d-Fect Inc.

Category: Rambling

  • Body stats, July 2018

    Let me first say that the project of getting my body into summer shape is not going the way I planned. As you will see from my body stats, it’s all bad.

    I know what I need to do to overcome this hurdle, but I suck at doing it. Luckily, I have some plans.

    business commerce computer delivery
    Measuring ALL the things!

    Did I get enough exercise?

    Short answer; No!

    I’m fond of tables, and this is really quick to make, so here’s my grand total of exercises done this month.

    Date Time Activity
    June 6th 1:45:43 Mowing the lawn
    June 10th 1:15:32 Orienteering
    June 19th 1:30.53 Mowing the lawn
    June 26th 32:05 Walking

    So a grand total of 4 exercises are what my watch have picked up, and two of them are chores and not really exercise related. I must say though that I consider mowing the lawn a proper workout. It gets my heart going, and it takes a while. Usually, the time would be closer to 1 hour though, but the summer we’ve had in Norway this year has been extraordinary which leads to unusual patterns in gardening.

    I have one week left of vacation now, and I plan to start getting that 30-minute walk in when I haven’t done any other workouts. I know I waste at least 30 minutes a day doing something stupid, so let me try to do something smart instead with that time.

    Did I get enough sleep?

    Short answer; No!

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    As you can see from this graph, I get an average of about 6 hours of sleep every night. And that is not good, especially when you know that I have had vacation the last two weeks of June. I really need to get at least 7.5 hours, and maybe even 0.5 to 1 hour more on vacation.

    It’s also not right that I have some peaks up to about 10 hours. It just shows that my body needs a lot more rest and sometimes it just crashes to try to cope.

    What this graph probably also doesn’t pick up is that when I sit myself down to watch a movie or something, I more often than not quickly fall asleep for about an hour.

    Slacking? Snacking? It’s all the same.

    I’ve been slacking, and I don’t know why. It’s summer, and there are fruits everywhere. Why do I continue to eat chocolate??

    At least I have now almost managed only to eat it on weekends, but my will still break from time to time. Hopefully, I will get better with this.

    I’m trying to find a course to learn some techniques that will allow me to control my unhealthy urges better. If you have any tips about this, then please write in the comments below.

    The grim reality

    So, let me just put up the same list I gave in mid-May and see where we’re at.

    Measurement Imperial Metric Comment
    Height 5 feet 10 inches 177cm This probably won’t change much 😊
    Weight 234lbs 106,1kg +1.3kg / 3 lbs
    Waist 46.85 inches 119cm +3cm / 1 inch
    BMI 33,9 +0.4
    Fat percentage 33.7 +0.2

    Red across the board there, so not very uplifting results when you just look at them like this and compare to last month. But you can’t really do that. You should always consider an extended period of time and try to remember if something unusual happened during that period.

    I was ill for several weeks this winter and lost most of the weight during that period. And we all know that weight you lose when you are sick always comes back. I’ve only gained 3kg over a period of 2 months since I got well again, so I’m happy with that.

    I was at my doctor in June, and she was delighted with what I have done.

    And if you look back longer, I’m thrilled. Last September I was 117.5kg, so I’ve lost more than 10kgs since then. I just need to stop my slow upwards creep before it’s all back again, but hopefully, this blog and my new focus on this will help me with that.

  • A new start

    young-game-match-kids.jpgSo, this spring might be a new start for me. Things happened earlier in winter that gave me time to think about a lot of things. So I decided to take advantage of what happened and run with it. Sadly life always comes in the way, so for now I haven’t been able to run as far as I wanted to, but maybe. This is a first step and hopefully there will be many that will lead me to new and wonderful places. It will be a multipart journey and I will try to document all of it on this site.

    Health

    pexels-photo-262876.jpeg

    One part is my personal health and well-being. I’ve been way to heavy for a long time, clocking in at around 115kg. That is way too much when I’m only 177cm tall. For a long time my goal has been to get down to two digit weight, so 99kg. It’s been far from easy and I’ve been hovering around 112-115 for ages with no real progress.

