Starting the Gym Arc

August 21, 2025

I’ve finally done it. I’ve started taking care of my body.

This might come as a shock to those who really know me. I don’t move often. In fact, many would say I’m quite bad at moving. But, the time has finally come for me to begin moving.

In all seriousness, treating my body with more respect has been something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. For basically my entire life, I’ve lived pretty unhealthily. I love food, healthy and unhealthy, but you can probably say that I’m a bit biased towards the latter. The portion sizes I go for are also most likely not the wisest… but I can avoid some of the responsibility of that and place it on the country I live in instead. Those that are not living under a rock should be able to infer what God-fearing country I reside in from that.

As a result, I’ve achieved a less-than-lean body. Around 2018, I made some effort to work that weight down, but pretty much exclusively through controlling my diet rather than implementing any sort of exercise. If you know anything about dieting or weight loss, you probably know that, technically, that is enough to lose weight. Losing weight is simply a matter of eating less than you burn.

My attempt at weight loss in 2018 actually worked quite well. I remember at the time I was surprised, but in retrospect, it shouldn’t have been very shocking. I ate less than I burned, so I lost weight. I was able to work myself down into the “normal” BMI range and was pretty satisfied with how I looked. Nice!

I hope I’m able to maintain this!

2020: The Fattening

Bad news, 2020 arrives, and with it, a pandemic. Everyone is forced indoors and there we stayed for a very, very long time. Of course, as time progressed, we were let out more and more, but it’s safe to say that life at that time was very far from normal. As an unemployed loser, though, not much changed for me. Unfortunately, it also turned out that the small amount that had changed was enough for me to start packing on the pounds again. I basically just stopped tracking my eating at all, and with the amount of “experimental cooking” my family and I had started doing in order to kill time, the weight came back on in no time. In basically no time at all, I had made my way back to 186 pounds, the weight that I naturally maintain if I don’t pay attention to my eating.

Damn. That sucks. Hopefully I can get it together once life gets back to normal.

2021-2023: The Dark Ages

Nothing happened during this period. I got a job, life continued, and things slowly returned to normal. Except for my weight. Instead of being an unemployed loser, I was just a fat loser instead.

2025: Locking In

Technically this should include some of 2024, but I got a different job. A job that requires significantly less physical labor and significantly more sitting down and staring at a screen. Of course, it also came with a lot more money. Great! I’m now a fat loser with money.

After spending some time with positive influences, I decided that I should use the money to utilize resources that could better my health. That started with me initially trying to just control my diet again to lose my weight. Starting with a pretty intense deficit, I ended up slimming down almost 10 pounds in a little over a month. Awesome! A part of me, however, craved more. I suddenly didn’t just want to lose weight… I wanted to… be healthier…?

No, I’m still pretty vain, actually. I wanted to be stronger and put on muscle so that I could look hotter. And that’s where we’re at now!

Okay there’s a little more… Not that much more, but I wanna yap a bit more about what I’m doing.

What I’m doing

Eating

Diet is, of course, still a big part of this. I’ve set my deficit to something a lot gentler since I realized there’s not really anything I need to be in a rush for. The goal is for this to be a life-long thing, so for the time being, I’ve set my rate to be about 0.5 lbs per week.

As for protein, I’m aiming to eat 140g every day. So far it’s going alright, but it’s pretty eye-opening seeing how difficult it is to actually hit that number. It requires being a lot more thoughtful when deciding what to eat, and it’s pushed me to cook a lot more of my own meals instead of going for the easy path of ordering food out (something I indulged in way too much before).

Other than that, I’m not placing any major restrictions on my eating. No weird diets, no banning myself from unhealthy food. I really don’t like those because I very much enjoy my relationship with food. It really is a significant source of happiness in my life, and restricting that would just make me more miserable. For that reason, I decide to focus on balance and moderation. It allows me to still indulge at times, but still maintain a generally healthy diet.

Exercise

As previously mentioned, I don’t move much! Or at least, I didn’t move much. Things are changing fast, guys. Sorry.

I’m moving now! Cardio and weights. Awesome! I go to the gym pretty much every day now, alternating between a rest day and lifting day. Rest days I pretty much just walk on the treadmill at an incline and speed high and fast enough to get my heart pumping while I watch something. It’s actually pretty nice because it’s forcing me to get through some of my backlog, like Blue Box and Uma Musume S1 (lol).

Weights have been pretty simple so far. I’m following a full body program and am just trying to follow it while ramping up the weight as I continue. I just started though and have only done about 11 workouts, so I don’t have much to say here. I’ll keep you guys posted though. Maybe.