I also lost 35% body mass, from 318-208 today. It took from September 2024 to beginning of January 2026.
1) amazing, I can actually do things now. I didn’t realize how much I was resting and just not doing anything around the house. I managed to do my work with stimulants but that’s about it.
2) I did a scan and am currently around 110% for with 100% being the baseline for the average male my age, for my muscle mass. I did lose more muscle mass in the 230-210 loss than most of the previous, but I think that’s because I couldn’t ride my bike everywhere as it’s winter time. I had to chug protein shakes while losing weight and do physical therapy for a few body parts, especially my hip and my shoulders as they were easy to hurt. Going to the gym regularly solved this long term.
3) I guess I answered question 2
4) I’m now 27.1 BMI, although my percent body fat is only 18.9%, so I’m not concerned about the number since I have access to a body scanner and can see I’m fine. My visceral fat levels have dropped below concerning levels, which is great.
I also sleep way better, and the heartburn I thought was just a part of life went from “literally every day” to “once or twice a year, and only if I do something I shouldn’t have”.
I was also way more aggressive about just going to the dose and hit 15mg in April of 2025, and have stayed there. I might go for another 10 pounds mostly out of vanity.
> the heartburn I thought was just a part of life went from “literally every day” to “once or twice a year, and only if I do something I shouldn’t have”.
I feel this, too. I was on Prilosec indefinitely, gastroenterologist said I have a mild hiatal hernia and that I'll probably be stuck on PPIs forever. But after losing a lot of weight, I was able to switch to occasional Pepcid instead, with Prilosec temporarily if I get tolerant to the Pepcid. The hernia won't heal itself, but taking the pressure off has really reduced the GERD symptoms.
Not the original guy, but down 32%, for a point of comparison:
1) Amazing, like being a decade and a half younger
2) Not before, planning one in the next couple months, but I use skinfold and impedance and they say I've dropped from about 48% to ~20% as I've dropped from 272 to 186, lean mass seems maybe 5kg lower than I started with? Less lean mass loss than I expected.
3) Weight bearing exercise and medium-high protein intake (>80g/d)
4) Per above, starting BMI 37.9 -> ending BMI 25.9
Your stats are very similar. I started at something like 274 (though my overall highest point ever was 284 a couple years ago) and now I'm down to 181. It's a huge difference, as you say it's like being 15-20 years younger. Life changing.
To add my own anecdata, it took me a bit over a year (September 2024 to December 2025) to lose the weight. I averaged about 1.5 pounds a week consistently.
1. I feel wonderful. Things that were hard are now easy, exercise is invigorating instead of exhausting.
2. I have not. Considered it, but locally the scans are expensive and I could not convince myself what I'd do differently if I knew the numbers. My goals would stay the same.
3. I lift weights, but there's no way around it, losing a lot of weight means caloric deficit and I have definitely lost some mass. I'm trying to establish a slight caloric surplus now combined with a heavier focus on lifting-for-growth to see if I can claw back some of what I've lost. I got big enough at my largest (and I am just over 50 years old, which does not help) that now I have a little bit of loose skin on my belly, thighs, and upper arms ... I'm hoping that if I can regain some muscle that I can alleviate much of that. Otherwise I'll get a surgeon to do it.
4. Currently at 25.2. Could lose some more, but happy enough where I'm at and my test results are spectacular now, so I am no longer targeting further weight loss. I still weigh myself but I am now refocusing my definition for success in how I look and feel.
Re the Amazon card, it used to be offered through Synchrony Bank (I think I got the name right). I had a lot of weird issues with them and their customer service was very difficult to get ahold of and were terrible once you did. I ended up canceling the card.
That’s the Amazon Store Card, which (at least used to) only works on Amazon.com.
The Prime credit card is issued by Chase. I closed mine and stopped patronizing Amazon.com around the time Bezos started meddling with the Washington Post, so I may be out of the loop on how things work now.
I also think that many people don’t know - I would wager for men that a significant percentage of them do not go to see a doctor preventively unless injured or sick and not that may know their blood pressure or cholesterol trends
Thanks for sharing this and empowering others to improve their heart health outcomes.
