Updated December 2023
Starting in 2021, and certainly throughout 2022, my physical body went through noticeable change. I was gaining weight – for the first time in my adult life. It continued until I had gained about 20lbs beyond my typical weight.
At first I thought it was just a result of my current age. And then I believed that it was caused by a great deal of stress at work. But the biggest misconception was that there was nothing I could do about it...I was wrong.
Right at the end of July 2023, my partner announced that she was going on Weight Watchers. "I want to do that too!," I declared and we started the journey together. In about 10 weeks, I was back to my 'fighting weight.' And I've had a lot of fun during the process. I've truly enjoyed tracking foods, finding recipes, and seeing the wins on the scale. Honestly, I thought that having to "give up" any kind of food was going to be difficult. But, honestly, there's a kind of freedom that comes from fewer choices – it makes choosing easier!
As I started to reclaim my health, I felt inspired to exercise more (which gives more 'activity points' under the Weight Watchers system, which opens up even more food options). I've been running about three times a week since the beginning of 2022. That has increased to five times a week: three to four 5K's during the week and a 10K on the weekend.
Starting in October 2023, a long standing goal to become stronger and more muscular naturally slid into these physical improvements. When I first started Weight Watchers, I used ChatGPT to generate exercises for strength training and weight-loss based the exercise equipment I had at home. Once I hit my goal weight, I transitioned over to just strength training. That's when I learned about Push/Pull splits. These are weight training exercises that focus on Push exercises (push-ups, chest presses, should presses, etc...) for one day and then Pull exercises (rows, pull-ups, curls, etc...) another day. Right now I do a Push day on Tuesdays, a Pull day on Thursdays, and then a Core day on Sundays. My goal is to get to a point where I do Push on Day 1, Pull Day 2, Core and some Leg on Day 3, Rest on ay 4 and repeat.
I'm absolutely seeing the changes in my body and am having fun at watching the transformation.
I've decided to turn this into an article. Check it out at aciern.ooo/ct.
Inspired by Derek Sivers and his incredible instructions, I embarked on the great journey of tech independence. This is a process and philosophy of owning your data and ensuring you have root access to the servers involved. I set up a web server - which is hosting this very site - email, calendar, database, and encrypted mass storage.
In fact, I've enjoyed this experience so much, that I've successfully ported my business website off of Squarespace to my custom web server.
The latest addition to my Tech Independence and coding skills involved building a commenting system (using PHP and PostgreSQL) that's now available on all of my articles and my Inspiration page.
There have been lots of books, movies, people, and experiences that have inspired me in many different ways. I've begun curating these all together on one place: Inspiration
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