My habits changed and so did my health
The last couple of years haven't been great, health-wise. Before that, my other half had a miscarriage and years of health issues, which forced me into decisions that backfired and made me a villain to some people.
I made hard choices to trade off my health for hers, and she still doesn't know, or realizes it.
I still haven't talked about that part in full, and I've made peace with taking the heat from outsiders who judged me on incidents where I had to restrain myself from telling the real truth.
It's one of the reasons I started writing my journal out in the open. Partly to repent for mistakes, partly to restore a bit of the reputation I lost. That's a story for another time.
Right now I want to talk about my habits and my health.
I stopped blaming the location
Living as a foreigner in Taiwan is already a lot. The weather, the food culture, the small habits you don't realize you're missing until they're gone.
But I don't blame Taiwan for any of this. I have to blame myself. I let myself slide for years, and my health kept deteriorating, until one day I said fuck it, pivot, do something about it.
I'll admit I hadn't done much real work in years. It's only since 2026 that I'm properly back, building something real with Ryoka Group, focused on software, media, and eventually micro-acquisitions.
That shift in focus changed my routine. New habits followed by default. My health followed the habits.
What April this year looked like
Back in April this year, I was constantly haunted by bad sleep cycles, dehydration, headaches, and fatigue during the day.
I mentioned it once in passing on a short audio journal entry, but the truth is these symptoms had been building for years, not months.
The headaches felt nuclear. They're still there, just less often now. The dehydration came from drinking too much coffee, which is a bad habit in a hot country like Taiwan.
The bad sleep came from a lack of discipline, an inability to shut my brain off, apps or doomscrolling still finding their way in even though my phone barely has twenty apps on it.
I already lived by most of the rules of digital minimalism. It still wasn't enough to fix my health, because the problem was never really the apps. It was that I didn't have anything pulling me forward hard enough to make the discipline stick.
Finding purpose again
That changed once I went deeper into finding a new sense of purpose, one that's now partly tied to building with Claude AI. Once that clicked, the discipline came back on its own. I drink four times more water than I used to. I'm exhausted before 9 PM most nights, which sounds bad but is actually the opposite.
I wake up around 5 AM, so after dinner I don't do much of anything. An hour after eating, I'm tapping out and heading to bed. It's a small thing, but it's the first time in years my evenings have had a shape to them instead of just dissolving into screens.
The physical changes are the visible part. The real shift happened underneath. Having a purpose again didn't just give me something to do; it gave me a reason to protect my body enough to be able to do it.
My mental strength came back in pieces before my physical health did, and it dragged the physical health along behind it. That's the order it happened in for me: purpose first, discipline second, body last. I don't think I could have skipped a step.
I feel happier. That happiness is doing real work on my wellbeing, not as a side effect but as part of the mechanism.
Finding purpose gave me back some of the mental strength I'd been missing, and that mental strength is what made the physical changes possible in the first place, not the other way around.
There's more to do. I want to start taking short runs, add some real exercise, close the loop on what I'm calling my restoration.
Final word
I'm aiming to be fully healthy by the end of 2026, paired with rebuilding physical strength and body mass. That's a different story, for later.
This is the first note I've written down about my personal health that matters to me at least. I'm putting it out here in public so I can track my own progress, go deeper on the specifics later, and eventually look back and know what worked and what didn't.