I’m not in love with the idea of sharing my biomarkers with multiple health-tech companies and really want a self-hosted solution to import biomarkers from multiple sources such as Apple Health, arbitrary csv and jsons while avoiding duplication.
Claude Code is something that will make this dream a reality for me pretty soon.
Do you have any tips on biomarker data design or import gotchas?
The thing that took the most time was normalizing biomarker names and units across labs. Even for the same lab chain (say, Quest), you'll get the same biomarker with slightly different names (e.g., Lp(a) vs Lipoprotein(a) vs Lipoprotein a) or units (e.g., cells/uL vs 10^9/L).
Thanks for sharing this — amazing resource and resembles my experience with US health care.
I recently asked my doctor at Stanford - a pretty expensive hospital but one of the top cardio hospitals in the country - to get me an APoB test. He said that it may not be covered by insurance.
So instead I spend $360 or so on a year worth of biomarkers from Function Health that included ApoB and others
Hamas and Islamic Jihad shooting thousands of rockets before, during and after October 7 massacre is documented[1] by Wikipedia (that does have documented anti-israel bias[2])
When does this cease to justify any possible retribution? How many murdered palestinian children, or emergency workers, or aid workers balances this out? How much torture of prisoners?
Sorry but doesn't fly. Also Islam has nothing to do with Palestinian resistance. This theme of "Palestinians and Muslims are all Jihadists and all seek to kill Jews" is also getting really really old.
2026 will bring more enlightenment to the masses. Also, Israel loves messing with wikipedia as it has done for years.
Can you refute anything the article about thousands of rockets launched by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad says?
As another poster said the name of the terrorist group (that you call palestinian resistance) is Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You can take it up with them why they decided to associate Jihad with Islam and Palestine.
Hamas - an organization designated as terrorist by my country - another entity that you refer to as Palestinian resistance - is an offshoot of Muslim Brotherhood and is a fundamentalist Islamist organization that has documented history of targeting civilians since its inception, including killing hundreds of dancing kids/young adults at the Nova festival on October 7
Please dispute the facts with something more solid that this doesn’t fly
Indeed, Abu Zaydeh is well aware that for the past two years the
Hamas leadership had been talking about implementing "the
last promise" (alwaed al'akhir) – a divine promise regarding
the end of days, when all human beings will accept Islam.
Sinwar and his circle ascribed an extreme and literal meaning
to the notion of "the promise, " a belief that pervaded all their
messages: in speeches, sermons, lectures in schools and
universities. The cardinal theme was the implementation of the
last promise, which included the forced conversion of all
heretics to Islam, or their killing.
In a large organization with hundreds of business-critical Java applications you can bring them all up to one version at once.
It’s quite normal to have multiple versions of JDK being used by different applications
It's not only normal, it is completely to be expected. Even if you have only one project, there will come a time when one branch will be used to test the jump from 17 to 24 or something like that, so you'll work on that, but also switch back to the master branch when a colleague needs some help there.
sdk use java xxx
And done. A new LTS is released? Just sdk install it. Set the one you use most as default, and focus on the project instead of managing JDKs.
Oh, and very occasionally you'll actually get hit by a bug within one Java major version (like when they removed historic offsets from the timezone database included in the JVM, that was fun). At that point being able to switch between minor versions easily is quite nice.
> there will come a time when one branch will be used to test the jump from 17 to 24 or something like that, so you'll work on that, but also switch back to the master branch when a colleague needs some help there.
But can you not just install 24 on your dev box and use that to work on either branch, maybe with -source/-target arguments? It never used to be a problem to develop with a newer JVM even if it was an older project.
Note: Java compiler versions from 9 onwards have lost the ability to -target 1.5 and earlier.
Sometimes you still need Java 8 to compile for super old programs — think decades old IoT devices too small to handle newer JVMs that you still need to do the occasional minor update for.
But really sdkman is just nice to be able to quickly install and quickly switch jvms without worrying about any opinions the os package manager may have. If I want an old jre8, do I need to fuss around with finding the right package repo for my arch etc, or should I just use sdkman and be done with it.
Ideally, yes. In the real world? Nope. The longer you work one some project, the bigger the chance you will run into some edge case determined by the major version of the JDK. It just happens.
