Blessed by the Potato

I have a bad habit of powering my way through tough projects and tight deadlines by eating at my desk — a bio-hack I picked up ages ago (undergrad for sure, and I think I used it a few times even in high school). I thus tend to gain some weight with many major projects, and it never quite goes away. For years I didn’t really do much about it — too busy on the next thing — but during grad school I set a “never weight” for myself, a point where I’d give myself a mental slap in the face and re-prioritize my health over whatever project was consuming me at the time. I hit that never weight near the end of 2016.

I actually made some decent progress in the first three months of 2017 after resolving to lose the weight. But then I backslid, and backslid, until by the fall I was over where I started.

So to make it real, I committed to dropping the price of the course and the book if I couldn’t lose the weight.

Here we are at the end of the year, and in the 4th quarter I’ve managed to lose a hair over 12 pounds, which is pretty impressive considering this is the quarter with Halloween, my birthday, and Potatomas. That also brings me back under my never weight so I can finish the year down from where I was this time last year… but it’s not quite good enough as I’m still not back to where I was in February, just barely erasing the gains that happened in the third quarter (and to be fair, half that was dropped almost instantly after the bloating from the Sept all-nighter season passed — it’s been about 2 lbs/mo of real progress).

For Potatomas, my parents got me a fitbit, I’ve got a new android phone that can do apps the BlackBerry couldn’t (like Carrots), so I’m more hopeful heading into 2018 that I’ll be able to keep up that ~2 lbs/mo improvement.

But for now, my failure to undo the damage of Q3-17 means a discount!
Update: I managed to lose some weight in 2018. As of the start of Q3, 2018, the price is up a bit, now to $229. July was off to a good start, and I’m on track for the price to go all the way back up to $299 in October!
The course is down from $299 to $229 now! (and at this rate, not for much longer!)
The ebook version of the Value of Simple is now just $6.99.

Otherwise, it’s been one of the longest-ever hiatuses here in the 19 years of BbtP. I don’t have much of a public update: things are busy in RL, and I’m trying not to stay up late blogging after everything else is done (and my brain is too broken to write anyway, whereas before it was broken in a way that I had to). I’m taking the next week off work, so hopefully I can get a few draft posts out to published status (as well as pushing the 2nd edition of VoS out the door).