DREWspective

I was proud of my achievement last week, having abstained from food for almost a week - even though my weight loss was just 3 ¾ lbs.

Unfortunately, I don’t have much to be proud of this week. I had a pizza on Saturday, which left me feeling full and slightly bloated, right up until yesterday evening. It was a good pizza, but not as great as I’d hoped.

To make up for it, I made a commitment to rejoin the gym yesterday. Many of the other guys in my diet group made a point of starting fitness training, some with personal trainers, and they were experiencing good results.
Though it was about 3pm when I left the house, I stuck it out and signed up. I also got to training again the same day.

Trying to do the same kinds of workouts I did when I was last there - including ten minutes on a cross trainer, chin-ups, various resistance machines and a two kilometre race on a rowing machine - I eventually made myself very ill. Ill as in on the verge of throwing up! It took me about fifteen minutes to recover, but thankfully I didn’t throw up.

I guess I really wanted to gain muscle (you should see my scrawny arms), and lose the remaining bits of unsightly flab, which was why I pushed myself a bit too hard. Seeing well-developed people of both genders didn’t help much, but even for them it took a long time and consistent training.

My next session will be on Wednesday, most likely; I’ll be going to see the new Bond movie on Tuesday. I am hoping to go at least four times during the week to the gym, and maybe once over the weekend.

A very important lesson was taught in an episode of Dragonball Z I watched a while ago.

(Some of you are probably thinking “he’s well and truly flipped”.)

In that episode, Trunks was fighting a far stronger Cell than he first encountered, all on his own. His strategy was to increase his physical power by channelling more resources than he had before. but although he became much stronger, the increased strength had made him more muscular than he used to be, lowering his speed. Cell was then easily able to avoid his attacks.

Meanwhile Goku, having seen the fight, came up with the insight:

In order to beat Cell, they had to get to get to a stage where being a Super Saiyan (at the time, an enhanced level of strength) was normal.

There’s the lesson. In anything you want to improve about yourself, whether it’s health, productivity, appearance or whatever, it’s not enough to adopt a mindset or purchase the latest tool for helping you achieve goals. You have to get to a stage where having the mindset, or doing the things necessary to get what you want, are a regular part of your life. That’s what learning’s all about.

That’s part of why I’m so skilled in HTML and CSS… all the way back from when I was in college, I’d spent hours finding the best ways to approach different problems, and coming up with my own strategies. Whether I was aware of it or not, I was developing my speciality in standards compliance and problem-solving. (The Maths A-level helped a little with problem solving, too.)

I mentioned this because I realised not many people are committed to growing and improving themselves. Actually, many “normal” people are convinced they’re “perfect” and don’t need to budge, or at the very least, “fine as they are”.
How many times have you heard people publicly announce, I aint changin 4 nobdy? Little do they know that it usually means for themselves, too.

Of course, the way to make any kind of change a part of you is to take it slow. Like someone said, if you wanted to get good at maths, you’d start with 2 + 2.

3 ¾ lbs this week.

This was after abstaining entirely from food since Friday afternoon, when - after waiting three hours in a hospital to be told “there’s not much we can do” - I had a Reggae Reggae sub from Subway.
The promotional sub sandwich itself was bullshit; despite being one of the most expensive, it was simply regular chicken with a pile of marinaded peppers put on top. I’ve tried the famous Reggae Reggae sauce (before the diet), and there was hardly any resemblance.

Anyway, losing less than 2 lbs last week made me get serious about losing more weight last week. The ketosis stick turning dark red almost immediately yesterday gave me hope, but I will admit to being disappointed to lose just 3 ¾ lbs.
It does mean, however, that I’ve broken two barriers at once: the 100kg barrier and the three stones loss barrier. Yesterday saw me coming in at 99.8kg, which leaves me ten pounds short of my 210 lb target for this year.

Statistics aside, last night raised an interesting point.

For anyone considering doing the LighterLife diet, you will probably come across people who will criticise you for taking part in it, and particularly the diet itself. They’ll say that it’s an unhealthy diet and that you’re stupid for putting your body at risk, while “stepping in” and giving you alternatives.

All I have to say about these people, in the kindest way possible, is that they’re the ones who have criticised you for being who you were in the beginning, and will still find some fault with you in the future. They’re people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and see you as a threat to their existence because you’re willing to do whatever it takes to change your life.

I’ve been around too many people like that in my life, and now I find ways of distancing myself from them. I don’t know about you, but this kind of thing seems to be more common in women than other men (men will just make fun of you).

Listen, I will advise one thing: like with cosmetic surgery, or any other life-changing thing, make sure you want to do it because you want to do it; don’t conform to these artificial images of what society, the media, or even your close friends and family dictate to you. Like my mom, other people’s minds are always changing, and very very few people are consistent in their thinking.

Again not much to report, except I remained true to the diet. There were many temptations, but I reminded myself of how things were before the diet.

What really helped was seeing a not-so-old photo of myself, lounging around in my bedroom on my desk chair. Seeing how fat and lethargic I was almost brought tears to my eyes.

One of my Drew Maughan original quotes is:

If you forget where you’ve come from, you’ll find yourself going back there.

This is one place I have no intention of going back to.

Last night I came home to even more dead fish in the tank. I was still upset about it, though a little less than the previous night, when the first losses occurred.

At first I thought the fish had gotten violent with each other, which didn’t make sense in the beginning as all the fish in the tank are known to be peaceful. I did see one rainbowfish nuzzle (or even nip) at another, however.

So I began to do a water change, and I came across a disgusting bug-like creature at the bottom of the tank:

WARNING: large picture of a bug

It turns out that this bug was a dragonfly nymph: a nasty creature that gets into tanks through eggs left on plants, or in bags of live food. It’s nasty because it kills small fish, while camouflaging itself and acting like a coward. The problem is, they grow to the stage where they can kill fish rather fast, and then graduate to harmless dragonflies slowly.

The first thing I did was suck it up through the gravel cleaner. As evil creatures always do, it put up a fight.
For whatever reason I’d flushed it down the toilet, along with its remaining victims and the dead foliage. I wish I’d stomped on it, set it on fire or let it suffocate in a sea of corrosive fluid, like it deserved.

The sad thing is that I’d seen this creature in the tank several days ago, and did nothing about it. I genuinely thought it was dead, not thinking about how it got there.

The good news is that the remaining fish are lively, with none looking like they’ll die any time soon. I hope there’s no dead ones waiting for me tonight, particularly none of the hatchets. Hopefully, there was just that one evil nymph lurking in the tank.

The really amazing thing, however, was the lack of information online about how to remove (or more to the point, destroy) dragonfly nymphs.
There was all the usual info about what they do to fish and how they get in the tank in the first place, but there are no products for treating them. In fact, there was far more information on their life cycles, and even people talking in message boards about keeping them as pets.

It reminded me of a certain person at my university that I’ve had (and continue to have) issues with. I knew just how evil, vindictive and malicious they were, yet far more people actually like them and think they’re the best thing since sliced bread. It’s kinda disturbing how that happens.

The moral of the story is to make sure you wash your plants before adding them to your fish tank, no matter where you get them from. Even Maidenhead Aquatics, as much as I respect them, have a habit of giving me snails in my tank - and more recently, a dragonfly egg or few.

Also, check any bags of live food for “additions”. Once there was a harmless red worm in a bag of daphnia I bought, but also what turned out to be a mosquito larva. Both are safe for fish, but there could easily be something more deadly in there.