Even if you do all developing on the latest LTS, you will want to be able to switch to whatever version is running on the dev or prod application servers to replicate a bug as closely as possible.
By the way, you are ignoring the case I mentioned where a JDK bug happened between one minor version and the next.
> Even if you do all developing on the latest LTS, you will want to be able to switch to whatever version is running on the dev or prod application servers to replicate a bug as closely as possible.
Occasionally, sure. But is it really frequent enough to worry about?
> By the way, you are ignoring the case I mentioned where a JDK bug happened between one minor version and the next.
I am, because I don't see why it's a case you'd worry about. Just install the version without the bug.
I mean sure, I can see some minor advantages to making it easy to change JDK versions. But for how often you want to do that, it really doesn't seem worth the overhead of having another moving part in your setup.
Just install the version without the bug? Have you never developed software in a company?
Sometimes the JDK version you are targetting cannot be changed at that time, for a variety of reasons, most beyond your control.
Sometimes the JDK contains or triggers a bug you need to workaround and test in various minor versions.
Sometimes you need to switch to the exact minor version used in production.
Often you need to switch JDKs even within a single project, more often with several projects.
In the years that I've used SDKMan the number of times I invoked it to switch JDK versions in a terminal was more than once on hundreds of days (along with hundreds of days where whatever I set it to was fine for weeks on end). All painless, quick, and easy. Why wouldn't anyone involved in developing Java in a corporate setting make life easier on themselves? Those are not 'minor advantages', those are major time and mental overhead savers. It's a trivial tool to install and maintain too with almost no overhead for me to worry about. And if it breaks? Then the last version I configured will just keep working, and I can spend maybe half an hour to set up an alternative. That hasn't happened yet, so for a tool I've been using for a decade or so, that's pretty good.
I've hit JVM bugs in my professional career, sure. I just don't see the scenario where you'd need to be switching back and forth more than occasionally.
If you're running x.0.3 in production, you'd run x.0.3 locally. If there's a JVM bug that your application hits on x.0.3, either it's a showstopper in which case you'll find a way to upgrade/fix production quickly, or it's something you can tolerate, in which case you can tolerate it in local dev too. If you decide it's time to upgrade to x.0.4, you'd upgrade to x.0.4 locally, test a bit, then upgrade to x.0.4 in production. What's the scenario where you need to keep switching between x.0.3 and x.0.4 locally? You upgraded application Y to x.0.4, then discovered that application Z hits a showstopper bug and needs to stay on x.0.3? That's not a situation that you let fester for months, you either fix or work around the bug pretty quickly, or you decide that x.0.4 is too buggy and put everything back to x.0.3, and for that short period sure theoretically you would want to develop application Y under x.0.4 but the risk of developing it under x.0.3 is pretty damn small.
I get the argument that the cost is pretty low. It's just this is addressing something that really doesn't feel like a problem for me, and something that I don't think should be acceptable for it to be a problem. The JVM always used to be something you could upgrade almost fearlessly, and I think there was a lot of value in that.
I've been lucky enough that the large organisations I worked for generally had policies and enforcement to ensure that all applications were kept current. It's more initial effort but it pays dividends.
But even if you don't have that, most people work on at most a handful of apps at a time, and again I would defer checking against a specific version to CI most of the time rather than switching around which JVM I'm using locally, unless your code was very tightly coupled to JVM internals somehow.
This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with.
Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart
The price of clean water is at least an order of magnitude less than the price of electricity, but the cost of creating a water grid is probably more expensive than the electricity grid.
You will notice that many of the countries with unsafe tap water also have electricity reliability problems. If the economics of electricity don't work, then the economics of safe water don't work at all.
I don't think there's any conspiracy like this. It's just economic + (lack of) beauracracy. Installing and maintaining a functioning potable water supply across an entire country is expensive, but even harder is setting and maintaining standards.
I traveled often between Jakarta and Japan in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The real breath of fresh air for me was literally the fresh air back in Japan. After running around for a week through Jakarta, I would inevitably develop a deep cough and a clogged nose. That said, the people, the food, and as someone else pointed out the nightlife is amazing.
