Turning self-improvement into a hobby

   Gamification doesn't work for me. I don't care about little numbers or achievements for doing my daily tasks or due diligence. I don't feel the need for reward for doing what needs to be done. I don't hold it against anyone who it does work for, it just bounces off of me. I get a small hit of instant gratification from doing the hard thing, not because I love challenging myself (I do,) or because the nature of it being hard, but because I know that I will be basking in the glory of a task completed soon enough. I get a lot of joy out of things I can turn into data and track; I'm not sure if it's because the human brain is designed around finding patterns or simply because those metrics give me a sense of progress in what I'm doing, but I really enjoy it. 

  With that in mind I've furthered my self-improvement by beginning to count calories. I don't mind eating the same (or similar) things day in and day out, so I worked out my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and Total Daily Energy Expidenture (TDEE). Using the Mifflin-St Jeor Equation we come up with a BMR of 2,654 calories per day for a 39 year old man who is 6'0" and 375lbs. This is my resting rate, not taking any activity into account, the amount I would burn just existing in bed all day. When you take into account my 6 weeks of elevated activity where I'm averaging 1,160 actively burned calories per day, I wind up with 3,814 calories to maintain my current bodyweight. At a deficit of 1000 a week, I will lose 2lbs (about .9kg) a week while consuming 2,800 calories.

The aforementioned 6 weeks of significantly increased activity. 

   So I set to putting together a meal plan I can act on that will meet the caloric and macronutrient needs of my body moving forward. I don't want to start burning muscle for energy as this process goes on, so I will need a significant amount of Protein, I need lubrication for my joints since I exist in a larger body, so I will need a heavy dose of fats, and I need glycogen to fuel my workouts and walks, so I will need to eat a lot of carbs. I can do all of those things in a way that is smart and healthy for my body, while managing my type 2 diabetes and hopefully getting me to a point where I am no longer considered diabetic and can stop taking this damn medicine. I did some digging around, found a few good bits of information, and settled on this: 

Here we are, healthy fats, protein, good carb sources, and fiber! 

   The real deal here is that I've taken all of this data and turned it into a self-improvement tracker, a hobby I can consistently improve at. I'm using HEVY (@apieceofenergy) to track all of my workouts and get some more metrics like these: 

A solid distribution chart, pretty cool.

Obviously I started lifting again a few weeks ago

Clearly reps per muscle group have increased

 

  All of this gives me a ton of data to work with. Coupling that with my intent to increase my general health, undo the damage I've done to my body (or at least whatever damage I can reverse,) I have even more reference points for my progress in this particular endeavor. By approaching it like a hobby and contextualizing progress through consistent data points I will not only have tracking information to compare myself to the only thing I should be comparing to (me yesterday!), but I will further increase my chances of success.

  I think when I was younger I lacked the understanding to set myself up for success, so even when I did this before I didn't maintain it for longer than a year, but now I have a deeper knowledge of self and find that motivation never even really plays a part in follow through. 

 

The Sorness Sets In: Being more active as I approach 40

   I've written before about taking better care of myself including a plan to walk 8000 steps a day. I know I also updated my progress two weeks in, but now I'm over a month into those goals and holding pretty steady to them. I'm not always completely on time with my updated bedtime (10:30-11:30) on the weekend, but I'm never off by more than 45 minutes or so, so I'll call that a success. 

  I'm now a month into my goal of moving more and I am most certainly doing that.  My average steps have increased drastically, as has my average activity level.

Six Months: Steps aren't the only metric of activity, but they're a pretty good start. 

 

One Month: Obviously the average has increased SIGNIFICANTLY.

  Hell, even my "low activity" day was close to my six month average, at 5,072 steps. I decided, as I started this project, that a 4 week spin-up time was good enough to decide if I was going to stick with it. If nothing else, the walks have been amazing for my dogs who are happier, healthier, and generally more ready to go to bed at the end of the day. That said, I told myself that if I stuck with it for four weeks I would start going back to the gym: I am paying for a YMCA membership, after all. 

  See, in 2013 I was around 400lbs, mostly fat, very unhappy, and extremely unhealthy. I decided in December of that year I would start counting calories. Initially it sounded like empty promises, since I decided that in mid-November, but it was really so I could not worry about it and have a big Thanksgiving meal with my family. I bought a food scale and started with the only focus being to get 2,000 calories a day. 

  By the end of December I had lost 31 pounds. I had decided when I started that I would eat clean for 30 days, have a single cheat day that coincided with my plans to spend New Years' Eve with my friends, and then go back to clean eating. After that I opted for 60 days of clean eating. In two months I lost 50 pounds and decided to get a gym membership and start lifting weights to try and restructure my body. What followed was me figuring out what worked best for me, learning how inflexible I am, and another 9 months of counting calories. By November 2024, a couple of weeks shy of a year of my decision to count calories, I was 262.3lbs, the lowest I had weighed since my addiction days, and the lowest healthy weight I had ever been in my life. 

