GoodFriday: On obstacles, outcomes, & weight loss
Happy GoodFriday!
BACK!
Here's something I heard, thought, and did this week.
Something I Heard: The Obstacle is The Way
"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
Marcus Aurelius
Something I Thought: Detaching From Outcomes
I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with content creation for as long as I can remember. In a world that puts attention on the highest pedestal, it's hard for someone as focused on outcomes as I am to find the will to keep going when the engagement isn't there.
From a young age we're taught that "If you're not first, you're last." Thanks, Ricky Bobby. We measure ourselves against other people. Against quarterly reports. Against follower counts, PRs, the guy in the next lane. We've learned to place all the value on the outcome, and then we tie our identity to it.
The reason I'm coming back to this newsletter is to practice the opposite. I can't control the outcome fortune produces. I can control the quality of my conduct. What I write from here on is a conscious choice to make things I find useful and worth doing, whether or not anyone's watching. Hopefully you find them useful too.
Something I'm Doing: Cutting Successfully
Over the past six months I lost 35 pounds. Back in February I decided to commit to getting the leanest I've ever been in my life. There were ups and downs. I hit a plateau a couple of times, and there were plenty of nights I went to bed hungry. But I stayed steadfast to the process no matter what. The other thing I wanted to achieve during the cut was maintaining as much lean body mass as possible. It's so easy to dramatically slash calories and lose muscle along the way, and I wanted to mitigate that as much as I could. So I kept the protein high, slowly dropped my calories, and made sure the intensity stayed high in my workouts. By the end I was sitting at 200g of protein, 250g of carbs, and 56g of fat. That's where I landed for my size and my training load, not a prescription for anyone else.
One thing that made this easier to manage was using an AI like ChatGPT or Claude to help fill in the gaps in my macros. I had most of the day planned and prepped, but when it came to dinner I needed to fill in what was left without having a plan. So what I'd do is take a screenshot of my macros in MyFitnessPal, upload it, and ask something like:
"Here are my macros so far today. For dinner we have chicken, potatoes, and bread. How many servings of each can I have in order to finish out my macros for the day?"
It would give me the numbers down to the ounce, I'd weigh everything out, and that was it. I still eyeballed what it gave me before I ate, since it got the math wrong once in a while. But it took the guesswork out of the one meal I could never plan ahead for, and I hit my target every single time.
Until next week!
-Cameron Harn
