published 2025-10-16 by Brad Dobson
Well, I finally decided. Minette’s been telling me for years that she was confident that once I made up my mind to make positive lifestyle changes that it would work. Three times she’s watched me go through a full year of Ironman training with a race at the end: she has had a front seat view of how determined I am when I put my mind to it … and just how stuck I am when my mind is adrift.
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
From the vantage point all of the self help books read, Youtube videos watched, journal pages written, and talks with Minette about making positive changes it seems ridiculous that I could have just decided to make a change. And there’s the years of discomfort, ill-fitting clothes, side-effects of metabolic syndrome when all that needed to happen was for me to make a mental shift.
In David Brooks’ “How to Know a Person” there is a section on people with deep, suicidal depression. My surface-level reaction is that it’s hard to understand that inability to pull yourself up … then I think about how much trouble I’ve had just committing to simple, consistent dietary and exercise changes. In no way am I comparing my plight to theirs, rather just trying to objectively view how hard it is to redirect our own minds and bodies away from comfort and a lifestyle filled with quick dopamine hits.
Minette wanted to know what was different this time after so many ideas and attempts. Apart from just being tired of feeling crappy all the time, ultimately there were two things that helped me make this shift:
One of the key exercises in “The Art of Impossible” is to identify things you are curious about and things you are passionate about, find intersections between them, and set goals that have you spending more time in those intersections. What came out of this exercise for me was that I had already done a lot of that thinking when I setup Strong99 (this blog). Things like “Writing about fitness, health, and longevity”, “Birding and hiking”, “Data tracking to aid healthy habits”, “Genealogy and how our ancestors are part of us”, and so on all came to the forefront and are all topics I have touched on in previous posts. In one way this was reaffirming in that I already knew what was right for me. In another way it forced me to look at why I wasn’t spending more time in those intersections.
Now that I’m almost a month in I’m able to see what is working and what needs work.
Energy levels and mood are up and I’m far less tired in the late afternoon.
Photo by Randalyn Hill on Unsplash
In the first few days of my decision to change I experienced random bouts of overwhelming sadness. They would pass after a minute. At first I thought maybe it was one of my standard things: a little dehydrated, normal minor depression. But after a few times I intuited that this was my 5-year-old self pushing back on the structure and the changes and the rejection of comfort. I’ve come to the realization that my mind needs to be guided with a much firmer hand, one that I have rarely used. Sometimes my mind is a 5-year-old that needs a gentle but firm push through the door into some new experience, sometimes it’s a lazy 20-year-old that needs direction and - as my Dad would say - a swift kick in the pants.
So, it’s early days but for the first time in a long while I’m hopeful. This approach is holistic with different pieces feeding off of each other. My job is to maintain curiosity, passion, and momentum.