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Well, I'm back. I managed to burn myself out something fierce in January. I picked lifting back up, I took on a more serious teaching role in my hapkido club, I started a YouTube channel (posting every day), put my nose to the grindstone for job applications, and started making time with my wife a priority. As my absence may have indicated, my mental state did something like this with all of these changes: Couple this with the new challenge format with no breaks and I hit a deep, dark low point. Now, obviously I've hit an equilibrium where I've found sufficient mental reserves to reach out again. What I'm NOT going to do is to try and do ALL OF THE THINGS again. This was an abject failure and not a particularly valuable experiment. I progress best when I make baby steps. Now just to plan those steps. KEEP ON STUDYING One of the things that my master has talked a fair bit about recently is the necessity of keeping up with our own practice while balancing the needs of teaching students. I love teaching, so it's never been a burden to take students and work through important fundamentals with them. That's an enjoyable class to me. To my mind, that's the proper behaviour for a black belt. BUT, what has been identified in lieu of two of my fellow students receiving their Sabumnim rank is that our own personal training is not just of value but also needs to be a significant priority. My habit is for two classes per week. That's so deeply ingrained right now that it's not even worth tracking. What I will be doing is spending a minimum of 15 minutes of our 1 hour classes focusing strictly on my technique and personal improvement. ALL HAIL HYPNOTOAD This might be mixing Matt Groening shows, but it was too appealing not to use. I may have mentioned a YouTube channel in my opening. A YouTube channel that I made the entirely unrealistical goal to post a video every single day. I managed to do it for three weeks before reaching a total burnout point. And when I say total burnout, I mean that it was the snowball that fell off the top of the mountain that eventually obliterated everything in its path. Even so, I received a lot of positive feedback from people and it was something I genuinely enjoyed doing. The recording part, anyways. Video editing is an absolute nightmare. My goal moving forward is to make 1 video per week, to be released on Fridays. This will give me more time to develop a script, record at reasonable hours of the day, and edit more effectively. That's a solid, measurable goal. TRY ALL OF THE DOUGHNUTS IN THE WORLD Me and food have always had a troubled relationship. I grew so fast when I was younger that I genuinely had no idea what a reasonable meal was. When I calculate what my calories were like as a teen and young adult from what I used to eat, it was regularly in the neighbourhood of 4000+ calories per day. And I looked like a skeleton. Before I went back to college at 23, I weighed in at a terrifying 185 lbs. For any of you new to my thread, my measured height is 6' 10". Let that sink in. I'm older now, and my metabolism has slowed down considerably. A 4000 calorie day is still doable, but my level of activity to accommodate that can be described as... extreme. My last weigh-in was at 265 lbs. My most recent TDEE was 2700 calories. And that's without taking exercise into account. With exercise, my calorie requirements hit over 3500. Size is complicated. What this means from the perspective of responsible food consumption is that I struggle to balance my diet properly. I binge eat far too regularly. I love junk food. I might even go so far as to say that I'm addicted to sugar. Caloric intake isn't my major concern. My major concern is to make appropriate food choices. When I need 1000 calories in a meal, you're damned right I'm going to fill a plate. If that plate happens to be brimming with vegetables and all sorts of responsible goodness, I'm going to get everything I need. When I am lazy, grumpy, sick, depressed, lazy, tired, busy, overwhelmed or lazy, I'm going to break out the french fries and eat a whole bag of chips. Guess which one makes me feel worse? My goal for the challenge is going to be to eat 3 meals a day and to plan 3 good dinners that I can be proud of. I'm not going to push myself into the total 100% compliance as it's not yet in the fully formed habit category any more. That burnout has consequences. LOOK AT THAT BLUBBER FLY They say you can't outrun your fork. A casual viewing of my midsection supports this theory. Despite my rather soggy midriff, I can and do run the stereotypically fit members of my hapkido club into the ground. For which they thank me afterwards. Fitness is weird. That said, making activity a more constant part of my life will enable my body composition to change. Cause it's not a constant. It's two classes a week. That's not an active lifestyle. That's sitting on my ass and conditioning my body to accept total physical exhaustion for sparse periods. While it presents an interesting case study for the adaptability of the human body, it sits very poorly with me for long term health. Something I did a few years ago was to challenge myself to do push ups every day. It was one of my more successful challenge goals. At the time, I was dealing with some wrist issues because of repetitive stress at work (computer programmer!), so I was doing knuckle push ups. My shoulder strength has decreased since then (despite OHP being one of my strongest lifts) so I'm going to start back at the bottom. I will do 10 push ups on my first day (which may be before the challenge starts) and add 1 every single day. So, new challenge format, new (for me) forum layout, and a new start. Let's get this thing going.