When I was at my lowest and totally hopeless, I decided to say fuck it. I'm not going to try to control anything. I don't want to be better. What happened next is exactly what I thought would happen. Things got worse. I got fatter, unhappy, depressed and was stuck. Turns out, that is exactly what I needed. To hit bedrock. My first thought was, I need to get help. Also, that I might not be able to do all of it alone. This was a start, the first step. Nothing changed, but everything changed. Which is code for, I changed. Turns out the world stays the same, it's you who changes. At the same time, I realized through getting help that not everything about me was crazy. There were a few things I needed to look at differently. Just to clarify, by help I mean clinical help. Slowly I started looking at things differently. The biggest change was that I had always been focusing on reducing the negatives. Example, want to lose weight I got to eat less. Which is true, diet is the 80 of getting lean, training is the 20. My approach was to always tough it out, ignore all my cravings. This works for a period of few years till it doesn't. Also, the whole time I was never able to enjoy the food that I was eating. Even when I was at my leanest.
Step one was to break this cycle of eating less and then too much. Also, I wanted to try to do something different. I stopped trying to make myself feel bad when I ate something that was hyper palatable. To my surprise, over the next few months I no longer enjoyed them as much as I used to. Once the emotional cues were gone, it no longer felt the same. From there I just made it super easy to eat high protein meals within a calorie deficit. I fall short quite often but I stopped making a big deal of it. Overall I'm getting leaner, and I'm not starving myself either. The progress has been super slow, I'm talking months instead of weeks. But at the same time, it feels a lot more sustainable. It feels easy.
A long winded way to make a point
That was just the preface. I almost forgot what I was trying to say there. The reason I brought it up was that recently I've been thinking about how much time I spend watching YouTube and Netflix. My first impulse was to reduce the time doing that. But then I realized, it's the same mistake I made all these years with food. So instead I decided to track how many hours I spend doing everything else. Work towards getting that number higher. It's a perfect idea too, I've been doing some embedded programming lately. So I'm going to create a DNS tracker that would check if youtube.com or netflix.com has been called in the last five seconds and keep track of the time. Sure, there is a simpler way to do this, but that's not what I'm going for here. The next bit would be to see this info somewhere. This is the part I don't know how to check yet.
Two birds one stone
I feel like a God damn genius sometimes, even though it's mostly just me. This way I get to make some embedded stuff and use my time better. I do feel how I show this info will make a huge difference and help me make it a game. I'm already thinking about version 2. If I'm off the Internet totally and it's not bedtime, I could also know time spent otherwise. Seems like a fun experiment.