Melting Baby Fat

I exercise but rarely exceed a month of consistency. I've never weighed myself regularly or set numeric targets. I feel healthy-ish overall, and I notice when I'm veering off course.

Last year, I tried a sleep and a glucose monitor but didn't find the wearables worth continuing. Because I'm not very regimented, I've gone through cycles and my body composition fluctuates.

I dug up some photos to illustrate:

Across all these photos, there is a noticeable bump on my waistline. I have received compliments on the definition before, and I have no issues with my weight or body. But although there's an oblique muscle under there somewhere, pinching the exterior certainly feels like a small belt of fat.

I always thought that someday, perhaps when I become a movie star, that I might go for Pavel Durov levels of abdominal definition. Turning 30 in a couple months has helped me re-evaluate certain dreams. I've gotten much more concrete about things I'm ever realistically going to do or not, such as getting tattoos.

I've said with increasing frequency over the past couple years that after I turn 30, I'm going to stop indulging in carbs and desserts. It turns out, I'm ready a little bit earlier than that deadline, thanks to a transformative couple weeks at the beginning of October.

I ran every day or two in Tahoe, at altitude. We ate very healthy food in the Abundance House, including lots of vegetables at dinner and mostly eggs for brunch. I noticed, completely unintentionally, that in 15 short days my love handles had shrunk to half their former size or less.

I've never attempted nor experienced such dramatic reduction in body fat before. The beauty of this change was that it naturally fell out of healthy communal living. It was a forced habit to only eat food from the kitchen and not eat out at all. That's just how it was living in the house, and I felt good doing it.

After I left and went on vacation for the last couple weeks of October, my normal waistline fat rapidly returned. I ate bowls of noodles, breaded appetizers, and copious desserts. If I dipped to 50% waist padding mid-month, maybe I'm around 70-80% now.

However, I'm highly motivated to start my January resolution early and shrink down to 5% or less over time. But I don't really need a specific number or a calorie monitor.

I've tasted excellence and gotten a new feel for pinching my waistline. I'm better prepared to battle resistance now that I know the inputs are reasonable. I have avoided chocolates and the ice cream bar in my freezer multiple times so far.

I'm adulting hard. Here we come Pavel!

"Our whole life is startlingly moral...all sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity."

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden (chapter 11)