  It's pretty safe to say that I have the discipline to override whether motivation exists or not. I don't enjoy working out, I hate every minute of it while I'm doing it but I feel better about myself after the fact, so it balances net positive I think.  

  It took 12 years of inactivity and increasing sloth for me to get close to my old weight, and even when I did I am smaller in size than the last time I weighed 370-380 pounds. I truly restructured my body and put on a lot of muscle during that year. The increased steps were a measure to combat feeling bad, I've been struggling with my body image for a while now and they were a start, but it's time to add more to the pile now that I know I can be consistent in my movement. 

  It seems to be working, remember that I've been going on around 2.2 mile walks every night for the last month when you see this: 

The bulk of the increase is "traditional strength training" and is determined by my effort rating.

  My walk effort has actually reduced by about 11% in the last week, but that's most likely because I went for a few walks during the day over the last month and I haven't in the last week what with it being blistering hot outside. That said, I intend to take the dogs out for morning walks in addition to our evening walks on the weekends from now on; they're just so damn happy about the time and who am I to deny them that or deny myself a longer-lived companion? 

  I started back in the gym, I had flirted with it a few months ago but fell off when I was more active in the garden. It's really easy to allow "some activity" to override "scheduled activity," when the additional activity should be just that, additional. Next thing I knew it had been two months and I hadn't been to the gym, so I'm back at it and the soreness has set in. 

  I divide my workouts into Push (Triceps, Chest, Shoulders), Pull (Back, Biceps), and Legs (...legs, what did you expect?). Right now I'm going three times a week but I've made the decision to follow my one month trial setup right on down that road. If I am consistent in three times a week for the next month, I'm going to move to a schedule that looks like Push, Pull, Legs, Rest, Push, Pull, Legs, Rest. It will give me a kind of cascading schedule since it doesn't line up with the days of the week but I don't think that will really present a problem. Even having increased from 3 sets per exercise to 5 sets, it's still less than an hour in the gym. It does skew a little more than that if I throw a swim in at the end, and gods know I need the cardio. 

  I'm aging, my body had been hurting significantly, and I'm pretty damn mad that moving more was the only real answer I needed to alleviate that. I'm also pretty mad that something so simple is helping me improve my relationship with my body slowly, and helping me feel better mentally because what the fuck do you mean it's that easy? Why haven't I been doing this? Why did I let myself stop (the answer is a relationship that didn't like how much time I spent in the gym, but that's neither here nor there anymore.) 

Ugh, it's annoying. And good. I'm doing alright. 
 

Frustrations

   Sometimes it's really hard to progress. Sometimes I get auto-filled support and go back to play something I thought I knew only to get absolutely trucked and made a fool of. It's easy to feel frustrated and angry and lose my cool. It's a lot harder to hold onto the growth mindset, and feeling stagnant leads to frustrations. I've played many of the 15 games per champion, paring down to Sivir and Xayah, with low damage and low masteries on each. In a previous post I expounded on knowing when something isn't working for me. 

  Clearly, playing these champions isn't getting me the progression I'd like to see, so it may just be time to switch it up.  Now, I'm not abandoning Xayah and Sivir altogether, but instead looking at what I'm missing: lane presence, creep score, damage to enemy champions, and I'm expanding this project to give a shot to a few more champs, see what feels good and that I can learn from it: like I did with Miss Fortune though woefully I didn't enjoy her much. To that end I searched for champions that can be used in Solo Queue, where I do most of my play, to climb and found a Mobalytics Tier List. 

This is the Low Elo tier list for solo queue ADC. 

  Prior to writing this I hadn't put any time into Jinx, but I have messed around a little with Tristana before and I think with a little practice and understanding I could really enjoy her kit. I'm also going to give Jinx a go. This tier list is highlighted with ease of use, white, blue, orange, red from easiest to hardest. I think by giving myself an uncomplicated kit and some decent range I could further focus my fundamentals and positioning. Hopefully I can also focus my participation in team fights and better decision making overall. 

  I think it's really important to be able to adapt when frustrations rear their ugly little heads. To keep my own head and not take failure as a lack of moral or intellectual strength or sign of turpitude. I will not suddenly rocket up the ranks out of nowhere, but as I continue this path I should be willing to accept what is working and stick to it and pivot away from what isn't working. 

