Day 204: The Quarantine Fifteen
Today’s post has nothing to do with being an indie maker.
For the last several months, I’ve periodically mentioned how I’ll go through periods where my sleep cycle gets wrecked and my eating habits follow suit.
Two days ago, I had a little moment of truth when I remembered that Cathy brought her scale from her SF apartment and I asked her if I could use it.
For context, my weight has been unbelievably stable since I left college — it’s pretty much stayed between 140 and 145 pounds for the past six years after I shed some weight in 2014 (Yes, I have a spreadsheet of my body measurements going all the way back to 2013, although I haven’t been very consistent with it.)
I knew that I’d gained some weight over the last several months that I’ve been in Santa Cruz, but I didn’t really know how much. Since there aren’t many occasions for photos and videos these days, I don’t really have a sense of what my body looks like from a third-person perspective. I was actually quite surprised when I saw the video that Stedman took of me for my birthday surprise — I was way bulkier than I’d imagined.
Okay, back to the scale. So I did the little dance where you press your foot, wait for the scale to turn on, and then step on. And the result?
160 pounds.
Since the very first entry in my body measurements spreadsheet from June 2013, there hasn’t been a single entry where I weighed 160 pounds or above. In other words, this is the heaviest I’ve been my entire life.
Alright, so that was a bit of a wake up call. Now, I’m not terribly attached to my appearance (the fact that I was cutting my own hair back in 2017 and occasionally shaving it before COVID should tell you as much), but I definitely am not trying to turn into a lilxkrnxfatty (this was my AIM username in junior high because I was lil, Korean, and quite chubs).
I have been working out over these past several months and gotten much stronger (can do one-handed push-ups again yeeeee), but I’ve also put on a lot of fat. If I had to guess, I’m probably at the upper end of 20-25%? By inhaling snacks all day every day for weeks on end while sitting at my desk coding (okay, this makes sense now), I’ve accidentally engaged in the dirtiest bulk of my life.
So here’s the plan. I’m going to start with two changes:
- Limit eating between 12pm and 8pm
- No more sweets
Intermittent fasting
I first got into intermittent fasting in college and spent way too many hours reading about glycogen stores, insulin levels, and fat storage. This time, I’m doing intermittent fasting mostly for the psychological benefit. By committing to eating within a certain window, I’ll be much less likely to engage in late-night one-man snacking parties where I see how much I can eat before I find myself drowning in a sea of regret.
Today was the second day of the fasting routine, and I experienced something for the first time in a loooong while: not acting on hunger. I’ve gotten so used to eating whenever hunger struck (or more accurately, eating so frequently so that hunger would never really arise) that having hunger appear and not doing anything about it was a novel experience.
No sweets
Once I eat something sweet, I start craving more sweets and end up binging. Better to avoid it entirely.
I also considered introducing other things that I’ve done in the past to lose weight (counting calories though My Fitness Pal and making sure I’m 300-500 calories below my TDEE of 2200, more cardio), but I’m going to start small to make sure I actually stick with this rather than go radical for a few days and then dropping everything.
Since I’m obviously very into tracking things, I’m planning to take progress pictures because it’s fun to do and see how the body changes from small changes performed over a long period of time. Might post them here because it’s my journal after all, but I’m also not trying to subject people to pictures of me when they’re just trying to learn more about indie hacking so I’ll probably put it underneath a toggle with a content warning: SHIRTLESS BIGXKRNXFATTY HERE