So admittedly this post was going to be a summary of a hacker news thread I saw called Ask HN: What is the best advice you received in 2022. I only recently joined HN, but it gives me a similar warm comfy feeling that old-school Reddit did. It encourages intelligent back-and-forth conversation, where having an unpopular opinion doesn’t automatically mean some gremlin bans you from commenting again in /r/whatever. In reality, I have only ever been banned from one subreddit, and that was before the CCP levels of over-moderation became commonplace, but that hasn’t stopped me from watching the site (I once was a happy member of) devolve into the cesspit it is today. Despite this tangent, this post is also not about Reddit, more than one person has chronicled that site’s devolution far better than I ever could.

At the time of writing the top comment on the thread is by a user called sainib

I had a self-realization and received advice from myself during one of my “zen state pondering” that - being in the best shape of my health with improve EVERYTHING by 10x in my life.

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I’m a big guy - I always have been a big guy. My entire life, to tell you the truth I don’t know when it first dawned on me that I was a big guy. I do have memories of when I used to steal biscuits out of the cupboard as a kid, the biscuits graduated into sandwiches, and sandwiches graduated into me ordering subway at 4am and ferrying it into my room. The easiest way to describe my relationship with food is toxic.

I have 3 really big attempts at weight loss in my life. I class anything more than a stone as a big attempt. The first time was at my first university, the second time I can’t quite remember, but the third time was the big one. I lost close to 80 lbs in this one three-month hit, and to this date, it was one of the most successful weight-loss campaigns I have ever made in my life. The circumstance around it was pretty unusual overall, I had just ended one of the worst relationships I have memories of and we were heading into lockdown. I read something at the time stating “if you exit lockdown no better than you entered it, then your problem is not that you don’t have enough time, your problem is discipline”. Fueled by the effect of a single evil girl and with what appeared to be all the time in the world, I reached out to a friend and asked him to help me lose weight. It worked; at least up until the point where I went back to uni and rediscovered the world of beer, drugs, and kebabs.

I don’t want this post to be me reminiscing about how good it was for me to lose weight that one time. The thing is that quote from sainib is right, there would be exponential benefits to the entire scope of my life if I got into better shape. I mention in my 2023 goals post that one of my goals is that I am going to be healthier by the end of the year. In truth my no-takeaways thing is going quite well, I have had a couple of times where I very nearly messed up and ordered something, but I have stuck to it. A small part of me wants to implement another objective before the three months window that I said I would stick to this - however, I am a tad reluctant to in case I am taking on too much too soon.

If I was to take one on it would have to be one of the following two:

• I want to start going to the gym once a week - I say once a week because if I give the objective a low bar, it makes it difficult for me to give myself an excuse not to do it. I used to go to the gym quite a lot, I would even suggest that I enjoy strength training. However, it would be irresponsible for me to suddenly go back to doing gym 5 days a week.
• I want to start bringing a packed lunch to work - This is something I experimented with at the end of 2022, where I brought a salad in for about two weeks. I honestly can’t with certainty why I stopped, but I would like to do it again.

I think it needs to be acknowledged that if I do this I am going to be fighting directly against behaviour patterns that have been developing for close to 25 years. When you do something, for your brain it is very similar to snowboarding down a mountain. The first time you do it it is rough because you are cutting a new path into the snow. As you do it again more and more however you are deepening that original cut. Eventually, you get to the point where that cut is so deep that it becomes effortless to take the ride down the mountain. Me doing this is similar to me following that original cut for the first bit and trying at some point to fork that crease into a whole new line. The first few times it is going to be difficult but I just need to keep doing it. The main thing I need to remember is that it is okay if I mess up, but it is not okay for me to give up.

I want 2023 to be the year I finally tackle this, and I think if I keep approaching this with the slow burn mentality then ill get the eventually.