Month: April 2009

Always look at the bright side of life!

As most of the people that know me, I was against of the choice of git as the DVCS for GNOME. I still find kind of unfortunate that we went for that choice for reasons that I have already stated on this blog.

However, I must say that the activity around the migration, and the prospects of lots of branches with really cool stuff already getting their way into the main repositories is actually really cool. Also, the quality of the documentation that is getting on live.gnome.org/Git is actually really good for the most important usecases and the sysadmin team is doing a great job (with the subsequent improvement of the overall sysadmin situation).

So it’s turning out that what looked to me to be not the best decision, has a lot positive side effects. Don’t overlook the benefits of community excitement for the sake of other abstract criteria. Kudos to everyone involved in the migration.

Milestone #1: 100Kg

As I mentioned a while ago, I have committed myself to spend a considerable amount of time a week doing sport.

When I came to Dublin, I was 122kg, having a more regular life, going work everyday at more or less the same time, healthy food at the canteen at 12, the decrease of my social life due that I was suddenly in a foreign country with not enough grasp on the language to feel confident enough to start building friendships around, food being expensive as it is in Dublin… all these factors helped me to lose around 10 kgs in a few months.

But all that sudden weight loss was not without a trade off, I was not doing sport at all and thus, losing muscle mass. My back was in high pain for a while out of that. I remained 112 for a while, until August last year when Carlos, my house mate, encouraged me to go out and start jogging and doing some abs, push ups and other stuff, we were following this program to be able to run 5km in 12 weeks. I was taking it very easily since it's been since I was 16 that I stopped doing any sport.

Then autumn came, afternoons were cold and dark, and Carlos and I decided that it was time to switch indoor. We were now in a gym. I must confess that the idea to go to a gym made me kind of hesitant, I kind of thought that it was a placed crowded by good-looking-zombies and people obsessed with their bodies. Also, committing myself to go to the same place, a few times a week, during my college years was something that I didn't want to do. How wrong I was.

I started at the gym on November with a 110kg weight, I've been going three times a week and also playing soccer on thursdays with some mates at Sun, I've been trying to be careful with food, but not too much, I took candy everytime I was really starving about one, but I wouldn't take one if I knew it was only for the sake of the good taste. I removed fries from my diet and switched to mashed potato or rice. I stopped taking bread on every lunch. And on the weekends I would have any dish I wished, just to make the rest of the week more pleasant.

Today I'm 100 kg and I feel better than ever. The reason I wrote this post is that I want to encourage people with overweight to forget all the excuses they might make up in their minds, yes, it takes effort and time, but when you start seeing the results, it gets much easier, and at the end of the day, for every 40 mintues you spend doing sport, you may well be extending your lifetime.

The so called before/after snapshot:

Next stop: 90kgs!