I have a hard time unplugging my brain on vacation, and in fact have come up with some pretty wild ideas with my wife when we have time together to “unwind.” (Date Night Appetite, anyone?)
A 5 hour drive to the beach is apparently a very conducive environment for hairball ideas to percolate. Somewhere around hour three, as the family enjoyed their devices and Ween played on the radio, I started stewing on how every single YouTube video these days opens with the same two words.
“Hey guys.”
It’s everywhere. Every creator, every tutorial, every teenager reviewing a energy drink, all of them leading with “hey guys” like it’s a legal requirement, and it had been quietly driving me up a wall for years.
So I decided I’d make some videos that are nothing but that. Just me, in some random setting, looking at the camera and saying “hey guys” like I’m about to launch into something, and then not saying anything else at all. That’s the whole joke. There is no punchline, because the missing punchline is the punchline.
I figured maybe my kids would find it funny and a few people would see them. Instead, the it quickly started taking off. A few of shorts went mildly “viral” on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, and I spent a good chunk of the week watching the view counts climb, all based on a bit I came up with while stuck in traffic on I-26. You can see the ridiculousness over on my YouTube shorts if you want to understand my sense of humor.
One of the “Hey guys,” shorts.
Aside from that whole distraction, the week definitely felt like a vacation. we took five straight days of 2 hour tennis clinics in the mornings, Rachael and I enjoyed some lovely chats on the balcony over a cocktail, we soaked up the sun and surf at the beach in the afternoons, where we continued to sweat and play Pro Kadima. Riding our longboards to-and-from the tennis clinics was a fun time as well, and it made me feel like we were the cool family that knew how to ride skateboards (and one scooter) together.
It was very relaxing. I want to make that known before I tell you about what else I did.
Bogey
As someone who likes to know what I’m sharing a wifi network with when traveling, I started I realized I missed having a UI for network scanning. NMAP and ARP scans are great, but sometimes it’s nice to visualize things (I think I’ve been spoiled by wiz.io).
So I built Bogey. It’s a little macOS app that shows you a live radar of your own network, figures out what each device probably is, and tells you the second something new and unfamiliar shows up. It runs entirely on your local machine. There is no root access necessary (though some root-based features are planned), there’s nothing to log into, and nothing leaves your laptop, because I cannot think of a single good reason my network map should live on somebody else’s server.
Bogey, watching thing.
It’s real and it’s up at getbogey.app if you want to poke at it. And that’s what I call a productive, relaxing vacation.
My annual physical in early March came back with some numbers that weren’t exactly alarming, but weren’t nothing, either. Glucose at 102 when normal tops out at 99. LDL cholesterol at 133. Total cholesterol at 205, just over the 200 threshold my doctor uses as a soft line in the sand.
Me and the fluffball
Her take was something like “it’s not a crisis yet, but let’s keep an eye on it for next year.” Which is a perfectly reasonable position for a doctor to take, and a perfectly reasonable position for a patient to ignore while continuing to eat, fast food, chips and Goobers.
This time, I didn’t ignore it.
I’m not sure exactly what the difference was this time, though I am pretty certain it has something to do with the recent passing of my father, and my ensuing conscious and subconscious thoughts about mortality.
I’ve had high-ish numbers before and told myself I’d do something and then didn’t. I developed the fat tire around my belly years ago, and always wanted to do something about it, but never did. Maybe it was a combination of factors. Maybe I was just ready. Whatever the reason, I decided to actually sit down and think through what I was eating, figure out what the problems were, and build something I could follow without losing my mind.
I had tried dieting before, counting calories, getting in shape, accomplishing some successes here and there, but nothing that ever stuck and nothing that really dove into the core set of problems.
I turned to Claude for help. I know some people are going to roll their eyes at that, and I get it. But I went in with a very specific request: I don’t want to count calories, I still want to enjoy a cold beer (or two) or a cocktail (or two) on the weekends, and I want meals that actually feel like meals.
I needed a framework that addressed the actual problems while leaving enough room to live like a normal person.
Introducing The FULL Diet
What came out of that conversation with Claude is what I’ve been calling the FULL diet. It is an acronym because I apparently cannot resist a good acronym, and it is a reminder of what this diet is all about:
F is for Fiber.
U is for Unprocessed foods.
L is Lean (or Low) fats.
L is Low sugar.
Fiber, Unprocessed, Lean fats, Low sugar. FULL.
The elevator pitch is: low refined carbs, low added sugar, high protein, high fiber, healthy fats. Just swapping the junk out for things that actually do something useful. There’s no calorie counting, no macro tracking app, no points system. Just four things to keep in mind when I am standing in a grocery aisle trying to decide between two crackers.
Tequila on the rocks still clears the bar (my new go-to cocktail is a Ranch Water). Dry wine does too. The framework is clear about what the actual villains are, and a beer with my wife on a Friday isn’t one of them.
The four things I decided to actually eliminate were refined carbs, added sugar, saturated fats, and heavily processed anything. Those four categories cover most of the damage.
Specifically, white flour, anything with an “-ose” early in the ingredient list, fatty red meat and processed meat, anything with an ingredient list that goes on for three lines. If it’s got all of those things working against it, I will not be partaking.
