Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

At the limit

It seems I am stuck at around 167 pounds. Conventional wisdom is that if you want to grow muscle and get stronger, you have to eat more. I’ve been eating more for this entire year, and yet I’ve been hovering at the 167 pounds mark for the past months. Still adding weight on the barbell, though, thankfully.

I guess that’s the problem with bulking: what got you to a certain weight level, won’t take you any further. My body has reached an equilibrium with my current food intake amount. To increase weight further, I must eat even more. And honestly, I am tapped out.

Because I don’t want to become the guy who is obsessed about eating. I have to remember this whole weightlifting thing is about health and longevity. It should not dominate my life. The goal isn’t to maximize muscle mass or step on a bodybuilding competition stage. To eat any more than I already am will become a chore. And it won’t be comfortable, too (all that digestion). Hard pass.

Getting fat - dirty bulk - is easy: I’d simply eat all the ice cream I could ever want, every single day. That’s not my goal, obviously. Clean bulking is incredibly difficult. To get enough calories by eating the right foods is not only time consuming (fiber and protein is not as caloric dense as a piece of cheesecake), but also expensive (cookies are cheap). There’s a limit, and I’ve personally reached mine.

At least until they figure out muscle protein synthesis in a pill. What Ozempic is to fat loss.

Two of a kind.

Rest in peace, Professor.

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away”
— Stephen Hawking

God's glory and power

“The creation of man whom God in his foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s glory and his power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man’s glory and power - But by God’s help. By His help and in his wisdom”
— Robert Penn Warren, “All The King’s Men”