December update
Numbers
And of course I’d like to keep trying to be consistent with resistance training and BJJ.
In the next half a year, that is, by the end of June, I’d like to be back down to 170lbs or so, ideally, having dieted down in May and June after being on a small surplus for the first four months of the year. If I succeed at this, I should be at my lowest body fat level ever as an adult, so that would be cool to experience, good to see how that is.
This next year? I guess if all goes as planned, and I diet down to 170 by the end of June and then spend the rest of the year on a surplus, I guess my hope is that I wouldn’t be above 190 by the end of December? But basically, the hope is just to be much bigger and stronger overall, however much my diet and training will allow for that.
For now, those are the main things I want to continue to focus on, same as before: diet, resistance training, BJJ. I was thinking about whether I wanted to add in another thing, and I’ve decided that the other things on my list from last year are too big to add in at this point. I’d love to start going to a weekly comedy open mic, and at some point in the next few years I believe I will try to do that; but that would be a few extra hours out of the house per week, and a pretty late night, and I don’t think now is the time when I’d be able to add that on top of what I’m already doing in terms of personal goals and family responsibilities. But I did think of something.
Ever since I finished my philosophy MA, a year and a half ago, I haven’t been able to get back into reading nonfiction, with few exceptions. I have learned quite a bit, especially focused on resistance training and BJJ, and I continue to follow the news with interest, filtered through the journalists I’ve found who seem to be most balanced and insightful. But I’d really like to have a more disciplined intellectual life, and I’ve been finding a lack of outlets for that desire, a lack of capacity for it perhaps, and even a lack of the desire itself much of the time, in anything but the most abstract form. But very recently I’ve been playing around with the “Study and Learn” setting on some of my favourite ai chat apps, and I’ve found it very worthwhile. It’s like having a customized, interactive textbook on whatever topic I want to learn about. So maybe this year, to try to rekindle more of that intellectual life of learning and exploring ideas, I will try to spend time regularly engaging with that setting, maybe not daily but say at least a few times a week, and just see where it goes from there. I won’t update on that as much in these blog posts, just to keep them from getting to cluttered, but I might come back on occasion to reflect on how it’s going.
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 future months I’ll feel better about how my learning is coming along. If it is a seasonal winter thing, I could well have a couple more months of struggling through ahead - I know from experience that February tends to be the worst month of the year for me, and January, much as I enjoy my birthday, is often fairly low energy for me as well. But we’ll see.
I hit my weekly goals for resistance training this month, and felt like I got a bit bigger, a bit firmer, in the arms and shoulders and maybe a bit in the back too. I shot for four exercise days a week and actually only hit three, but three is, even if not my main goal, still within the lower end of what I’m shooting for, so that felt okay. Possibly it’s the same low energy December thing I mentioned for BJJ. I did a deload at the end of the month; I felt like especially with the fatigue I was feeling in different parts of my life, it was a very appropriate time for it.
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 future months I’ll feel better about how my learning is coming along. If it is a seasonal winter thing, I could well have a couple more months of struggling through ahead - I know from experience that February tends to be the worst month of the year for me, and January, much as I enjoy my birthday, is often fairly low energy for me as well. But we’ll see.
I hit my weekly goals for resistance training this month, and felt like I got a bit bigger, a bit firmer, in the arms and shoulders and maybe a bit in the back too. I shot for four exercise days a week and actually only hit three, but three is, even if not my main goal, still within the lower end of what I’m shooting for, so that felt okay. Possibly it’s the same low energy December thing I mentioned for BJJ. I did a deload at the end of the month; I felt like especially with the fatigue I was feeling in different parts of my life, it was a very appropriate time for it.
Reflections
So I’m publishing this update about twelve months after starting this blogging-through-my-resolutions project (the first eight were at the other blog that’s no longer live, if you’re confused, so sorry about that). Most of my monthly updates just consider how far I got in the previous one month, but this might be a chance to consider how far I’ve gotten in one year, and to think about whether it will be worth trying this again for 2026.
Short version: I think I’ll keep doing this, as long as I continue finding it helpful. It’s nice to have a periodic taking stock ritual to keep me honest like this, and the possibility of external eyes on it does also help a bit too I think. I’ve made a lot of good progress this year - more progress than any other year of my adult life I think, and also progress to a further point than I’d ever yet attained. I hope I can keep pursuing that this coming year, where the improvements probably won’t be so striking but will nevertheless hopefully still take me still further beyond even what I achieved this past year.
I figured out two extremely valuable things in terms of diet in 2025: one is a sustainable and super healthy weight loss meal plan that works all the way down to 170 at least (no doubt lower too, though I haven’t tried) and includes kale instead of spinach (I invented the basic plan in 2024 but at that time didn’t manage to find a way to make kale palatable so I used spinach with its ultra high oxalate content every day for months on end - so this feels like a real improvement); and the other is a slow weight gain diet (almost identical to the weight loss one, an approach that didn’t occur to me for way too long) that allows me to build muscle without also putting on piles of fat along with it. For resistance training, I learned so many things I can’t list them, but what I ended up with - high volume, long muscle length isometrics designed for convenience - really does feel like playing real life with cheat codes on.
And here’s the pretty amazing thing: I think I’ve passed the threshold where I’m happy with my body composition. That’s not to say that my work is done or that I couldn’t be happier with bigger muscles or lower body fat levels; I do intend to keep working at it and I know I will be pleased if I can get my arms and shoulders bigger, my back more tapered and defined, a bit less jiggle on my lower belly, a bit more vascularity on my upper body, that kind of thing. The journey isn’t over. But it’s amazing that getting from significantly obese and fairly weak to pretty slim and pleasantly muscular happened in only about fifteen months (Sept 2024 to Nov 2025). I don’t think that in my most ambitious and hopeful predictions twelve months ago I’d have thought that I would really be at this point already.
