Seven Weeks After the Post

Seven weeks ago I published “The Day I Stopped Running Aimlessly.” It was the whole story. 401 pounds. Fourteen medications. A gaming addiction I hid behind for years. A marriage I nearly destroyed. A verse from 1 Corinthians 9 that stopped me cold and became the operating system for everything that followed.

If you have not read that post, go read it first. This one will not make sense without it.

That post was the testimony. This is about what happens after.

The weight loss started in February 2025. Over thirteen months ago now. The come to Jesus moment on gaming was September 14th, 2025. Almost six months ago. The January post put it all in writing and made it public. Seven weeks later, here I am. Still in it. Still showing up. And the story looks different from the inside than it did when I first told it.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Churches love transformation stories. The before and after. The dramatic turn. The moment everything changed. And those moments are real. September 14th was real. The marriage conference was real. The first time the scale showed a number under 300 was real.

But nobody tells you about February.

February is when the adrenaline of change has worn off and the work is still there. The alarm goes off at the same time. The calorie target is the same number. The Bible study meets on the same night. The debt snowball requires the same discipline with the same paycheck. Nothing is new anymore. Everything is just continuing.

That is where faith gets tested. Not in the crisis. In the ordinary.

2 Corinthians 4:8-9 Hits Different Now

When we picked this year’s family verse, I thought it was about enduring big trials. Pressed on every side. Hunted down. Knocked down. That sounds dramatic. That sounds like a fight scene.

Seven weeks in, I realize the verse is about Tuesday.

Tuesday is when no one is watching. Tuesday is when the trainer is not expecting me and the dojo is not open and the Bible study already met. Tuesday is when the old patterns whisper. Not loudly. Quietly. Just a suggestion. Just one hour. Just this once.

“We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed.” The pressing is not a single event. It is constant low-grade resistance. Fatigue. Financial stress. The weight that still needs to come off. The debt that still needs to be paid. The business I am building that has not produced revenue yet.

Not crushed. Not destroyed. Not abandoned. But pressed? Every day.

DPE in the Grind

When I wrote about Disciplined Precision Execution in January, I described it as a framework. Discipline, precision, execution. Filter every decision through those three words.

That framing is accurate but incomplete. What I did not say is that DPE fails without prayer. I can discipline my body all day. I can aim with precision at every goal on the board. I can execute the plan with zero deviation. And if I am doing it in my own strength, I will burn out. I have burned out before. Multiple times. Every previous attempt at change died the same way. I white-knuckled it until my grip gave out.

The difference this time is not that I found better willpower. The difference is I stopped pretending I had any.

Proverbs 3:5-6. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. I leaned on my own understanding for a decade. It got me to 401 pounds and a pharmacist telling me I had three to four years left.

DPE works because it is built on surrender, not strength. I show up to the work. God sustains the showing up. That is the deal. I do not always feel it. I do not always sense some spiritual presence guiding my meal prep or my K&R exercises. But I trust the process because the process is obedience, and obedience is not contingent on feeling.

What Seven Weeks Looks Like

The weight is 289 now. Twelve more pounds off since January. That is slower than the early months. That is expected. The body adapts. The discipline stays the same.

The debt snowball has taken out eight accounts since January. Still in survival mode through April. The math says a breakthrough comes around May. I am trusting the math and trusting the One who made the math work this far.

Fifteen consecutive days of writing on this blog. Every single day. Not because anyone is reading. Because I said I would. DPE. Execution means you finish.

The MBA has two classes and a capstone left. Targeting June. Not rushing. Not stalling. Precise.

Iaido training continues twice a week at the dojo with Noelia and our daughter, plus two mini sessions at home working on form. We had a break this month because the whole family got sick. That is the kind of interruption that used to kill a habit for me. Not this time. We are ready to get back into it. We are past the phase where every session feels completely foreign. Now we are in the phase where we can feel how much we do not know. That is a different kind of uncomfortable. A productive kind.

The Temptation That Did Not Leave

I sold the PS5 in September. Deleted every game. Cancelled every subscription. That was nearly six months ago.

The temptation did not leave with the hardware.

It adapted. It found new surfaces.

I have gaming accounts going back to 1998. Accounts I forgot existed. Accounts that sat dormant for years on platforms I stopped using. Then they started getting hacked. Password reset emails showing up from services I had not touched since the early 2000s. And I could not just ignore them. They have my personal details. My email. My name. Payment information from a decade ago. When an account gets compromised, I have to go in, recover it, lock it down, and figure out how to delete it entirely.

Except deleting gaming accounts is hard. Some platforms make it nearly impossible. So I am logging into these old accounts, seeing the libraries, seeing the friends lists, seeing the history of a habit that almost cost me everything. And the pull is right there. Familiar. Comfortable. Just for a minute.

Then I set up IRC for work communication and discovered MUDs still exist. Text-based multiplayer games running on telnet. No graphics. No PS5. Just text on a screen. And my brain immediately started building the justification. This is different. It is text. It is social. It is not really gaming.

It is exactly gaming. Different outfit. Same escape.

My wife has access to all my email accounts. That is not a punishment. That is a guardrail I asked for. So when a password reset email comes in from some account I created in 1998, she sees it. And she asks what is going on. And I have to answer honestly. When I recovered one of those old accounts, the email from the hackers showed up first, then my recovery confirmation right after. She saw both. That conversation was not fun but it was necessary.

The accountability is the point. Sin hidden is sin growing. I gave Noelia visibility into everything because I know what I do in the dark. I spent years proving I cannot be trusted with unsupervised access to my own escape routes.

What Faith Looks Like in the Middle

The temptation piece is connected to something bigger. Faith is not a straight line upward. There are days I do not open the Bible. Days where the devotional sits untouched. Days where I let two or three mornings slip and the guilt starts compounding.

The old version of me would spiral at that point. Miss two days, feel like a failure, give up for a month. Shame became its own excuse to quit.

The new version picks it back up. Not because the guilt went away. Because repentance is not about being perfect. It is about turning around. Again. As many times as it takes.

When the sin affects my family, or when I have hidden something, the process is the same. Confess it. To God first. Then to Noelia. Then to our daughter when it touches her. Ask for forgiveness. Not in a vague “sorry about everything” way. Specifically. Name what I did. Own what it cost. Ask to be forgiven and mean it.

That is harder than any workout. Harder than any K&R exercise. But it is the core of what changed. I stopped managing my image and started telling the truth. To God, to my wife, to my daughter.

1 Corinthians 10:13. “The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure.”

The way out is usually boring. It is usually just closing the browser, picking up the Bible, and doing the next right thing. But sometimes the way out is a hard conversation with your wife at the kitchen table about an email she just saw.

Why I Am Writing This

The KNR posts will keep coming. Chapter 2 starts tomorrow. The tech side of this blog is not going anywhere.

But Tyrminal says “faith, fitness, and the occasional tech rant” and for fifteen days it has only been tech. That was not the plan. The plan was the whole person, because DPE is about the whole person.

The January post told the story of hitting bottom and turning around. This post is about what the road looks like after the turn. It is not dramatic. It is not a highlight reel. It is showing up on a Tuesday when no one is watching and doing the next right thing.

That is the faith part. Not the sermon. Not the conference. Not the come to Jesus moment. The Tuesday.

Pressed on every side. Not crushed. That is the promise. Showing up is the response.