(last edited on February 15, 2023 at 12:25 pm)
Happy Monday! This week I’m changing my posting/daily livestream schedule to Monday-Wednesday-Friday. It had occurred to me that even though blogging/streaming didn’t take a lot of production time, it was still a two hour daily commitment followed by an hour or so of downtime. Since I’m prioritizing health now in the morning, I don’t want to overload my morning with gym time (still light, but it may grow) with blogging/streaming just for the sake of sticking to a daily content regimen.
Speaking of health, this week I’m committing to a daily 15 min of cardio at the gym. It’s not a lot, but the first couple of weeks I am taking it really slow to just get the heart reconditioned. Combined with the renewed commitment to low carb diet to get serious about managing my diabetes, I’m hopeful that I will overcome the brain fuzziness I’ve been having trouble with for the past several months. In hindsight: DUH.
My friend Bill Cava sent me an encouraging email after reading about my realization, which he’s given me permission to quote:
March 31, 2016, I made a very similar statement and decided that I was going to go “all in” and try to see if changing diet and life choices could improve my lethargy, brain fog, apathy, issues with overeating, etc. etc. etc. etc. In a nutshell, I made some very sweeping changes and the resulting outcomes were so significant, so impactful, that I now consider March 31 to be my “re-birthday.” My two year re-birthday is coming up later this month!
The major outcomes I’ve experienced having made these sweeping changes…
- No more brain fog – My brain fog has completely dissipated. This is coming from someone who was living with Brain Fog at a Level 10 out of 10. I didn’t even realize how bad it had gotten until it cleared. This is by far the outcome that compels me to continue to stick with my regimen
- Increased energy – It’s just consistent throughout the day; no crashes. I used to be so sleepy … and would often nap during the day out of necessity
- Need less sleep – One thing I’ve learned is that sleep is when your body detoxes. The less crappy sugary foods it’s trying to process, the less you actually need to sleep.
- Get up early – See above, this has become pretty easy. I’m up usually at about 4:30 AM now. Coming from a huge sleepy morning person, this was life changing
- No food cravings – Due to the diet I’m on, you just don’t crave food. It’s nice to be free from the nagging
- Lost weight – Lastly, in the process, I ended up losing 60 pounds.
Bill went on the describe a lot of other great life changes that occurred; his only regret is that he didn’t discover this in his 30s! Bill is one of the smartest and most capable people I know, so my mind boggles at what he must be doing now with his new-found mental powers!
In other news, I finally plugged-in the replacement video card. It’s blue! It lights up! It matches my typewriter! I am very pleased, and I admittedly did pick this particular card because of the aesthetics of it matching the typewriter. It also is a pretty fast card, factory overclocked, and it’s been more than capable of delivering frame rates in excess of 90fps at high quality at 1920×1080 in all the games I’m currently playing. If you’re curious, the card I’m rocking is the Sapphire Nitro+ Special Edition RX580. I paid $449, which is not that much higher than MSRP for this card especially since it is rather popular with cryptocurrency miners. I spent the weekend reading about the blockchain/cryptocurrencies, and have determined that there’s no way that it’s going away any time soon…sigh. Prices are going to remain high for the foreseeable future because Ethereum is going to stay popular as a smart contract platform and even if it doesn’t NEW CRYPTOCURRENCIES with proof-of-work approaches will grab miners attention. While $449 is more than I wanted to pay, at least I didn’t pay the $600-$800 that this particular card is going for. And it matches my typewriter so it’s sort of a two-for-one upgrade :-)
On a side note, I’ve been greatly enjoying the game Titanfall 2; it’s not only impeccably art directed, it is also one of the best-handling first-person shooters I’ve played in quite some time. It’s fast, fluid, and it handles the transition between ground and your giant mecha really well. I’m also getting a solid 100fps in the game at all times; it’s got a very nice adaptive rendering quality algorithm to maintain a certain framerate by selectively modifying the graphics quality. In practice it just looks great all the time.
One last note: at the gym I was listening to the TED Radio Hour podcast on Nudging. This is the idea of forming habits by making them easy; for example, a school found that they increased the consumption of apples by students merely by provided them already sliced. I’ve only listened to the Richard Thaler segment describing the concept so far, but the entire episode looks like it will be a productive source of habit-changing ideas that I can get behind. Listen to the Nudge episode of the TED Radio Hour (from 2016) on the NPR site!
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