Eyeing the world

 I decided to write this to you. It's me, from the future, and I wish I could be by your side to tell you all this when you need to hear it. I know you've struggled a lot and it seems like there is no way out, but trust me: there is. I'm not yet on top of the hill you need to climb, but I'm through that initial shrubbery that was cutting you all over, and I've found some really tasty berries to eat and a stream of water to drink from. The view is also incredible. I wish I could hold your hand on the way here, but I'm going to continue just as you did, completely on my own. I want to tell you how utterly proud I am of you for undertaking this journey. You saw the hill, and you've tried before, and you were so close to giving up forever, so thank you, from the bottom of our heart, that you didn't. You made this happen - which means you can make so much more happen, too. There are very few people that understand us. So many admire the climb, but are scared ...

 Disclaimer: at time of writing, I'm quite far away from my goal weight, but it doesn't really matter to me. The same way I lost 10 kilos, I'll lose any amount. I had a brief relaxing period between my two Insanity challenges, with the express purpose of testing how I'll be able to maintain my weight (and, well, I was foreseeing that my body would be totally exhausted after the first one, so I wanted to give myself a bit of time to recover, to get over soreness or any other pain), and I did fucking great. On the day of my first weigh in, I weighed the same as on the day of my last fit test, so that's amazing. It gives me a bit of hope for when I'll be 60 kilos, and will want to maintain that. Now, I won't want to be counting calories even then. I want to continue this lifestyle of "I eat whatever I want and I train because it makes me feel good", but I'm not sure how I'll be doing that. So I did what everyone would do, which is: a google se...

 The other day, my mother attended a seminar with this exact title. It was supposed to be related to her inner life and issues, but I really took offense with that presentation. Of course, she couldn't watch the entire thing, so I'm just gonna criticise my understanding of its first half: the half about self pity. The presenter started talking about how people who pity themselves get trapped in a cycle of negative feelings; how they complain a lot, and by complaining, they emphasize their own bad situation even more. They aren't interested in help, or helping themselves, instead, they actively try to feel worse. At this point, I basically blew up. The presenter was a theologian and a "mental hygiene specialist", but not a psychologist, or, dare I say, a psychiatrist. I could remember my depressive episode way too well. It wasn't about me not wanting to get out: I genuinely felt like there was no way out. I was too fat to train, I was too sad to work, too poor ...

 I'm trying to make a vlog of the experience. I just loaded all the not-workout recordings into my editing software, and I have 4 and a half hours of footage. Pray for me. I'm not even entirely sure of the story I want to be telling. After all, it would come off as an ad for people to do Insanity, which I don't intend it as. I don't want people to get the impression that this program will melt ten kilos off of them in two months. I don't want to make it look any less challenging than it was, or any less fun, or any less painful. There were weeks where I was sore, periods when I was training with a knee brace, and moreover, this is just the start of it all. I'm gonna do the program again, for two reasons: one of them is I'm hoping to lose another ten kilos with it, but the other is to see if I even would. I think I should emphasize its effects on my mental health more - for that it would help if I'd actually been diagnosed with depression. I did write an ...

 I don't know what I could tell anyone about discipline that they wouldn't find out from an influencer or some inspirational quote. Or maybe I do? Maybe. I don't believe in discipline. I don't believe in self-control. We aren't "in control" of things at least 80% of the time. Discipline might get you out of bed for a week, but to actually do it long enough to form a habit (in theory, 21 days) or an entire lifestyle (apparently 90 days), you won't be able to rely on it. Discipline lasts you a day, maximum, but in my experience, about an hour. I don't think we're able to "suck it up" for days, but maybe it is my brain being different from everyone else's. So, how do I wake up at 5 am and train? People do tell me that I sound so disciplined, that it's almost as if I were in the military. And what gets me to wake up? Is it David Goggins? No shade, but no. No amount of inspirational speech can get between me and my love for sleep. ...

 I didn't want to call this one Drama 3, since the actual interaction went just fine. I have hypothyroidism, and half of it was removed when I was 14. I've been taking hormones since. This monday I went to an endocrinologist, to get results, a prescription and... dunno, a shoulder to cry on. She did look at my results, said they were okay and that I should keep my current dosage, which I will definitely will do, and was glad to hear. Then she asked if I had any problems at all - yes, this turned into a discussion about periods. So now I have an appointment with a gynecologist, and will have to do blood tests too. We did talk a little about my weight - first she only asked if there had been any changes to my weight in the past year. I told her I gained 25 kilos in 2020 and was now trying to lose that. I had lost 10 kilos in the past two months. We carried on for a while, but then returned to this and she said she'd calculate my BMI. I said it would be around 38. She asked me...

 I am honestly beyond shocked with what has happened to me so far. Yes, I did go into this with the expectation to actually get down to 100 kg by the end of it, which would be around 2kgs a week lost, and I still feel attached to that outcome, but much, much less. I can definitely feel that my mental health is better, it is like I'm a new person now. I hear my coworkers complaining and my brain goes "couldn't be me". But then, at the same time, it says "remember when this was, indeed, us?" and of course I remember. I do feel like exercise is the thing that's keeping me out of that horrible rut I'd fallen into in 2020. So, now, as I'm at the end of my first Insanity cycle (one week left!!), let's sum up what expectations I had and didn't have, and how I did on them so far! I actually put all the things into an Excel sheet, thinking it'd be really helpful for me to track. And boy, am I tracking! I'm tracking my weight daily, the wee...