150 days

Hi all! Back at it for a quick update on how my "body transformation" (ugh, hate even saying that) is going. It's been 50 days since my last post, and in that time: my nephew Sam was born, the war in Iran ended (maybe??), I started working at the gym, I finally broke 200lbs for the first time in 5 years, and — through all of it — I kept trudging along with the tracking. (Not ranked in order of importance, I promise.)

Before anything else, let's dig into the stats — y'all know I'm a numbers guy (read in Patrick Bet David's voice). Here are all the updated graphs for 150 days of tracking. Spoiler: it hasn't been nearly as smooth a ride as the first 100 days were, although progress is still being made.

While my weight has kept on dropping over the past 50 days, its undeniable that its slowed down. There are a few reasons for this: slightly less training, my TDEE has dropped even more since may and so my deficit keeps on shrinking despite eating the same, AND I've been a little less diligent, giving myself more leeway to feel like my workouts are a little more fueled and I can actually maximize effectiveness on them. But honestly, just taking it day by day and tracking all my intake and output has really just helped me stay on track

Training has also slowed down somewhat, mostly due to a knee injury that had be take two weeks off hitting legs, and just general fatigue from staying at this deficit for coming on 5 months.

And as you can see, a large reason for the workout dropoff, is I'm no longer PR'ing and improving each session, and that's been super demotivating. A plateau at this stage is frankly expected. Once you reach a certain BF%, unless you're really pushing the protein totals, being at a deficit makes it super hard to grow strength and muscle unfortunately. Not impossible, and losing muscle mass is really the bigger fear, but really its much harder than when eating at a surplus or even at maintenance. Still, we're inching every session, one rep here, 5lbs there, but injury has really been the biggest issue, as keeping this workout intensity has started to show its issues as we progress.

Yeah graph says it all, inching higher with my avg calories in July. Been feeling like I need more food to fuel my workouts, AND I've had a couple days where I don't quite binge, because otherwise the calorie numbers wouldn't show 4k but 10k, but I do have one meal, where I usually just eat "unhealthy" usually fried foods (It's popeyes, or general tso chicken and you know it), or calorie dense sweets.

Some updates to the "fun charts"

Body Dismorphia

One big regret I have from before I started this "journey" is that I didn't take more photos of myself at my heaviest and most out of shape. Obviously, when you don't like looking at your body, taking photos of it comes with an almost tangible physical pain. Unfortunately, I think that's played heavily into my body dysmorphia this whole time. I wish so badly I had a true "fattest baseline" to look back at and prove to myself the progress is real. I wish I'd taken more body measurements — waist, biceps, all of it — because while the scale tells a story, and the fact that clothes that used to fit tight now literally fall off me tells a story too, it's hard to look past all that when you still aren't satisfied with how your body looks. Sometimes only hard numbers give you the confidence to actually be happy with the change.

I've been struggling with body dysmorphia pretty heavily these past 50 days. As I get closer to my goal weight, as I watch the pounds slough off without feeling like I actually look different, as I start to contend with the reality that after 10 years of throwing dogshit at my body I may never look the way I want to — the dark thoughts start creeping in. Luckily, I'm a 27-year-old man with a modicum of experience handling those thoughts, not a 16-year-old girl raised on YouTube shorts and K-pop, so I've been relatively good at rationalizing them and keeping them from affecting my daily life or pulling me back into toxic self-harming behaviors like they might have in the past. Despite all that, I'm still a very online person. And the second the algorithm catches wind you're trying to lose weight, it pounces. YouTube starts throwing fitness content at you, no, "throwing" undersells it, it's a full deluge. Most of it, like 85-90%, is actually solid: informative, instructional, body positive. But that other 10-15%? Dudes completely shredded, either juicing hard or genuinely a decade-plus into training (because that's actually how long it takes to build a physique like that), and no matter how informed you are, its still gonna mess with your head.

So yeah, the extra skin everywhere sucks. The stomach fat sucks. The double chin that refuses to leave sucks. The stretch marks being more visible sucks. In the first 100 days I could still look at these and tell myself "another 10lbs and you'll see what you're waiting to see, don't worry." But the closer I get to my goal weight, to what's actually a healthy weight for me, the harder it is to accept that I'm never going to look like the 19-year-old at the gym on a cocktail of steroids strong enough to kill a rhino. Obviously I feel so much better than I did half a year ago, obviously, and my friends' compliments keep reminding me I'm on the right track. But in a way my confidence is somehow lower than it's been in a while, mostly because I'm actually paying attention to myself now instead of running on autopilot. And those negative thoughts are still there. Still something I'm fighting almost every day. And honestly, it's just tiresome.

Working out at 27

Man, getting older sucks. Working out at 27 versus 21-22, the last time I seriously tried to change my body, is so much harder. After 150 days, here's the damage report: a meniscus tear in my left knee, tendonitis in my right elbow, lower back pain, an inner ear infection from swimming, and a strained shoulder from deadlifts. My whole body just hurts. Granted, I went into this with a pretty heavy workout load, betting on two things: one, that a consistent near-daily schedule would keep me from falling off rhythm, which, credit where it's due, has actually worked. And two, that the more I worked out, the better I'd look, feel, and get stronger, which is obviously just not true.

