

And as you can see in the above graph, my strength really started to increase week over week. Building strength and muscle is actually shockingly easy going for people who are new to strength training i.e. newbies, and being able to add that plate to the barbell or move up dumbbells really is a huge motivator. And while I'm aware it does slow down later on, man is it addictive at first.

Here are my strength goals, that I think are achievable in the next year or two, that if I keep progressively making my workouts more challenging are very feasible:

Lastly, my other goal with weightlifting and strength training is to bulletproof my joints (knees, elbows, wrists, shoulders etc...) so that when I do inevitably cross the threshold of 30 in a couple years, I'm not constantly whining about my aching body (see exhibit Jerome and Robin jkjkjk). For knees, before every workout I walk backwards 10 minutes or do sled pulls. For elbows, doing weighted elbow rotations and stretches, and for wrists, wrist curls and extensions. And for my back working on back extensions and deadhangs have done wonders for both occasional pain and discomfort and grip strength.

I really do just want to forge a body I can wield for years to come, instead of being a slave to the results of my bad choices.

Nutrition

Every day, did I hit the numbers.

As you can see, I'm not nearly as "perfect" with my diet as I had been in the past consistency wise. I think the heatmap above shows a story of consistency with hiccups but no derailments. I tried to keep my calories to 1850 and protein to 140g, and fiber as high as possible during this cut, Everything else just doesn't matter, it's just about keeping my calorie intake low, while still eating the foods I love, just substituting and adding where it makes sense. I've had a few days be it at a wedding a birthday or just a Saturday night with friends, where I allow myself to go over or outside my calorie goals, and I don't feel bad about it. I still track everything, and I still pay close attention to what I eat, but I also don't deprive myself of the things or moments I love, doing so would be counterintuitive to the whole project.

A bunch of really nice positive side effects happened as I started paying more attention to what I ate:

I've been keeping a moderately high protein diet, not too high that I'm constantly shoving scoops of protein powder down my throat, but enough that I'm building muscle easily, feel way fuller for longer, and reap the higher thermal caloric energy benefits of protein. I did however also start paying attention to Fiber more than I had in the past, trying to prioritize higher calorie fruits over processed fiber to make myself feel fuller and to also push off / curtail the impending colonoscopy I'm going to have to have in a few years.

The other major change versus past attempts: actually listening to my body. A calorie deficit, for the most part, sucks. That's the deal you make going in. But there's a level of sucking that crosses from useful discipline into the kind that's about to crack the whole project. So I built planned refeeds into the cut. Roughly two-week stretches where I bump calories up, lean more into carbs, and deload or pull back on training. The result: less frustration with both the diet and the gym, glycogen stores replenished for harder workouts on the way out, and some real energy back for the shifts I pick up. There's a bigger bonus too. Eating closer to what would eventually be my maintenance calories, while still in a slight deficit, gets my body used to the long-term version of this. So that when I finally hit my goal weight, the transition back up to maintenance isn't a shock to the system.

What the math said vs what the scale said.

Between the very anal and autistic food tracking and my expenditure, I'm able to track the "theoretical" weight loss against what the scale is telling me, I'm able to validate that what I'm doing is in fact working and even calculated my TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) to a pretty precise degree giving me information on how much food and how much exercise works for me to properly fuel my body.

Some fun graphs

Sleep the night before, against the day's lift volume.
The shape of an average week.
Where the sets went, by muscle group.

What's next

I'm not done. This isn't a victory lap, whatever it might read like. I'm 100-ish days into a process that doesn't actually have a finish line, just a point where the cut becomes the maintenance and the project becomes the life. The next 50 days: hit my goal weight, finish another block of bench programming, and start the real, gradual climb back up toward maintenance calories without losing the muscle I've worked for.

I'll write an update then. Probably more charts (sorry not sorry). Until then thanks for reading and message me on Signal with any thoughts.

See you in 50.