The practical changes weren’t actually that hard once I figured out the swaps. Chips became fruit, nuts, or lentil crisps. White rice became basmati, which has a lower glycemic index, or riced cauliflower when I wanted to go further. Regular pasta became Chickapea chickpea-lentil pasta, which has 13 grams of protein and 5 grams of fiber and honestly tastes fine. Earth Balance instead of butter. Unsweetened almond milk.
I was used to a rotating cast of Girl Scout cookies, M&Ms and other things I don’t need to publicly itemize. I learned that Barebelle and Quest protein bars have a great variety of flavors that satisfy my sweet tooth cravings.
How AI Helps
I really didn’t want to have to get bogged down in calorie counting and diet apps on my phone to track my weight. Those things failed to stick in the past because they were a huge pain in the ass . Once I built out the FULL framework using Claude, I was able to quickly assess whether or not things fit my diet.
It’s as easy as taking a picture of an ingredients list on the side of a box of crackers and uploading it to Claude, or even snapping a photo of a menu or sending Claude the URL to the menu on a restaurant’s website. Claude recommends what I should eat, any substitutions I should request, and gives me options that fit the diet and are enjoyable.
It makes it really, really easy.
Success
I started at 189 pounds at the physical in March (I have been as high as 204 lbs in recent years). By mid-April, about six weeks in, I was at 178. By late April I was at 175.8. That’s 13.2 pounds in roughly seven weeks, which was not something I was expecting. I wasn’t starving myself, and I wasn’t eating tiny portions. I was just eating different things. Good things.
The tire around my belly became noticeably smaller. I felt great about that!
A few things surprised me. The dessert cravings went away around week three. They were actually gone. That was strange to notice. I’d eaten something sweet basically every night for as long as I could remember, and then one day I just didn’t want it. I don’t fully understand the why, but I’ll take it.
The other thing I didn’t expect was that my tennis elbow improved. I had been dealing with that for about six months, tried most of the standard treatments, and it had been stubbornly present regardless. Within a few weeks of changing how I was eating, it got noticeably better. The working theory is reduced systemic inflammation from cutting sugar and processed food. I can’t prove that’s what happened, but the timing is hard to ignore.
My general achiness in the mornings improved, too.
Digestion improved significantly too, which makes sense given how much fiber I added, but it’s worth saying. TMI, perhaps, but being regular is a great feeling.
To Summarize
As I write this post today, I have dropped 23 pounds and I’m at a cool 166.6. I plan to keep going and just see what happens and see where I level off, but for now, the scale keeps declining and I keep losing pant sizes. I’m feeling healthy and looking leaner than I’ve looked in many, many years. The fat tire is deflating.
My next bloodwork/physical is in March 2027. That’ll be the actual test of whether the LDL and glucose numbers came down, which was the whole point. I feel better, I have dropped a pant size (or more), and I am having to buy new clothes (a good problem to have). The data will either confirm that the food changes are doing what I think they’re doing, or they won’t.
My fourth album under the moniker Shadow Person was released yesterday. I wrote and performed all of the songs on this album, and I recorded them in my home studio. I am pretty excited about the way it turned out, and I am eager for people to hear it. The name Chronic Disappointment is derived from several areas, including my dismay at social and political events over recent years. You can hear a lot of these themes throughout the songs on this album.
But in addition to that, chronic disappointment is also the feeling I get after every album that I release, because I spend hours upon hours pouring my heart into these songs and recordings, only to have a couple dozen people at most ever listen to them. But hey, that’s okay. It’s the process, right?
Here are many links to the new album for you, to be sure you can choose the best one for your listening needs.
Rachael and I just won our first tennis tournament in the mixed doubles division for 2.5s. I only started playing tennis last year, but it’s a lot of fun. It isn’t too hard on my knees and has turned out to be a passion.
Most of my family has fallen in love with playing tennis recently, and to a slightly lesser degree, watching it. So it was exciting to find out that a benefit event had been put together, bringing four big names in tennis and a few other random celebrities to Asheville. The “Stars Servin’ Up Love” event gave us some up-close, in-person observations of what the pros are capable of, and it was quite remarkable.
On February 2, 2025, Jessica Pegula (ranked #6 in the world at the time), Emma Navarro (#9), Andy Roddick, and Andre Agassi, all showed up and played some seriously awesome tennis, even though it was just an exhibition.
The celebs in attendance, and who also played some decent tennis, included Esai Morales (of Caprica fame), Pete Wentz (Fallout Boy), Jeff Probst (Survivor), and some dude from The Daily Show named Michael Kosta (sorry, I haven’t watched that show in some years).
They raised over a million bucks that day, and much to everyone’s surprise, all of the stars involved did it completely free! Asheville is still recovering from the impacts of the hurricane, and we will be for quite some time. I still drive by the debris, missing buildings, upside-down cars, and devastation multiple times a week…over 4 months later. The whole city still has downed lines, fallen trees, and piles of debris lining the streets. It is slowly getting better, but the reminders are all still there, and the tennis event was a welcome, unifying celebration of what selflessness can do to lift spirits.
