The Monday Read: A cool and pleasant summer?

Losing weight seems to have an unexpected benefit

This year’s summer for some reason has seemed incredibly mild and pleasant. My wife assures me it is not so different to last year, but I haven’t felt unpleasantly hot at all so far.

My best guess is that this is because I have lost a lot of weight this year, and have spent a fair amount of time exercising outside -which probably allowed me to acclimatise gradually.

Of course, it is warm, and we do run the AC at home and at work, but I walk or cycle to work most days and it’s been glorious.

I’m not sure why I feel this way this year (usually I’m a miserable sweating mess from mid-June to mid-October) but it is very welcome.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time and money on my health this year, and have lost 11kg so far (still have 8kg to go) while putting on a fair amount of muscle and building a lot of healthier exercise and eating habits.

In a way it’s trying to correct decades of unhealthy eating and routines, so the fact that it is taking more than a year makes sense.

If you’re overweight I do recommend trying to sort it out. It is really hard but very much worth it.

My top recommendations: weigh yourself every day and use a weekly average to track your process, track your eating in terms of calories and macros (especially protein -eat more of it if you are trying to lose weight in a healthy manner), do some kind of resistance training (body weight exercises, free weights, or machines in a gym), and move more (walking, cycling, swimming).

I’ve been doing all four and they are incredibly powerful in combination. Sorting our your finances is great and all, but if you don’t have your health it is all for naught.

YouTube

Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. Once again failed to make a new video this week. Have to break this trend before it turns into a cycle!

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (36,520 posts so far). The forum rules are here. In essense, they are:

1. Be nice
2. Ask any question you like
3. Only answer questions when you have relevant knowledge or experience

Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s books

No new books this week. Really enjoying the Murakami book from last week.

This week’s links

1. Well, that is a very different story to the ‘permanent residents not paying their way’ debate: Japan’s pension system relying on foreigners to secure sufficient payments: assessment
2. Completely off topic, but I remember trips like this: Night Train Carnage in Thailand
3. I’m sure this isn’t going to go horribly wrong: ‘Our Oppenheimer moment’ — In Ukraine, the robot wars have already begun
4. It usually doesn’t: Maybe it doesn’t matter
5. Probably a good thing: Japan Inc. shows signs of faster rejuvenation
6. This was a good video. Impressed! How Tokyo Vice Actor Learned Japanese FAST
7. Be careful out there: Number of heatstroke patients in Japan jumps fourfold amid sweltering temperatures
8. Might need more attention in Japan: An encounter with disability and a call to action
9. How many more categories will be added during my lifetime I wonder: Japan adds ‘most severe’ category to its heatstroke index amid deadly summer
10. People complaining about China subsidising renewables -every country should be doing that! China building twice as much wind and solar power as rest of world
11. How long is a piece of string? How Much Money You Need For Retirement
12. This is great: Happiness Through Subtraction
13. NihonPolitics makes a welcome return: I am back! (Plus the 2024 Tokyo Gubernatorial Election)
14. Lots of detail on wage data: May Wage Data Mixed: Are Shunto Hikes Spreading to Rest of the Workforce?
15. Some of these have come down since this post, but still. Impressive: We’re so back!
16. Completely agree with this, which is why I am not using AI at all with RetireJapan: The Purpose of Things Isn’t to Stop Doing Things
17. Some of this is very similar to my experience (YouTube) without the gene thing that I know of: How I Lost 60 Pounds and Started Giving A F*ck About My Health
18. I really need to get into yoga: I spent 60 years sneering at yoga. It turns out I love it – and it does make you healthier and happier
19. AMAZING numbers in here: Fertility declines, tapering populations, soaring life expectancies: What the U.N. population report shows about us and our future on this planet
20. Found this interesting: A Subtle Rebuttal to an Energy “Realist”

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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