Week 1498

To date, I have dominantly used this blog format as a public journal. I have always wanted to know what successful people were doing along their journeys and how they felt along the way. 

I feel doubt. I question what I am doing. I don’t know how the pieces of this puzzle are going to come together. I don’t know what decisions are going to be the decisions that make or break me. 

I will know. 

This gives me the ability to show how my thoughts bounce all over the place. How consistent or inconsistent my behaviors are. This enables me to get my thoughts out on paper and, potentially, refine my thinking. Or spiral into madness. 

I have done this as a form of accountability to myself but also to give others insight into what I am doing. It will be irrelevant to most unless I become a well-known success or a well-known failure, but I find it to be an interesting exercise regardless. 

Even when I procrastinate writing these. 

My hope is to inspire someone. Whether it’s through shared humanity or another avenue. If it has an impact, that’s all I could possibly hope for (outside of the benefits to myself). 

Today, I have been reflecting on what I have been working towards and the first thought was of how I will support myself. 

I’m not sure if it is societal programming or what, but that is always where my mind wants to go. I don’t want to experience a decline in quality of life because that would clearly be the end of the world, but that isn’t my end goal. 

It’s a positive outcome. 

So I am working to get ripped, become fluent in Japanese, and to be more intentional with my dogs. 

Great. 

How does all of that play together? Outside of them all being recurring interests to me, there’s little overlap. 

I just want to accomplish some of the goals I have had most of my life. I’m tired of having vague ambitions, working towards them and getting distracted. 

Plus, two of the three have real-world benefits. That’s right, Japanese and dog training. 

Just kidding, I have no real intentions with learning Japanese outside of getting to connect with natives when I visit. 

I’ve been once and would love to go back with a greater ability to communicate. 

That doesn’t impact my daily life. 

The dogs do. My health is also impacted by my physical fitness. 

Plus, I have an interest in making a positive impact to animal welfare (both in and outside of my home). I believe that if I, a 6’9” currently 234 lb man can get jacked eating mostly vegetarian or possibly vegan in the future, then I can hopefully encourage more people to consider their dietary decisions. 

Ultimately, it’s not my job to force people to believe what I believe. Nobody likes people sitting on their soapbox, touting why they are better than you. I just believe that raising living beings for slaughter is wrong and that I would be an outsized consumer of these products due to my personal goals and size. If I can show through my actions that you don’t have to be frail to be vegetarian or vegan, it might cause more people to evaluate how they eat, decreasing demand on a system that seems unethical to me. 

I’m aware our pets offset what I am doing but I can only juggle so much at once and will figure out how to address that in time.

I’m not sold on vegan food for dogs and would need to be able to conduct continuous blood tests to ensure that their bodies are healthy on that diet. I also don’t know that I agree with vegan diets for beings whose teeth and lineage clearly demonstrate that they were made to consume meat as a dominant source of their calories. 

While I am currently listening to Rich Roll’s podcast and that is clearly slanting some of my evaluations right now, I have had an interest in doing this for a while. I tried to do a hard pivot to plant-based in 2021 or 2022 and the massive uptick in bean intake absolutely demolished my stomach (physical pain in my stomach for 2-3 weeks). 

Due to that pain, I took a step back. Unintentionally pivoted to a fast food diet and got fat (heaviest I hit was 270 lbs after being only 219 a short period before). 

I began trying to incorporate more vegetarian meals into my diet in 2024 (while I was 250-260) before hiring a dietitian because I was scared of fucking up my stomach again. 

From February of ‘25 to now, I have been 95%+ vegetarian. I lost 35 lbs and just bulked to 238ish (I hit 239 but 238 was held consistently for a week). I did a Dexascan yesterday and came in at 236 and 15% body fat. 

I will hold this for 2-4 weeks and do a cut to ~10% body fat. 

The only meat I consume is when my wife and I eat out. During my cut, I only ate out maybe 5-10 times over a 5 month period (don’t cut that long, it sucks a lot). During my bulk, I ate out more often due to the insane caloric density of the American diet but was generally limited to 2-3 meals a week). 

I’m not perfect, nor am I trying to be. But I have eaten over 200g of protein a day (as high as 300g) and significantly reduced my impact through meat consumption. 

I’m aware that my excessive consumption of Core Power Elite still giving money to the dairy industry but I can only do so much at once while I am ignorant. 

I have found that when I try to do too much, I fizzle out due to feeling like I am doing things incorrectly. 

I’m willing to learn from failure but can only handle so much feeling like an idiot before I return to baseline behaviors. 

Weekly Summary

Not a bad week for productivity. Was back on track with the gym, even going before work one day this week. I am evaluating going in the mornings because I hate how busy 24 Hour Fitness is. 

The dogs and I have enjoyed many walks this week and they even got to go on a couple together. As I work to refine how we walk, I prefer walking them separately but this was a good test to see how much they don’t listen when together. 

Also, I was glad not to have two dogs when Truman and I had a mid-day Coyote encounter. It’s always odd to see them during the day and by themselves. 

I finally took apart our furnace again to get an idea of how the thermostat is wired just to learn the wires got disconnected to install the current wireless thermostat system. I want to change this as the previous owner has access to the thermostat and I can’t gain access due to that. Seems a bit short-sighted. 

Plus, the Nest is much prettier. 

I downloaded MacroFactor and am trying that out. I initially was going to start my cut this week but decided against it to give my body some time around 236 lbs. 

It’s a good thing because before MF has evaluated my caloric intake needs, it was suggesting I starve myself by only intaking 2500 calories. 

For reference, I ate 3900 calories yesterday and maintained my weight at 234.4 lbs. Maintained. 2500 would put me in an absolutely massive deficit. 

I’m glad I learned a bit about my body because blindly trusting that, I would have been a very hungry hippo.

Almost forgot that I got quoted on installing 2 ethernet ports into my office and an access point upstairs. ~$1800.

Guess who also finally unplugged their router upstairs to find that was messing with the speeds that they were receiving? Went from 50 mbps download to 400 instantly.

Have I ever mentioned that sometimes you are your own biggest enemy?

Average weight: 235.72 lbs