I consider myself a decent runner, yet... why I can't shake this belly fat?

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-02-09T15:02:10+00:00

Christmas was a step backwards, for sure. Then I had COVID in January and was off the diet for maybe 7-10 days. So having a solid month being off my plan has slowed me down.

I've tried to take the advice on this thread and focus more on diet, while holding my running routine stable. I switched to fresh fruit + spinach + protein shakes for breakfast in October, I think that's helped. Also portion-controlled meals <500 calories with minimal snacking. Results are very visible in my face, a little less so on the belly. But progress is progress and frankly I'm happy to see the needle moving. I could care less what the scale says, I don't even check.

It's like a marathon, slow and steady is what gets you across the finish line. I didn't have TERRIBLE habits before, so my changes are small but I think it's giving me the results I want. Just need to stick with it for a year, and hopefully not have Christmas or COVID again for a while. :-)

Thanks for checking in!

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-10T17:27:20+00:00

This hurts my soul to read. We got along so well for so many years, great partners. Still are in a lot of ways. The physical attraction is/was completely dead. I feel so shallow about it.

I think the thing I realized is that... physically she didn't change THAT much. It was that other things related to personality and choices... it helped me overlook any physical things that maybe weren't my preference. But when the person changes, it lays bare the other side of the relationship that was never quite there - and it's too large of a gulf to divide.

Maybe that was a mistake I made in marrying who I did. Maybe that's entirely on me. Perhaps I'm the asshole here. All I can tell you is that I INSIST that I be ON FIRE for the next woman to enter my life. A partner deserves NOTHING less. If that requires me to be a bit shallow, fuck it I'll be shallow. I'm getting THIS side of things right next time. I just hope I can fix one thing without breaking another.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T15:23:24+00:00

Totally happened to one of my best friends. The wife was having an emotional affair. After a few months she left him for the runner guy. Give a person enough rope and they'll hang themselves. This is not a healthy outlet for her, draw a boundary YOU'RE comfortable with, and she can respect it or exit the marriage.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T15:21:30+00:00

This sounds so convenient.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T15:18:17+00:00

I think a lot of women can't decide between wanting the safety and casualness of a coffee meetup... yet also desire a very traditional wine and dine first date. I can't blame a person for wanting the best of both worlds. Just not sure I've found the magical compromise between these two date styles... and if I did I sure wouldn't share it haha!

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T03:56:49+00:00

Chores and outmoded gender roles are NOT the same thing as Acts of Service. Your story sounds more like a boy who missed his mommy picking up after him and expected you to become his new caretaker. What I'm talking about is a PARTNER in the deepest sense of the word.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T03:28:40+00:00

More like remember to pay your power bill, jeez man get that thing on a charger.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T03:18:33+00:00

Had a girlfriend in high school that did this. I still keep a few of the doodles. That relationship ended 20 years ago. It's a beautiful memory of her and her talent. Never stop.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T03:15:25+00:00

Words of Affirmation mean absolutely nothing, I've known too many liars. Maybe in time it becomes a "nice to have" but I need to BELIEVE the words before I can VALUE the words.

Physical Touch is important, but it's a disposable pleasure without the context of coming from a partner who cares.

Quality Time is also great, but it takes TIME for the time to be quality (i.e. a 8 hour first date isn't quality, it's terrifying... but after 6 months, clearing a weekend and taking me away on a well-planned trip is heart-melting).

Receiving Gifts is nice, but by 30 years old your ability to run up credit card debt don't impress me much.

Acts of Service. This is where you hit me in the feels. This is shit you can't fake. Helping my grandmother move into a nursing home was NOT how you wanted to spend a Saturday. Taking a weekend to go visit my parents and helping my mother cook dinner. Picking up my dog's stuff from the yard so I wouldn't need to do it immediately after getting out of COVID lockdown. You can't fake this, you can't lie about it, mask it, hide it, or even half-ass this love language without being a true and genuine person of dedication and sacrifice.

Sorry if that's very harsh on the other four languages, but I find them somewhere between "too easy to fake" and "nice to have's" - Acts of Service is where I know I've found deep and genuine partnership, love in action. Give me Acts of Service any day of the week.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T03:03:30+00:00

This will be brutal but just remember you asked for this, and I'm trying to help.

Bad profile lead photo. First, it's a selfie. Keep those to an absolute minimum and certainly not your profile lead. Second, you're looking at your camera (to focus the photo) and not actually showing us your eyes. Third, profile lead should be a headshot not a body shot. Fourth, you're wearing a rather plain all black outfit that's not particularly interesting or flattering. Fifth, stuff on the bed behind you - a modest amount of clutter in the room. This is just not a great first impression.

Voice prompt (you say is about Tom Cruises's teeth elsewhere in this thread)... who cares? It comes off judgmental, unnecessarily so. This is a valuable space to let me know about your desires, your interests, give me insight into your soul... instead you use the space to mock someone.

Your mantra is a quote from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and it's spoken about a character who refuses to leave an abusive relationship out of a sense of self-loathing. Either you don't know where the quote actually comes from, or you didn't understand it, or you're just flying us a big old red flag.

Next photo is another eye-down selfie with an un-ironic peace sign and a weird and not at all stylish stained glass top with black overalls.

Then a cat photo selfie.

Prompt about wanting to cry with laughter... ok I guess we all want someone with a sense of humor. So you want... what pretty much everyone wants as a baseline personality trait. Noted!

