jr conlin's ink stained banana

As is the case with a great many things of this nature, i blame Jeremy Zawodny.

A few years ago, he decided for various reasons (possibly due to rising fuel costs and his love of flying) that he needed to reduce his bulk. He did so, quite successfully, and blogged about it which was picked up by a number of others. Mind you, his method was the radical, cutting edge system of "eat less and exercise", but it still struck a nerve with the tech community. Possibly because he threw in a spread sheet to you could require less sheets for your spread.

Mind you, this is the exact same community that generally goes through the 3 and 4 XL sized promotional t-shirts long before the short listed mediums and smalls run out. This is a community fueled on full strength Mountain Dews, cheap pizza and Cheetos. A community where intense action can be measured in words per minute and mickeys.

Well, previously at least.

Perhaps it's just me, but there seems to be a rather interesting trend developing among the geekly. We seem to be regressing back to our high school physiques (well, without worrying about having to fit into the locker). We're foregoing the two liter bottle of Dr. Pepper as our morning "pick me up" in favor of water or black coffee. We're walking and biking more and realizing that it's better to eat smaller bits of really good food rather than a lot of junk. We're getting up away from our desks for longer than it takes to compile a library.

In other words, we're starting to pay attention to ourselves.

i've managed to drop 20 lbs (9kg) since March by cutting the pop-tarts and walking three nights out of the week. i know others who've lost more weight doing a lot more than that. It's as if we as a collective hive mind suddenly realized that being fat nerds wasn't really as much fun as we thought and decided to do something about that, and i'm not really sure i know why.

Well, other than accidentally seeing oneself in a mirror or on flickr or something.