Eyeing the world

 My experience so far has been that as a beginner, you simply get screwed over. Maybe not even intentionally. You might come across people who have been training for months or years, and you immediately start to compare yourself to them. Well, at least I did. The first time I saw photos of a girl who runs a running tumblr, I immediately registered that she was still heavier than me, and my first thought was "aha, so I can run better than her then"; and I couldn't have been more wrong. I did not learn from this experience at the ripe age of fourteen, but decided to look at other fitblrs, and ended up somehow finding the Insanity program. We all know my most recent experience with it, I lost 20 entire kilograms of weight and gained 2 kilograms of muscle doing it. But I also mentioned my first experiences, which were total disappointments to me. Hell, the workouts warn you that if you acquired them in any other way but the official Beachbody site, they aren't going to be...

Can you imagine how excited I was to see this movie? I loved most of the superhero films, starting from Batman (well, technically, I only liked The Dark Knight, but I watched the entire trilogy because I thought I'd appreciate all of it together). And I really, really enjoyed Wonder Woman, and how I could actually see her be a person in all the action - something that not many characters get. If you are doing an origin story, you will need to put the character's personality into it, but for "classical" action, where you just turn your brain off, it isn't really required. I didn't really enjoy Captain Marvel, though, and I'm sure it wasn't because the main character was a woman. I just felt like I couldn't connect with her the same way I could, for example, with Iron Man, who's basically the least similar person to me. I believe that was because of writing. I have seen many arguments saying that her movie is actually good precisely because it...

 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. ...