Short version: I think I’ll keep doing this, as long as I continue finding it helpful. It’s nice to have a periodic taking stock ritual to keep me honest like this, and the possibility of external eyes on it does also help a bit too I think. I’ve made a lot of good progress this year - more progress than any other year of my adult life I think, and also progress to a further point than I’d ever yet attained. I hope I can keep pursuing that this coming year, where the improvements probably won’t be so striking but will nevertheless hopefully still take me still further beyond even what I achieved this past year.
I figured out two extremely valuable things in terms of diet in 2025: one is a sustainable and super healthy weight loss meal plan that works all the way down to 170 at least (no doubt lower too, though I haven’t tried) and includes kale instead of spinach (I invented the basic plan in 2024 but at that time didn’t manage to find a way to make kale palatable so I used spinach with its ultra high oxalate content every day for months on end - so this feels like a real improvement); and the other is a slow weight gain diet (almost identical to the weight loss one, an approach that didn’t occur to me for way too long) that allows me to build muscle without also putting on piles of fat along with it. For resistance training, I learned so many things I can’t list them, but what I ended up with - high volume, long muscle length isometrics designed for convenience - really does feel like playing real life with cheat codes on.
And here’s the pretty amazing thing: I think I’ve passed the threshold where I’m happy with my body composition. That’s not to say that my work is done or that I couldn’t be happier with bigger muscles or lower body fat levels; I do intend to keep working at it and I know I will be pleased if I can get my arms and shoulders bigger, my back more tapered and defined, a bit less jiggle on my lower belly, a bit more vascularity on my upper body, that kind of thing. The journey isn’t over. But it’s amazing that getting from significantly obese and fairly weak to pretty slim and pleasantly muscular happened in only about fifteen months (Sept 2024 to Nov 2025). I don’t think that in my most ambitious and hopeful predictions twelve months ago I’d have thought that I would really be at this point already.
Here’s something I was thinking about that I want to remember in a few months. When I do my next fat loss phase, around May, I want to keep taking creatine all the way through. I’ve found a way to make it an easy part of my routine rather than a tedious extra thing to remember: I already have a morning mocha that I make for myself that is coffee (usually decaf) with natural cocoa and ground cardamom, and now I just add a scoop of creatine to that and then I don’t have to worry about it for the rest of the day. And when I am losing weight, I generally plan not to go much lower than 170. If I use creatine, then that might mean getting down to the same number on the scale will involve losing an extra few pounds of fat, not to mention that it might well make at least a small difference in terms of retaining or even gaining muscle during the deficit. Previously I didn’t do creatine during the weight loss because I wanted to spare myself the hassle of an extra thing to worry about and I wanted to get down to the goal number as quickly as I could, but the way I look at both of those justifications has now shifted and I’m really looking forward to losing a bit of extra fat and keeping slightly fuller looking muscles in the process.
Predictions
This next month, I’d like to aim to end the month somewhere in the range between 183 and 185 lbs. I should say - I also have been considering for months the idea of doing a minicut in January. I haven’t decided on that, but the way I’m currently feeling it does seem like a possibility. If so it’ll be something spontaneous. I’ll tell you about it next month.And of course I’d like to keep trying to be consistent with resistance training and BJJ.
In the next half a year, that is, by the end of June, I’d like to be back down to 170lbs or so, ideally, having dieted down in May and June after being on a small surplus for the first four months of the year. If I succeed at this, I should be at my lowest body fat level ever as an adult, so that would be cool to experience, good to see how that is.
This next year? I guess if all goes as planned, and I diet down to 170 by the end of June and then spend the rest of the year on a surplus, I guess my hope is that I wouldn’t be above 190 by the end of December? But basically, the hope is just to be much bigger and stronger overall, however much my diet and training will allow for that.
For now, those are the main things I want to continue to focus on, same as before: diet, resistance training, BJJ. I was thinking about whether I wanted to add in another thing, and I’ve decided that the other things on my list from last year are too big to add in at this point. I’d love to start going to a weekly comedy open mic, and at some point in the next few years I believe I will try to do that; but that would be a few extra hours out of the house per week, and a pretty late night, and I don’t think now is the time when I’d be able to add that on top of what I’m already doing in terms of personal goals and family responsibilities. But I did think of something.
Ever since I finished my philosophy MA, a year and a half ago, I haven’t been able to get back into reading nonfiction, with few exceptions. I have learned quite a bit, especially focused on resistance training and BJJ, and I continue to follow the news with interest, filtered through the journalists I’ve found who seem to be most balanced and insightful. But I’d really like to have a more disciplined intellectual life, and I’ve been finding a lack of outlets for that desire, a lack of capacity for it perhaps, and even a lack of the desire itself much of the time, in anything but the most abstract form. But very recently I’ve been playing around with the “Study and Learn” setting on some of my favourite ai chat apps, and I’ve found it very worthwhile. It’s like having a customized, interactive textbook on whatever topic I want to learn about. So maybe this year, to try to rekindle more of that intellectual life of learning and exploring ideas, I will try to spend time regularly engaging with that setting, maybe not daily but say at least a few times a week, and just see where it goes from there. I won’t update on that as much in these blog posts, just to keep them from getting to cluttered, but I might come back on occasion to reflect on how it’s going.
Comments
Post a Comment