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.