What caretaking taught me about skill-based hobbies

   When I was younger I fell victim to the "former gifted and talented kid" trap. I would start something up and if I wasn't instantly good at it, I'd quit. It was easy to buy into the hype of starting something new until it became work, putting it to the side with a "this just isn't for me." Then addiction happened, then sobriety, then caretaking. 

  I spent all of my early adulthood in varying states of mess and necessity. I was an addict, a criminal, a thief, and somehow I managed to avoid getting caught (I say somehow like the clearance rate for crimes isn't 44% for violent crimes and 18% for property crimes: the police are fucking useless.) Then my Nana called me and told me she needed my help, I quit cold turkey, moved to Oklahoma, and detoxed by myself. At 21 years of age I don't think I had found joy in anything I had done save playing guitar in a punk band. I started playing World of Warcraft again to give myself something to do with all of the free time I found, eventually got a job as a 911 Dispatcher, and spent my days taking care of my Nana and Poppa, then just my Nana for a long while. 

  Poppa lived for 3 years after I moved, I lost him in 2011. He was on dialysis, blind from Diabetic Retinopathy, and a tinkerer. Being stuck in the house drove him crazy; he continued running his used refrigeration business and messing with various things around the house, some of which I had to set to rights after he took them a bit too far. He frustrated my Nana to no end, but she loved him as infinitely as he annoyed her. Those three years set the foundations for the patience I have today, the follow-through I pride myself on, and the importance of taking care of the folks I care about. 

  After Poppa was gone I found myself doing a balancing act. Nana was obviously in a bad place emotionally, but I found that if I didn't leave a mess behind she would stay in bed for days on end. It took a while for me to realize this, but I started taking the ass-chewings gladly because they meant she'd get up and move around. The patience and follow-through truly became cemented in my character during these years. 

  I lost her in 2017 and found myself rudderless for a while, but these traits stayed strong and as I came out of that particular nasty depression I began climbing the ladder in competitive StarCraft II. The patience I learned and allowed to become a part of my character was indispensable in competitive gaming, I wasn't instantly good, hell I was terrible initially, but through will and work I got better. I kept that mentality over the years and it's been so useful in beginning to relearn league. I get frustrated with my lack of progress in game, then shake it off and remind myself that it will take time. 

  This year I started gardening and sadly, despite the prodigious plant size, I only managed to get one zucchini out of my yield. Some kind of bug ate through the root just above the dirt level on three of my four plants. This wasn't seen as a personal failure, rather an opportunity for learning. My bed was too dense and gave ample cover from natural predators like birds, I need to thin it out a bit and let nature take its course as I grow the kind of things that will encourage pollinators, birds, and other creatures to spend time on my little plot. It was an abject lesson into how I can do better in the next season.

  I originally started this blog as an exploration of the world through my hobbies, and that's the goal here, writing about myself through the framework of the hobby as well as finding my writing voice, but it's very much also become about character and mental health, emotional honesty and security. I have no idea who will ever set eyes on this, but I think it's a good journal for me over time. I also honestly think if this gardening setback had happened to me in my early 20s I may have seen it as a lack of virtue and just quit gardening altogether. Hell, I know that's probably the case because I experienced my first frustrations with League of Legends way back in 2010, and I only occasionally have touched it through the years as a result of leaning on that experience and thinking "I'm not very good at this," but Jake the dog had the right of it:

Gotta fail to learn. 

Accepting when I'm wrong in a hobby

   Man, I love cooking. I've loved cooking for most of my adult life. My primary love language is absolutely acts of service, and my primary expression of that comes out in feeding people. I've fallen into a bit of lull about that since moving to the city and having disposable income/proximity to good food, but I'm trying to get back into it. 

   I also have long held the opinion that French cooking is for assholes.  I guess that's not entirely true, when I say "French Cooking," what I mean is "haute cuisine" since it has its roots firmly planted in "what the poor can't have," while including "elevated" dishes poor people were already eating. It's pretty safe to say that I'm not a big fan of fine dining as an experience or art form. Something about a thing being created for an only really available to the wealthy makes me want to burn it to the ground.

  Maybe I'm the asshole, but I'm pretty convinced it's them. 

   That said, there are some french dishes that really strike me as worth the time to create. Things like French Onion Soup, Cassoulet, Quiche Lorraine, and the dish I'm giving a go to this weekend: Vichyssoise. It's a thick, creamy, blended leek and potato soup served cold and a food that Anthony Bourdain said it was the first food he'd really noticed and the first food he remembers enjoying.

  That has to mean something, right?  

  There's not much to say here about it until I've cooked, cooled, and tried it, but I think it goes a really long way to acknowledge when we're wrong about something. Just a little growth every day can go a long way, and I think when we stop trying to grow that's when we really fall apart.