Three years ago, I weighed nearly 400 pounds, had high blood pressure, eczema all over my hands, snored so hard sometimes I’d wake up with a headache, and struggled with depression a lot. I was in a situation I did not love. At times, I felt powerless to do anything about it.

I’m not special. For the past few years, I was as impacted as anyone else: COVID hit, some people stopped caring about how they looked, what they ate, how they worked. I did, anyway. In a way, I kinda gave up on myself.

I looked around one day and saw I wasn’t trying to improve. I couldn’t deny it. Dunno what inspired me other than being bored of being unhealthy but I made two lists: things out of my control, things that were not my fault, and another list of things that were my fault, things completely within my control.

I started small and have stayed that way, creating subtle but consistent shifts in habits, and almost imperceptibly shifted my inside, arguably more than the outside.

My orbits of friends and loved ones are prolly sick of hearing me talk about making lists because I love them and have been doing it all my life but it all revolves around silly, little lists. I use pencil and paper, actually, some throwback to an ancient art by now lol. It’s quick tho, never needs charging and is always on. I get up, get out, walk, and when I get back I make one for the day. They tend to look like this:

I make these to have four or five things I’d like to achieve for the day. If I don’t get them all in I try to be careful not to beat myself up too much.

It’s a bit embarrassing but I do have to remind myself to be gentle on myself. There are days when I forget this and it comes at a price. It’s easy to fall back into old habits where I treated myself like garbage and generally didn’t take good care of myself, I focused most on trying to balm the anxieties of everyone else around me.

Also, I never questioned any of my “automatics.” For example, for most of my life, I made lists at the end of the day. No way I could’ve know it but this was destroying my momentum of spirit. My body and mind worried about everything I didn’t get done. All night.

Now, making them in the morning as a meditation on what I have to look forward to, my mental model has shifted in unexpected ways. There’s no harm in experiments or simulations. That’s why they’re valuable, in fact. It hadn’t ever occurred to me to try this sort of thing and see how it changes the way I FEEL.

With such a subtle change to making these after early morning strolls, they not only have more power but they are somehow encoded into how I operate during the day. Such a small thing, such huge impact.

Long story short, it’s more than 3 years later and I’m still on a slow but upward-sloping arc of achieving a new level of appreciation and enjoyment of life in general. I’m going to share the whole story here because it was much simpler and easier than I ever imagined. The story might help inspire someone else to break out of whatever they feel might be an obstruction to living their best life.

My friends and loved ones comment on how I look, they praise me for having lost more than 150 pounds or 68 kilograms over the past three-four years. I always tell them, “Thanks! You think the outside looks different? You should see the inside.”

Mental models matter and I’m gonna talk more about that here as time permits.

UPDATE –> It’s nearly Fall of 2026 and so much has changed, both personally and in the world-at-large yah.

Some of the key habits I shaped are durable and improve little-by-little.

Of these, making small lists at the start of each day may be the most valuable, still only made after I’ve completed two things that I write down. This hack still works and it’s not even superstitious it’s just a pace-setter for the day, starting out on top even though it shouldn’t work as well as it does, it does and I’m grateful for it.

Remaining active is another. For me, this means general, consistent activity makes it easiest to swim with the current, as-it-were, such as running all my errands on a traditional bicycle, walk/hike most days, and am an avid, early-morning and/or late-evening open-water swimmer in Lake Michigan.

I’m also still a bit more intentional about the foods I eat and how much tho I still struggle to resist the mammoth appetite I was born with. Finding a happy medium isn’t always easy but I have more awareness and better tools than ever.

A great hack that has served and continues to serve me well long-term is what started out as hitting a tennis ball against a fire house wall when I was bored one day near one of the neighborhoods I grew up in at like age 6 or 7.

Since then my whole life I’ve found some surface to hit a tennis ball against as a daily meditation for 20-30 minutes. That habit is still very much a part of me.

What’s new is feeling better than ever about it especially that I hadn’t ever considered it as exercise just this mental game I’ve played most of my life. When I play with other people the game is easier than ever, too, almost scary how much better I am after learning to swim with the brutal current of an unforgiving wall where there is no such thing as unconditional love.

Playing with other humans is fun tho can sometimes be a calamity. For example, some of my tennis pals only wanna play indoors, some only wanna play super-early mornings, some wanna be all competitive and/or formalized.

Me, I just wanna hit, keep it in play, care not about serving tho mine is formidable and when forced to play competitively tends to turn the elder crowd off. 12 years of formal training betray me and expose experience on multiple state and nationally-ranked teams, and also as coach and instructor, both private and group, kids and grown-ups, too.

So, I’m in a weird tennis place where I only really wanna hit against a wall a few minutes from my front door even more.

Which is a great cue for another hack: pickleball

Almost all my tennis pals hate it when I say this. It’s true, though, and I’m grateful because so many more people are outside moving because of it.

Of course I love tennis and my sticking a flag of luff in the ground for pickleball isn’t a vote against it. If anything it’s a vote for it because pickleball wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for tennis. It’s okay to write a new song every now and then, especially if it’s inspired by other great songs.

Tennis takes YEARS of practice to establish technique that makes the fun part the playing part effortlessly enjoyable.

Pickleball? Like, 20-minutes.

I play pickleball some Mondays and some Fridays, mostly and usually indoors with an ever-changing and broad assortment of players. It’s arguably more fun than tennis. Matches are shorter while maintaining the annoying trait of having to pick up balls a lot and tapping a pickleball up isn’t easy. Way harder than tennis.

My goal is finding ways to make active lifestyle easy, natural, without muscling it. Pickleball fits into that nicely.

I don’t understand all the haters but it’s just like snowboarding back in the day, out of all my ski team pals I was the only one that was excited about it all the rest were against it and now the world builds towering monuments to it, filmed by helicopters, drones fitted with with the world’s latest gimbals. the bleeding edge of technology, all dowsed in Red Bull and powered by ad revenue.

What a time to be alive for sure.

How are you shaping up to be the best version of yourself?