An Actual Personal Blog

I don't usually get too personal in my blog entries.  Usually they're about my artistic projects, or maybe about my art techniques.  You a find a lot of the latter in my Bodacious Creed blog from when I was working on my thesis.  I often came up with my own techniques in Maya and Zbrush, and shared these so that other 3D artists could try them out.

I feel like writing about a few semi-personal things today, and about what I've been up to.

Like a lot of Americans, I'm overweight.  There's a lot of information, and misinformation, about being overweight out there.  It's really tough to sort through it all.  I've been wanting to lose weight for years.  At one point, I was on Atkins for a few months, and lost about forty pounds!  Then I went off it, and of course gained all that weight back.  Well, not all of it.  I'm still fifteen to twenty pounds lighter than I was when I went on it, and about forty pounds lighter than I was at my very heaviest.

I don't remember where I read this, but I think it was in Cracked.  Basically, it said that studies have been done more or less debunking the idea that thinner people have better metabolisms than heavier people.  There are times when this is true, especially with thyroid problems.  But the studies indicated that for the most part, it's simpler than that.  Heavy people just eat more.

And I immediately thought about how my eating habits haven't changed that much since I was a teen.  Back then, I was growing, and I was active.  I could eat a lot of food.  Well, here I am in my early forties, and I feel stuffed if I eat a lot, yet I was still eating too much.

I've had a lot of moments of clarity in my life, and often they're about things that should be obvious.  So, I had this moment of clarity where I thought to myself, "You mean, if I just cut down my portions, I should lose weight?"  So yep.  I haven't changed my diet much recently.  I'm just eating smaller portions.  I've been getting a bit hungry at night, but instead of getting up for a bite, I just wait it out.  My body realizes it's time to sleep, suppresses my appetite, and I'm fine.

I'm letting my stomach shrink to a reasonable size, and just eating less.  I feel better this way, too.  I'm not getting tired in the middle of the day.  I'm not even getting that hungry.  Over the long term, hopefully this will get me down to a reasonable, healthy weight.

In about ten minutes, I'm supposed to be interviewed for a newspaper story about my Kickstarter project, "Bodacious Creed: A Steampunk Zombie Western!"  Exciting!

The other day, I added a prize to the $5 and up levels: a write-up of how I conducted my Kickstarter publicity.  The reason is that, while there's helpful information online, it could be better.  I learned a lot from a book called The Kickstarter Handbook, but of course the specifics of any campaign are unique.  That's an excellent book, by the way.  And, I figured that some of my backers might one day want to create projects of their own.

That's it for now!