Somebody I know had asthma while she lived in Jakarta. It went away when she moved to Europe. I really liked Jakarta, but the air quality is one of the reasons why I won't go back again.
Run the pve8to9 script first to do some sanity checks (it should already be installed if the system is up to date).
Update the box to latest 8.x with apt update etc. Change the package sources to the new ones and update the system.
The packages databases can be a bit confusing: You have two lots - stock Debian and Proxmox (enterprise OR no-subscription).
Stock Debian is in the single file /etc/apt/sources.list - change "bookworm" to "trixie".
Proxmox sources is in a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ Remove all of the Proxmox related ones you have there and run this (or do it yourself with an editor). This example is no-sub - the official doc notes the enterprise equivalent:
Run apt dist-upgrade then the pve8to9 script again and then reboot. If in doubt choose Y for install the maintainer's version when prompted. There are notes in the doc about several packages.
I just followed their guide last week and was surprised how smooth it went. Their documentation seemed very thorough. I kinda expected a few issues, but everything worked flawlessly. Seems like they do a pretty good job of detecting most of the edge cases that would cause issues. Granted, my installation hasn’t been modified too heavily outside the norm. I think I had one or two modified config files I had to edit, but the helper script found and told me about them and how to handle it.
I had put off the upgrade for a while figuring it would be a breaking change. But it went so smoothly I’ll probably be upgrading to 9.1 pretty soon.
Quite. Its almost as though the docs are written by people who actually use it.
I was (still am sadly) a VMware consultant for about 25 years. It makes me laugh when I hear breathless "enterprise noises" with regards VMware and how PVE isn't quite ready yet.
PVE is just so easy and accommodating. It's Linux on Debian with a few nobs on. The web interface is so quick and uncluttered and simple. The clustering arrangements are superb and simple. The biggest issue for me and many like me was how to deal with iSCSI SANS (no snapshots - long story) It turns out you can pull the SSDs out of a Dell Msomething SAN and wack them into the hosts and you have a hyperconverged Ceph thingie with little effort.
VMware rapidly gets very expensive. Nowadays with Broadcom you have to fork out for the full enterprise thing to get DRS and vDS - that's auto balancing clusters and funky networking. PVE gifts you Open vSwitch support out of the box and all clusters are equal. Storage DRS (migrate virty hard discs on the fly) is free on PVE too. Oh and you get containers too on PVE - VMware Tanzu is seriously expensive.
Anyway, I could grind on about this for quite some time but in my opinion, PVE is a far better base product in general for your VMs. A vCentre is a horrendous waste of resources and the rest of VMware's appliances are pretty tubby too. I recall evaluating their first efforts at SDN with edge firewalls and so on - no thanks!
I had an experiment with vmware to build our next iteration of kubernetes platform, and they were asking why we used rancher and things like that, they got very frustrated when I was trying to do anything with their product and needed to sign up or sign in to a billion things, which I got frustrated and said ‘this! this id why we went with rancher, because there was no friction!’
too bad SUSE is doing the rancher prime stuff now as well.
The whole point (from a savvy business perspective) is throw money at the hardware and throw experience at the software.
In the end, Proxmox is based on KVM and KVM does run a workload or two across the world. VMware isn't KVM and I watched both be born and grow up oh and I should mention Xen but I can't be arsed. Most of the rest are Johnny come latelys.
If I need a massive cloud then I'll go all in on K8s or whatever and get my orchestration hat on big time but for my needs and my customer needs, PVE is more than enough, whilst being just enough.
My homelab upgrade from 8.x to 9.x was pretty smooth from following their upgrade guide[1]. I just upgraded from 9.0 to 9.1 this morning without any issues.
For what it’s worth I went through the upgrade last weekend. There is a compatibility check script and, frankly, the whole process proxmox had described on their site worked precisely as advertised.
5 host cluster; rebooted them all at completion and all of the containers came back up without issue (combination of VMs and LXC)
1) How is your energy/stamina following the 35% loss
2) Have you done any dexascans/bodyspecs to measure your lean mass percentage before and after your loss
3) Did you take any steps to reduce the muscle loss?
4) with 35% loss, what BMI are you at?
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