    But over 5 weeks this winter I went down about 10-12kg “for free”. I got ill, lost my appetite and the kilos vanished, so now I hover around 103-104kg in stead. Much better and SO much closer to my 99kg goal.

    Now you will probably say that weight you lose when ill will always come back. Well, I’ve managed to stay at my current weight for about a month now without gaining anything, so I have hope that I might not get heavier again if I continue do the right things.

    The other thing I got from being ill over a longer period was a huge change in my eating habits. I used to be very fond of chocolate and Coca-Cola. I still like chocolate, but I don’t have the same hunger for it that I used to. And Coca-Cola and other sugary drinks I can’t even touch now. They are just SO sweet. But I do have gotten a liking to fruit. So this means what I put into my body will contain much less calories and also be more healthy.

    The other thing is that since I’m now lighter it’s much easier to move around. I have just dropped a 10kg weight behind and that is quite a lot when walking, bicycling, doing push-ups, lifting weights or other exercises. This means it’s much more probable that I will increase my exercise and the amount I move around.

    So my health goals for this year is to get below 100kg in weight, increase my fitness and build core musculature. I’ll target my weight by eating properly and don’t stuff junk into my face whenever. The fitness will be addressed by using a rowing machine that we have at work, my bicycle and general trekking in the woods around where I live. The core musculature will be taken care of by lifting weights. If I can I will do the Stronglifts 5×5 program, but at least I will do a mini version of that. And sleep! Sleep is important. I’ve gotten way too little of that in recent years.

    Hopefully this will make me get in better shape, get stronger and generally feel better. This feeling leads me to part two of my journey.

    Personal development

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    There are two parts to my personal development this year.

    • Professional skills
    • Personal motivation

    Professional skills

    For my professional skills I will be learning programming. And not just any language, I’m attempting to learn C++. To do that I’m taking a couple of courses on Udemy.

    Both courses are pretty extensive and are lead by people with real experience and a goal of teaching people new skills.

    The Beginning C++ course is still not completed on the site, but so far contains 240 lectures and over 34 hours of video content. It’s 21 sections and 20 of them are complete so I have lots of stuff to get through before that last section completes the course.

    The Unreal course is complete but they still update it when needed. For instance it was written using Visual Studio 2015, but they have added and or edited videos to include content related to Visual Studio 2017 if there’s a difference. They’ve done the same with the Unreal Engine and updated  the course to include whatever changes there are between older versions and the current Unreal Engine v4.19.1. This course contains 319 lectures and a whopping 56 hours of video.

    Personal motivation

    For this one I’ve also chosen to start with a couple of  Udemy courses.

    The first course is pretty small, but I guess there’s a reason for that since one of the points of the course is time management and don’t wasting it. So 14 lectures and less than 1 hour of video, but it will give you the tools needed to identify tasks and optimize your time usage.

    The Finish It! course is more about projects and how to complete them. It again gives you the tools needed to getting the overview, identifying blocks, building your momentum and habits to get the results you need.

    I’ll be making separate posts about all the courses I take in separate blog posts. I will also make posts about the courses every time I have gone through some lectures. I will try to summarise what I’ve learned but also try to answer any questions that I got after watching the lectures.

    I hope you will join me on my journey. If you have questions about the topics I write about I’ll try to answer to the best of my abilities. I also hope I can get help from you people to answer questions I might have and that I can’t find the answer for anywhere else. Hopefully all of us will get something out of this. That’s my end goal for this blog.

  • The Journey Begins

    Thanks for joining me on my journey through the rest of my life.

    I just put up this website today so it’s kind of empty right now, but I am busy writing posts and there will be at least three more this week. And then goal is to have at least two or three every week going on.

    Hope you will be joining me, as I really like to get feedback on things I do.

    Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

     

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