What POSITIVE CHANGES are you making in your life?

I had tried going back to the OMAD style of eating and found my food addictions were stronger than my will to stop and saw my weight go from 215 to 225. I have been back on the 36/12 fasting schedule and feeling more comfortable back in it. Down to 209 and headed to 'onederland'.

Last Friday I even completed my first half marathon distance. There was some walking and I ended with a 12min/mile avg, but it felt great to complete the distance.

Good luck to everyone on their own positive changes as well!

Big sympathy, Cranberries. We did the grand canyon backpack (5000 down in one day, then 5000 up in two days) and it set my IT band injury, the injury that never ends, back. I'm getting an MRI Monday.

On a personal note, I've reduced my drinking to about once or twice a week having a beer or at most two, I was going pretty heavy dayswise this spring and summer. I'm sleeping better, so that's good.

The firewood continues.

And continues, and continues.

We bought a house in the woods in late 2018 and there was a monster silver maple tree at the one corner of the house, way too big and way too leany for safety of the house and the driveway. So down it came shortly after we moved in. I spent the first year in the new house splitting its wood for the insert fireplace that I use to heat now. Excellent! Done! Great exercise, great mental health.

I stopped this past summer because I more or less ran out of wood except for some scrap that I figured I'd get to when the weather cooled. Well, the weather cooled and the foliage that had covered the scraps died off, to reveal . . . another three or four cords of wood unsplit. Turns out I was maybe half done.

So our recent trim up (likely a couple more cords) has been sent to the back of the queue, and yesterday I got to get out there for an hour and pound out another 1/4 cord of the silver maple.

I have enough exercise waiting for me for the next year if I work it right.

Time away from screens is valuable. I put in an audiobook and spend me-time busting wood that makes for a very warm family room, more or less 24/7 now that I work from home.

After a full summer of home and yard projects that featured cutting up a large quantity of deadwood, I didn't have much to do by early November. I was hoping to get back to the gym, but Minnesota's COVID numbers started to spike and continued to get worse, so the gyms were all closed again. I wasn't eating more than usual, but I was definitely getting less exercise. I don't how much weight I gained, but I'm guessing 12 pounds plus moving up a size at the waist.

So I finally prioritized exercise again, starting last week. Due to an unusually warm and dry December, I started running again. I also ordered an inexpensive set of resistance and started using them. It's still a sham compared to my old gym workouts, but I have already made some progress. The governor allowed gyms to re-open on Saturday, but at 25% capacity. So I am staying away for now.

There are 25,000 Nordic Tracks purchased between 1996 and 2018 that are getting their first serious use this winter.

Though it is a blessing to be able to work safely from home (I teach at a university), I feel I've fallen into a very indulgent and unproductive workaholism in which I binge information constantly with nonstop reading and zooming. It makes me feel quite disgusting, to be honest. I feel overstimulated yet at the same time very starved and isolated. I think things would have been quite different if I had a dog or children to keep me in line and force me out of myself. My lovely spouse is a workaholic, so no help there.

Anyway, to get my shit together I've implemented a strict schedule, set by alarms on my phone, that give me clear boundaries from wake up to bedtime, with work, fitness and offline time all tightly scheduled. I am living by command of my programmed phone now. It's terrible that as a middle aged adult I lack the cognitive functioning to do this naturally, but what can you do. Anyway, for such a free spirit, I've settled into a very military lifestyle, so to speak. And I gotta say I feel great. I should probably get some psychoanalysis to figure out why I depend so much on external pressures to keep sane. Until then, my factory home makeover is just the pill I need. I am keeping a calendar going, and checking a box each day I stick to this. I am thinking of it like breaking an addiction, one day at a time.

I lost a low end office job back in March 2020, just before the lockdown. I had already been living with my aging parents due to a recent separation from my wife... I kinda used their health as an excuse not to get out and get a new job for awhile. My dad died (non-covid) back in September. I started seeing someone new around the same time thanks to meeting on a dating app.

I started working for the Post Office as a carrier in April of this year... man, it's rough. I don't know if it's my lack of manual dexterity, my general tendency to overthink things or fear of making mistakes, or what (this was a problem in my low level office job too), but what I'm supposed to be able to do in 9 hours and the regular who normally does the route can do in 5-6, is taking me 12-12.5. There's a hard limit of getting back the outgoing mail before the truck leaves at 6:30 PM for you to adequately perform your job, but within a few weeks I'll be expected to do that stuff in 9 hours regardless. After these 12 hour days I'm completely stressed and wiped and can barely be called upon to socialize or play board games or anything. And my days off are random days like Tuesday (or Thursday), so even now that I'm fully vaccinated I haven't really been able to go and see the people I've missed for so long. Not even sure if I'll be able to get my brother's wedding off on a Sunday in a couple weeks, as we're expected to deliver Amazon and other packages on those days.

