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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2611 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 17, 2024

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New Years resolutions updates- we're a little over a quarter of the way through the year, how is everyone doing?

For myself, I have meaningfully reduced my intake of restaurant food in general by better planning/meal prep and an increased willingness to eat leftovers. This is cheaper but I haven't actually seen any health benefits; I'm not sure if this is because my health was already pretty good or because I need to do something or other else, maybe exercise.

Same resolution as every year - "more HEMA".

So far this year I made it to one mock tournament to fight, one real tournament to watch and help out a little, and zero training sessions. It's better than nothing, but still abysmal. Having been sick for over a month helped little, of course, but who cares about excuses. I did get a ticket for a big weekend event later this spring, and that one was always pretty great in the past. I hope it still holds up, now that I missed it for several years. It also contains a tournament that I'm signed up for, and that one will probably have better fencers from a wider area than the ones I made it to lately, so I expect to - pardon my Swabian - get my ass handed to me, given the absolute shit state I'm in. Still, I need to make it to regular practice/sparring somehow. Sparring, preferably. But all other obstacles nonwithstanding, all HEMA clubs nearby start at something like 20:00, and none is closer than an hour by car, and damn I hate nighttime driving ever since all the cars in the world decided that the only way to be safe was to blind everyone else.

Going okay but currently hampered by my lack of adequate tools and workspace. Slow but steady progress.

I've failed to make any progress on my fitness goals due to lack of gym attendance, but I've got a good enough baseline that this just means I'm continuing to slowly lose weight. Since I hit 1/2/3/4 in 2022 my lifting motivation has gone down a lot but I haven't found anything to replace it with.

Reading sort of, I've read a lot of books but they're not the history/philosophy ones I marked out as wanting to cover. My main excuse is that some of the latter are 1000 pages and it's taking a while to get through them.

Learning French I'm not sure, I feel like I'm making progress but random encounters with French speakers remind me of how bad it is.

I was doing ok on the book every two weeks, but picking up Tolstoy again means I'm running behind, but it'll be beach read season in another month and I'll catch back up that way.

I'm on track with the running and rowing goals.

My weight goals are running ahead of schedule, which is unexpected but good, though I suspect that the next five pounds will be tougher than the first eight. I was 207 and change the day before lent, I'm currently 200 on the button (weighing in the morning after toilet and before coffee). The goal was to average weigh in under 195 for a week straight with no illness or other unusual extenuating circumstances. I'm hoping to get to 197-198, then pause and reassess some lifting goals to make sure I'm not losing more strength than I'm comfortable with before continuing.

Lent itself is going great. I think my pick was too easy.

  1. Make 52 unique burgers - On track with 12 so far. No surprise, I like burgers. My favorite so far was the Oklahoma onion burger. My wife like the grilled poblano, bacon, and ranch burger best. The best patties so far were short-rib patties from a good local source.

  2. Play board games 52 times - I stopped tracking the number because we play so often that it didn't seem like it would be close. I could go back and count by looking at scoresheets, but I probably won't. Adding Brass: Birmingham has been great, although it definitely does fry the brain to do a full playthrough.

  3. Read 52 books - Not gonna happen. I just don't like reading books enough to knock this out. Better to acknowledge that and read when it strikes me than keep trying to be book-guy.

Running was about goals rather than resolutions, but it's been a mixed bag. January was my highest mileage month ever and I ran 5K and 5-mile personal bests. Unfortunately, I injured my calf and peroneal tendon in the week after the 5-mile race by overdoing it (ran 17 miles the day after the race, ran a 3x3K LT workout on Tuesday, then 14 miles on Wednesday, and it was just too much for me to handle) and have been slowly rehabbing that and working back to 100%. On the bright side, last week was back up over 50 miles and also included a couple good bike efforts on Zwift, so I'm feeling pretty on track even if I'm not where I wanted to be at this point.

Read 52 books - Not gonna happen. I just don't like reading books enough to knock this out. Better to acknowledge that and read when it strikes me than keep trying to be book-guy.

52 is a lot either way, but if you don't care about what books you read I've found you can definitely hit the 1 a week pace with audiobooks (I work with my hands so don't lose anything focusing on something else). Doesn't really work with dense nonfiction but old sci-fi/fantasy books are an easy listen.

For the 10th year running I've kept all three of my resolutions-

  1. Don't die
  2. Don't go to jail
  3. Don't walk on the moon

I fully expect to keep them again this year, or be in such a state as to not care if I didor not

From personal experience, going to jail for a very brief period was useful in confirming my edgy teen high school suspicions- "This place is bullshit, I bet jail is literally better than this."- jail was substantially better than a similar amount of time in high school. If you don't start shit with anyone and are vaguely polite to guards (don't be an ass kisser or snitch though), you can spend your time lying down on a shitty mat, read {Bible} or other provided material and just kinda chill.

P.S. Cumulative Uber/Lyft/Taxis over decades are almost certainly cheaper and easier to deal with than any given best-case first-time-offense DUI deferral/diversion program and eventual expungement. If you must be arrested, preferably do something cool or brave or sexy with near zero chance of harming innocents instead of something lame and stupid.

76 Days sober.

Jan 1 - present.

I didn't have a rock bottom moment or full on dependency, but I was undoubtedly drinking far too much and for not good reasons. My estimate is somewhere just north of 1,000 drinks for 2023.

Expected: Energy, mood, discipline, mental health all far,far better. Everyone says this and it is true.