I've been seeing a physio (kine, for the French) for my knee the past three weeks, and despite the $185/hr price tag, it's been useful as a reality check. My issue with physiotherapists is twofold. First, in the era of ChatGPT, barring an actual scan or rigorous exam, the odds a physio tells me more than an LLM about my injury or recovery timeline are pretty low. Second, physios aren't necessarily geared toward training and lifting the way a physical therapist might be. They don't really adjust your priorities with you, or give advice beyond "rest" that would still let me train around the injury and shore up the weak links. I think the real benefit is that it stops me from constantly second-guessing every twinge, gives me a simple recovery routine to follow, and gives me that external validation. But I'm still frustrated, less with the physio and more with my body's apparent inability to just recover from anything anymore.

Shifting goals and what's next

In my last post I said my main motivator for this whole change was to live in a body I could be proud of, one that would actually let me do the things I want to do in life. Honestly, I don't think that was the full truth. The bigger reason was wanting a concrete goal to strive toward. Ever since I quit my job last year, it's been hard to find a rudder, something I could build on every single day, something to actually work toward. This transformation has been the number one thing on my mind since. Even on days with no shift, no plans with friends, days I could just sit inside playing video games and getting high, as long as I hit my steps, got my workout in, and stayed on my calorie target, I still felt like I'd done something for myself.

That, however, is no longer enough. Especially as the weight loss has slowed, especially as the gym has become more routine than revelation, that sense of accomplishment has started fading. And as I creep closer to my goal weight, I need more concrete goals to actually chase that feeling down. So while I'll keep tracking everything, food, workouts, mood, I now have two goals I'm prioritizing for the next 150 days (the rest of the year, really), on top of the usual personal and career stuff:

1. Finish a half ironman next year. Watching Unwana and Burton do Escape from Alcatraz this year really lit a fire under me, made me want a race goal to chase instead of just chasing weight and strength numbers. Obviously you don't skip straight to a marathon if you've never run a 5k, so I signed up for a few races between now and next September to build up to it: a 10K in November, a sprint triathlon in December, an Olympic triathlon in April, and hopefully the SF half marathon next summer. Swimming and biking are obviously my strong legs, so I started getting back into running last week. Last time I trained by running was almost 5 years ago, when I was about 20lbs heavier with none of the cardio base I've built over the past 150 days, so it's actually been way easier getting back into it than I expected. I don't hate it nearly as much as I used to, (To be very clear, I still absolutely hate running.) but its been a nice change of... pace.
2. Sobriety.

   a. Alcohol. Alcohol's great. And I've never really felt like I had a problem with drinking, never felt like I struggled to control my intake. But lately I've noticed my sparse drinking has actually been hurting my progress. It's not just that the calories are hard to justify in the grand scheme of things, it's that wearing a sleep tracker has shown me exactly how much it wrecks my sleep and recovery, and how far off rhythm it throws me, not only the next day, but the next few days as a whole.

   b. Weed. I've been an on-again-off-again (okay, mostly on-again) smoker for about 8 years now. I'm not gonna do the whole origin story here, partly because it's boring, and partly because I've noticed my weed monologues tend to be extremely counterproductive (see: the Channel 5 Hunter Biden interview and the general phenomenon of euphoric recall). So let's just say the goal is zero smoking until I go home in August, at which point I get to sit with a full month of data and see how it shook out.

   Here's my list of reasons why, written mostly for me, future-me specifically, so when I inevitably get the itch in week 3 I have something to point at and go "no, remember, you wrote this down for a reason":

   • It wrecks my sleep. I miss actually getting REM sleep and dreaming, and new research keeps coming out on how important real REM sleep is for muscle hypertrophy, so my gains have probably been getting smothered a little.
   • It hurts my ability to emotionally regulate.
   • It bolsters anti-social tendencies I already need to work against.
   • It's become dulling rather than enhancing.
   • It inhibits my desire to engage with things in a meaningful way.
   • It diminishes my ability to speak eloquently.
   • It makes me spend less time on things that actually matter to me.
   • It affects my memory, especially with the books I'm reading.
   • It makes the days blend together.
   • It's a catalyst for other bad habits. If I'd normally have an 80/20 shot at making the right call on some minor bad habit, it drops to 70/30. Not huge on its own, but it adds up.
   • It makes me overly content, to the point of losing ambition.
   • It makes me unreliable.
   • It makes me want to take shortcuts in life.

I'd genuinely love to hear other people's sobriety stories in the comments. It's a weirdly personal thing to talk about, but I think everyone's version of white-knuckling their way through a bad habit has something useful in it for the rest of us. Or at least it'll make me feel better that I'm not the only one negotiating with my own brain over this.

That's it for this 150-day update! I honestly probably won't be writing about the fitness stuff much more after this, because unless something drastic changes, I think I've said pretty much everything I have to say, and there's not much left to do here besides keep trudging along. Maybe I'll do one more when I hit goal weight, but don't hold your breath.

What I do want to write more about is everything else going on: sobriety, the job search, the political climate in America right now. So subscribe, so I stop having to pester you every time I post something new.