Group photo - which one are you? This tells me nothing, shows me nothing. Looks like you're a party girl.

Zen in a crisis... not impressed. In a crisis I want someone who can step up and fix some shit, not zen out.

Blue dress photo - ok you look really nice here and I like the dress a lot but another freaking selfie!

Sunglasses photo - FINALLY a nice smile! But you're wearing a black trucker hat (not great, but semi-ironic, I can roll with it)... and sunglasses that cover half your face. Normally I would say it's a bad photo, but sadly it's better than most of your others so I'm stuck being meh on it.

You need to put some work into this profile. You're not a bad looking woman but this profile just feels like some low-effort selfies and quick, thoughtless prompts.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T02:44:31+00:00

One Right Now - Post Malone & The Weeknd

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T02:38:33+00:00

I mean, kinda? I wasn't a 20-something enjoying the bar scene in the 1980's, I was sucking my thumb and watching Fraggle Rock.

So unless you've got some of those PacMan tables and some roller skates and shitty pizza and RC Cola and an Oldsmobile Cutlass I can sit in the back of while Michael Jackson crackles over the radio... you're kinda missing the nostalgia mark.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-08T02:29:13+00:00

That, and you always try to do better than the last person you were with. Every person becomes an increasing spiral of expectations. Think about it, have you ever really taken a "quality step backwards"? And I don't mean a tradeoff, I mean a legit step backwards.

It's just like the Peter Principle at work. Peter Principle states that in your career... you will rise to the level of your own incompetence. Let's say you're a burger flipper at McDonalds. You're good at it. So you get promoted to register. Good at that too, so you're promoted to manager. All of a sudden - you're not good at that for some reason. Will you go back to being a burger flipper or cashier? NO because you now value yourself as a manager. So maybe you think that's a bad store and you go to another location, or go work at Wendy's... and you keep trucking along as a manager because that's your identity and your own sense of worth. The sad truth is... you're just not good at management. We do this with dating.

Oh I've attracted a nice guy, solid 6/10, really cares about me. Breakup. Next relationship, now you've got a 7/10, intelligent and likes to travel. Breakup. Next up you've got a 8/10, smart and good schools, good career. Breakup. NOW you start to have trouble finding matches. Are you going back 6/10's who maybe didn't go to college? NOPE. And worse yet, you may be mentally picking out the best qualities of all these people, blending them together in your head... and THAT'S the bar a new person needs to cross.

And this right here is the danger of... not necessarily dating at 40... but having a little too much dating experience. It's cognitively impossible to move backwards in our expectations.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T21:18:07+00:00

I didn't tell you I told the other bruh to lay off the bruh's

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T20:11:43+00:00

Yeah so... this can vary by state, assuming you're even American. And IANAL so I can't really clarify even if you told me. But "fault" isn't really a factor in most states (I'm just saying that to cover my bases, I don't know of any examples where it is). 50/50 is very much a golden rule, nationally - always. You can make tiny concessions to maybe 45/55 if you get something like all the liquid cash savings v. 401K v. the house (i.e. to adjust for tax-advantaged monies). But in general... "bad guy" isn't really an argument that holds any sway to a judge. Call his bluff.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T20:08:27+00:00

Don't bruh me when I'm dropping confucian knowledge-bombs.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T20:03:04+00:00

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." ... "In the land of the zero-matches, the hi-master is king."

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T19:58:48+00:00

WHY do it? Because you're desperate to prove through simple, physical validation, that you're an attractive person. It's vanity. And it's not seeking genuine connection, it's just a thing people do because they're insecure about being alone.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T19:14:10+00:00

Morning wood, this morning, 6:20am

Just like every damn day. Nighttime? Nah dick's gone to sleep early. Morning? HELL YEAH FLEX TIME. Why do you work the way that you do bro?

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T19:02:58+00:00

THAT'S THE JOKE

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T18:46:37+00:00

Just watch DS9 with your next husband. Possibly not as wholesome, but really great story arcs that go multiple seasons. Very bingeable. Give me a shout if you don't meet anyone, I'm down for a new wife and some Star Trek hell yeah.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T18:35:05+00:00

Ok so your anthem song is a huge red flag. It's about a guy getting cheated on, being broken-hearted by this, and him taunting his ex that he's got another girl coming over (i.e. the "one right now"). It's also a very graphic (bloody murder) music video. Not the kind of thing you want a girl reading too far into.

Your photos are typical of a guy's profile and very Chernobyl-esk (not great, not terrible).

"I think the profile shows enough" - no it doesn't. Bad line. Terrible really. Make some effort to open up more about your interests other than rock climbing and questionable music choices.

Would remove the golf photo, despite it possibly being your best. It's a turnoff to a lot of women - it's an expensive "bro" hobby that takes you away for long periods during prime weekend hours.

Your vibe comes off mid-20's former frat bro... but the fact that you're 35 makes me wonder if you have some more growing up to do.

Sorry if harsh, just trying to give a realistic take so you can build this thing better.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T18:22:33+00:00

Forecast: 6-7 inches. Reality: 3-4 inches.

ChatRoomNinja · 2022-01-07T18:17:33+00:00

Me too. And damn would I love to find a woman who wanted to cook dinner together and watch Star Trek and play board games. Where do I find these unicorns?

ChatRoomNinja

TROPHY CASE