Broke my no anime streak

11:40 PM

It's been several months since I watched any anime and I think my life has improved since. It's really hard to quantify though. It's all about opportunity costs. Giving up hours of my time for anime makes it so that I can't do other things during that time. The thing is, I'm not sure if what I do without it is any better. I technically could exercise on a treadmill while watching anime, and that would be pretty productive and beneficial, except that I don't have a treadmill at my parent's place. I could download some anime onto my phone and then watch it in the gym, I think that would be doable. It would be better on a tablet. Maybe I should get a tablet just for that reason alone.

Or I could just run outside for free and listen to some podcasts or audiobooks. That's what I did today. I woke up, did some work, had a meeting, and finished some work related tasks. Then at around noon, instead of eating lunch, I went out and jogged. It started raining on my way to the forest, the place where I would start jogging. It rained hard in the forest too while I was jogging. By the time I got back home, I was soaking wet. Still, it was nice to jog.

The reason I went out to jog was that my VO2 max is very low. It's extremely low, it was 40 a few days ago when I first got my Apple Watch, but it has since been adjusted 38.4 after it had new metrics from my walking workouts and exercising in the gym. That's pretty abysmal VO2 max. Walking doesn't really improve it all that much. I've sometimes walked for 4+ hours, I've sometimes walked for 12+ hours, yes really, taking 65k+ steps in one day, and my VO2 max is still really low. So that's why I need to incorporate jogging and zone 2 exercising. This is pretty much the only way to improve VO2 max. I think this, and losing weight. I am still classified as overweight.

I lost even more weight today and I weighed even less today. The scale says I weighed 182.4 pounds when I took my weight this morning. This is surprising because I calculated I ate over 3500 calories yesterday, and yet I still lost weight. It's possibly from my exercising at night. I'm not sure what else it could be. I also ate a lot of calories the day before, and still surprising lost weight still.

I like losing weight. It feels good slightly improving your appearance day by day. Weight loss is the easiest way to improve attractiveness and appearance, up to a certain point that is very hard to reach, in general the lighter the better looking. Looking like an anorexic skinny person isn't attractive, but it's very hard to reach for most people, especially if they have been overweight for most of their life. Having muscle is also good, which is why I also exercise and lift weights. It's actually extremely rare to find a guy with six pack abs today, yet I know a few vegans who do. It is also extremely rare for a woman to have six pack abs, yet I also know vegan women who have them.

I just want to lose weight to be able to see what I look like in the most attractive version of myself. It is a famous Socrates quote, "It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable," which is easier said than done. It literally takes hours and hours of exercising at the gym every day to achieve good results. At some point when you do reach good physique, you can stop working out for months and still maintain it, but it's extremely hard to reach in the first place.

It's better while I'm younger too. If I did this in my 20s I'd probably look better than if I did it in my 30s. But, it's still better to do it in my 30s than never at all. I didn't go to the gym today and I'm regretting not going because of that. I need to go every day to improve myself. Every single day.

The anime I watched today is called "I Parry Everything" and it's a refreshing anime. Unlike all the mainstream anime today, where the main character becomes overpowered just because they were born that way, this main character has no abilities, and trained every day for 14 years to achieve his skills. His main ability is parrying. He does have other skills as well, but they are rated as not being useful by everyone else, so he's not even able to participate in any combat, he's only allowed to do menial chore quests.

This main character is overpowered, but he acts humble and thinks everyone else is far stronger than him. It's funny in that way. The main character is the most powerful character in the series able to block any attack, yet because other characters can perform things he's not able to, like advanced magic spells and advanced combat spells, he treats everyone as superior even though no one can beat him. It's supposed to be a "ridiculous comedy" in that way, because the internal dialog the main character has with himself is that everyone goes easy on him, or that the strongest monsters he encounters are ordinary and that everyone else can take them down more easily than him.

Anyway, I had a good day today. After coming back home from jogging, I worked, and yeah. Then I just watched this anime and read a bit of the manga, and that's pretty much what I've done all day today.

I do enjoy the fiction works, they're all so fun and creative, but such a waste of time when I could be doing other things.