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March update

Numbers Started the month at 178, shooting for 174. Ended the month at 174! BJJ, musculation: weekly consistency, as intended. Reflections Weight loss is definitely slowing down at this level of body fat but does still seem to be happening. I want to get down nice and low and try to stay there for a while, but I’m not in any terrible hurry to arrive. My leanness, muscularity, and BJJ practice are starting to become pretty automatic, background processes that don’t take as much focus and energy. That’s what I’ve been shooting for for a while. I still want to keep track of them here, but I think I’m finally getting to the point where I can start deliberately layering other things on top of them when I want to. I forgot to give an update on my AI learning habit last month, but it has been going really well. I feel like I have learned so much, so much about politics and law and especially economics. I’m not being as disciplined about this, but I’m easily hitting my goal of having an inform...
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February update

Numbers Started the month at 181.5 lbs, hoping to see 177 by the end of February. For the first two weeks I continued to hover around 180-182, and it wasn’t until the last part of the month that I dipped below 180 at last, but I did reach 178 by the time the month ended. Weekly BJJ, going well. Weekly resistance training - making progress! More on that below. Reflections Aiming to lose a pound a week this month felt like a reasonable goal, but it was actually surprisingly difficult. Still, I’m happy with how it’s going. I’m losing at a very reasonable rate, and I’m not in any hurry. (See my strategy update below.) Already, at 178, I’m barely overweight by BMI (and according to waist circumference, I’m already in the ideal range). Losing slowly is supposed to be better for muscles and hormones. So I’ll keep aiming for this range until I reach the weight I don’t want to go lower than (whatever that turns out to be this time). I used to aim to lose like ten pounds a month, but I think at ...
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January update

Numbers Started the month at 182.5. Ended it at about 181.5lbs. I was trying to lose weight this month but didn’t find as much success as I expected. I went to the gym every week this month, and did my resistance training every week, though I kept resistance training lighter, since I was (at least intending to be) fueling my body with fewer calories this month and didn’t want to push myself too hard, just enough to maintain muscle mass basically. I was very successful with my idea of trying to educate myself via ai. I put together, over the course of the month, a list of three dozen or so areas of governance that I want to learn more about, and I’ve made pretty good progress on about a dozen so far, which is pretty exciting. Reflections So I went into the month planning for it to be another slow bulk month, but it didn’t take me long to make it a fat loss month instead. There were two main reasons for this. The main one, actually, was fatigue. My muscles were tired - or rather, my nerv...
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December update

Numbers Started the year at 189lbs, having already lost almost 80 pounds in the previous four months, dreaming (without much optimism) of getting down to 173 or lower before I stopped losing weight; I reached that goal twice this year, with my lowest weight of the year being about 171. Started the month at 180, aiming for 181-182 at the end of the month, and then ended the month at 182.5. I blame Christmas. :) I wasn’t doing any BJJ at the start of the year; I began doing weekly classes in July, and now have a full half a year under my belt. This month I missed one week because I hurt my back shoveling snow - and the following week I found out that half the gym came down with some awful illness while I was gone, so although I had been feeling bad about missing a week, I felt a fair bit better about it after that. Even the classes I managed to attend this month didn’t feel great; I don’t know if December is just a month where I have less energy or what was going on, but hopefully in fut...
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November update

Numbers Started the month at 179lbs, aiming to end the month at 180 or 181, maybe 182. I ended the month at 180! Not bad. That feels like a huge success for my approach to this slow bulk. (My big goal, to reiterate, was to put on weight without gaining too quickly - which seems to be succeeding so far.) Hopefully over the next five months I can put on a decent amount of muscle and minimal fat; then in my next fat loss phase I can aim to get down to lower levels of body fat that I haven’t seen before. That would be pretty cool. The first week of the month I didn’t reach quite the volume of resistance training I was shooting for, since I ended up getting my flu and Covid shots a day earlier than anticipated (I was scheduled for Thursday, but when I brought my family for their shots on Wednesday the nurse said they’d just do mine at the same time), and it took my body a few days to recover fully and be less sore and achy, but I still got a decent effort in (more like fifteen sets per priv...
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October update

Numbers I started the month at 171lbs, planning to gain, hoping not to go higher than 181 this month; this was a rough guess, based on my estimation of how much weight I’d gain from glycogen and water and gut contents, plus how much I figured creatine would add to my weight, plus how much I was hoping to gain in terms of actual tissue (muscle preferably and probably a bit of fat too). So I’d have been okay with ending up a bit higher or a bit lower for this month. I ended up at 179. I’m very happy with that. I don’t know how much was incidental weight and how much was actual tissue (muscle or fat) gained, but it was close enough to my target that I’m happy with it. What makes me even happier is that it appears that in the second half of the month, I put on one pound, which is exactly the pace I am hoping for during this surplus. I did all my planned weekly resistance training schedules (with one of them being a planned deload week, where I did exercise but a fair bit less than normal)....
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September update

Numbers Started the month at 178 lbs. Aimed to end the month somewhere between 173 and 178. For resistance training and BJJ, the goal was just to keep up the weekly habit. How did it go? The weight loss was very successful. I got all the way down to 171 (a new record - my lowest weight ever as an adult!). I did BJJ every week, and I did resistance training every week of the month except one - there was a week where I was fighting off a cold when my joints were feeling extremely achy and sensitive and I decided to take the week off. Reflections I lost considerably more than I really thought I would this month, and what makes it even cooler is that I tried (pretty successfully too!) to be at maintenance calories for a couple weeks in the middle of the month on account of a stubborn cold that I was trying to fight off. A calorie deficit weakens the immune system from what I hear, so I tried upping the intake for a bit and during those weeks didn’t see any weight loss but I did manage to h...
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