I still have to sign up for my insurance, which I need, as I found out that the medication I take for my mental condition (type I bipolar disorder, not ADHD which seems to have a huge cast of supportive folks on Twitter) costs $1.5k/mo without insurance. It keeps me stable, but at times I wonder if there are some unseen side effects or simply the goal of the medication are what's keeping me from being the quick and agile thinker I once was.

Working at the post office has given me renewed appreciation for stuff just magically showing up at your doorstep, but I don't know if I'm cut out for it... but if I'm not, I don't know what I could do. I'm so far off from my economics degree (graduated in 2007) that going back to academia or doing something like consulting are utterly out of the question, but I honestly don't know what I'm well suited to doing. Like I'm good at math, but I'm not the type A organized personality well suited to something like accounting or anything.

It's a bit late to blame other people for my problems, but when I was in those key decision making years of 18-22, I made some poor decisions, all while people told me that I was so smart and so talented that I'd for sure find something and be great at it. And now I feel like even the things I was supposedly good at a) aren't actually important and b) I'm not even good at them anymore.

This was supposed to be about positive changes, heh. I have a new job. It is difficult. I don't know how to make it less so, yet.

I went on my third bike ride in the past two weeks. It's always pouring rain or too hot here but I'm making it work when I can. My goal is to hit every other day more or less. Local rail trail goes 11 miles and eventually I want to make it from one end to other and back again.

Switched to the popular (among strength training nerds) 531 program. I kept stalling out doing an A/B split and trying to progress every workout. 531 is 4x/week, each day is one main lift (squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press). It’s done over a four-week cycle. The first week you do lighter weights but more volume. Week 2 is medium weight, medium volume. Week 3 is heavy weight, low volume; week 4 is light weights, low volume (for recovery). If you hit all your reps then you raise all the weights by 10lbs and start over.

So this week is week 1, light weight, high volume. This morning was a deadlift day. I did (sets x reps x weight):

2 x 5 x 45
1 x 5 x 85
1 x 3 x 130
1 x 2 x 170
1 x 5 x 210
1 x 5 x 245
1 x 8 x 275 (was shooting for 10, bah, but it’s almost a double Barnes)
5 x 10 x 160

We did a gorgeous backpack a month ago as a check to see if we could do a five night backpack... surprisingly, I ended up coming out ok. Which was a big relief because my knee has been a problem for a year and a half. Looks like the PT worked ok... which is a pretty darn positive change in my life! Ironically, my wife got a back injury on the same hike we were originally using to check my knee so we cancelled our five night trip anyway.

ChristopherMD wrote: I went on my third bike ride in the past two weeks. It's always pouring rain or too hot here but I'm making it work when I can. My goal is to hit every other day more or less. Local rail trail goes 11 miles and eventually I want to make it from one end to other and back again.

About a month after starting I biked 17 miles today and just went for a walk so I'm not even tired from it. I've dropped a bunch of pounds too. I think I'm a biker now.

My wife and I are making more solid plans to move to Costa Rica in about two years. It gives her a bit of time to recover from her mastectomy and reconstruction and to visit a time or two. The plan is to rent first and buy....unless we happen across something great in the mountains of the central valley. CR has been putting some very favorable laws in place for 'digital nomads'.

Definite positive changes for the future.

After taking the dark winter off, I'm back on the bicycle. Even bought a new bike just for my semi-daily ride. Partially applying a lesson I've learned from board games; when you get something new you really want to play with it. Helped make sure I was definitely getting going again. Also glad I did because I discovered that my old bike was too big for me. One of those things you don't really notice until you're riding one that fits I guess.

I rode mountain bikes that were slightly too small for years as a young college student, because I was 6'7 and cheap. This invariably led to numb hands, neck pain and other problems. So in grad school I bought a BikeE (now defunct) recumbent and have been riding them for a while. They have an internal hub that required a rim rebuild ($100) which kept me off the bike for a while.

Lately I've been walking the three miles to work, or walking two miles and grabbing the free express bus when I'm feeling lazy. That time by myself in the cold morning air is really nice. There's some low grade stress when riding the bike, because everyone in a car wants to kill you, that I don't feel when walking. The other day I ran like a quarter mile to catch the bus as it sat at the stoplight, something I didn't realize my body was capable of doing. I'm getting a prostate biopsy in a month, which involves needles in sensitive areas,so if my posts here come to a halt you'll know what the results were!