Unexpected: Quitting was easier than I thought. After day 10, I felt genuinely confident I could maintain sobriety. After day 20, I started to feel proud. After day 30, I actively started thinking about how much it would suck to relapse. After day 50 .... I just don't think about drinking anymore. I've been to dinners, bars, and hangouts with friends where everyone else was drinking and have had to turn down offers multiple times in one night. It just hasn't been hard. This was very unexpected.

There have been zero downsides. Social life hasn't suffered. A (minor) additional unexpected - the number of people who genuinely give you a "Good for you" style response and mean it. Some of these people, I think, may be struggling themselves.

I keep hearing about how great everyone feels after quitting drinking, and I kind of feel bad that I don't have a way to get that kind of improvement. For me, not being in a constant state of low-grade chronic alcohol poisoning is just normal, so I don't really appreciate it.

I don’t know. Like @Walterodim below actual hangovers suck but I can’t tell the difference between a day I had a couple beers in the prior afternoon and one I didn’t. I’ve also been off alcohol for extended periods and couldn’t tell the difference, so it’s not a two week detox or whatever.

If it's any consolation I quit drinking for almost a year and didn't really feel any better at all except in one way: much better sleep.

I still don't really know what other people are experiencing when they say they feel so much better without alcohol. Sure, an actual hangover is pretty unpleasant, but I cannot tell the difference between a Monday where I had three beers watching football in the afternoon and a Tuesday where I had nothing to drink the day before. I also have a decent amount of health and performance metrics - resting heart rate, HTV, stress level, sleep score, and running/cycling data. Alcohol causes a noticeable, but transient increase in heart rate and stress level. If I drink too close to bed, it disrupts sleep. But moderation and avoiding late-night beverages results in no measurable or felt short-run differences.

A couple of theories for why I didn't see benefits from not drinking.

  1. Drinking lots of water mitigates the negative effects of alcohol.

  2. Something like half the people in America are diabetic or pre-diabetic. Many also have non-alcoholic fatty liver syndrome. Adding alcohol and sugar to the diet might be particularly dangerous for this group. But I'm decently fit and my liver function is good.

I mean, at some point you can't just keep feeling better with life adjustments. There are totally sober, in shape people with zero financial worries who are depressed.

Nevertheless, the best, longest lasting, and simplest ways to level up (in ascending order):

  1. Exercise. Start doing something you like (rock climbing, pickleball, softball (non beer league), whatever...) to build the habit. Then, use that habit to move to something maybe a little less intrinsically enjoyable, but more challenging (traditional weight lifting, etc.)

  2. Diet. This doesn't mean diet as in "losing weight" but just being intentional about what you eat. Generally, people in developed countries eat crap most of the time or have very unstable eating patterns (binge to semi-starve cycles. For instance, "girl dinner" meme). You can really improve energy consistency and mood stability by building your own diet through experimentation. You find out what you're more sensitive to in the carbs/protein/fat breakdown and how different type of hunger hit you (yes, there are different types of hunger impulses). The only prescriptive advice I'll offer is that refined sugar seriously is the Devil.

  3. Sleep. Simple to design and plan for, hard as hell to execute. There's no way around it; create and stick to a consistent sleep schedule. Some people need 6,7,8,9. Most people don't need more, everyone suffers with 5 or less over a long period of time. Polyphasic has always fascinated me and I'd love to commit to it, but I don't have that ability with current career. Sleep disruptors are as bad as sugars - put your phone in another room, no screentime at least 30 min before bed, don't drink.

  4. Social life that isn't stressful or require management. One of the most "holy shit" things I've seen in the past few years as my friends have started to move into middle marriage (first kids, heading towards mid 30s and 40s) is how often one or other of the spouses will start to turn into a Professional Social Lifer. Calendars booked months in advance, complex logistical scenarios for transportation to and from, several different apps used to build invites, procure gifts, create agendas, fucking prepared outfits for the other spouse. It is all, ostensibly, just "hanging out with friends" but it's really about creating the Instagram representation of career/family/social-ness to present to others. It's already obvious that in many cases, these kind of couples are heading to divorce. Anyways, what you want to do is develop a core group of friends that's always down for a casual hangout. Forgive the term, but you want a group of drinking buddies. On top of that, add in some activity specific groups - gym buddies, hiking buddies, car repair buddies ... whatever you choose. Then, you can be sort of opportunistic for making new friends through these groups plus your career. If you have a spouse, you've just squared (I.e. to the power of 2'ed) your options.

  5. Find and cultivate perfect self-actualization. Instructions unclear on this one, I'm sitting beneath trees and walking through deserts working on it, though.

we're a little over a quarter of the way through the year

I scoffed internally on reading this but damn.

I quit sugar (read: anything tasting sweet) about a month ago. I have had one or two lapses but generally I skip sugary snacks that previously I would have indulged without thinking (chocolate croissant with coffee is now just coffee, ice cream after dinner with my sons is now a glass of water or cup of some herbal tea thing we have from someone). I, too, have noticed little difference except possibly more energy in mid-day. But I'm on a fitness kick and trying to curate more carefully what I eat for metabolic health. Doc appt end of the month will see where I'm at.

Also recently I put chia seeds in things and on things, and have discovered I like blueberries.

The cutting back in restaurants must help with the wallet, even if you don't feel differently.

I scoffed internally on reading this but damn.

I mean the average New Year’s resolution Peters out in what, February?

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