BLOG: Numbers go down :( and Numbers go down :)

Hello.

Now that the dust has settled a bit I hope you all enjoyed Sallas. Yesterday I started posting "The Cuckolding of Baby Anthony" and I hope the first part has whet your appetite for more!

I have two things I wanted to discuss and they are both numbers based. Before I say anything else I just want to make sure all of you know that what I am about to say ISN'T a complaint about any of you. You're all wonderful to support me and thanks to you guys and gals I'm able to pay bills and buy food. So thank you very much!

However, I just want to talk about numbers and how they can affect a creator such as myself. We live on numbers and it is very easy to become obsessed by them. Seeing likes, comments and new patrons is a big boost whenever it happens. Seeing people enjoy your work and the number of patrons and amount pledged rise is a great motivator. But the flipside is true as well...

Last month was a tough one for me financially. Believe it or not my payout at the start of this month was down 25% on last month. Which is a big chunk of money! Now I want to reiterate that I'm not trying to browbeat people into giving me more, you're all fantastic, the problem is with me. I'm aware of some of the reasons why perhaps last month my Patreon underperformed and it's no one's fault but my own.

This isn't just me wanting to moan about that though. I was more interested in discussing how goalposts are shifted so that you never really achieve happiness. It happens to me and I'm sure it happens to a lot of others as well. There was a time where for maybe a full year I had about 80 patrons and it seemed like that was my ceiling. I was happy with that, always trying to push myself to grow but accepting that there's only a finite number of ABDLs in the world.

Then my Patreon experienced a surge and I started getting around 150 patrons for a year or so and that felt great. But now knowing I hadn't hit the ceiling I continued to try and grow whilst writing better content. Suddenly the time that I had previously considered a success didn't feel like it so much as I wanted those numbers to go up. 

For the last few months I have been hovering a lot around 200 patrons. Again, I'm stunned by how many people want to support me and I continue to look to grow...

So when my patron count falls over a month it suddenly feels like panic stations even though where I'm at is massively higher than what I previously considered a success.

In other words... If you spend too much time looking at the numbers you can miss the forest for the trees. If you look at small drops you miss the bigger picture which shows how far you have come. I think this is a fact in a lot of different areas in life. Maybe you're trying to build up savings and one month you end up having to take a little out to pay some bills, or you're working on improving your golf game but one day you take ten strokes more than usual, or you're playing a video game and you're trying to rank up the competitive leaderboards but you hit a plateau. Even if you have experienced a lot of improvement it's always easy to forget about all of that and get disheartened when there is a small set back.

I guess the moral of the story is that, when possible, you should always try and take a step back and look at where you are versus where you were a year or so ago and that even if you feel like you've had a month remember that your bad month or bad game now would've been seen as a massive success a while ago.

Right now I'm doing that very thing. Looking back and feeling ever so grateful and blessed to have so many of you supporting me. I only hope I cn keep writing the stories you want to see and livnig up to the money you pledge me <3

Right, that covers the frowny face in the title... Now on to the smiley face.

In the last month I have started trynig to lose weight.

For a long time my weight has been fairly stable but climbing slowly. I had to go a size up on my nappies from medium to large (a traumatic event!) and even found that to get shirts with the bagginess that I like I was having to buy XXL or bigger. Now, I'm still not what I would consider as being very big but when I stepped on the scales recently and saw the number blink back at me I decided enough was enough.

I was 78.4kg which is 172lbs. Considering I'm only 5'7 this was giving me a bit of a belly. In fact, when I put the numbers into a BMI chart I was nearly going off the end of overweight and into obese. I decided it was time to change things.

So, I've done a few different things. I'm sure none of these will be earth-shattering to you but I thought I'd keep you all up to date anyway. Maybe it can be a way of keeping me motivated. I'm telling you all so that if my weight goes up you can all tease me or put sand down my diapers or whatever!

1) I cut out bread. I was having as many as eight slices a day with dinner and snacks. I realised that's a lot of calories for little reason, especially when you add the butter on them. In fact I really cut out a lot of snacking. The only things I eat besides dinner are yogurts, bananas and apples.

2) I started counting calories. I got this nifty little app on my phone that helps me keep track. I've found that by cutting out snacks I can pretty much eat whatever I want for dinner but still come in under my maximum calorie count. This has also led to me buying waaaay less takeaways which saves money as well. A male body usually needs 2000 calories a day to maintain weight. I've set my max to 1,800 calories but I usually don't even reach that.

3) Regular exercise. I've started making use of my gym membership and spending a lot of time on the cycling machines. I also walk to and from the gym which is about 40 minutes of walking all together. To go with that, once a week I've started going on long walks. Typically about three hours long which really tires me out but burns a lot.

So after a month my weight has gone from 78.4kg (172lbs) to... 74.6kg (164lbs). Very nearly a kilogram a week!

I don't know what my ultimate goal is but I'm happy to keep losing weight and just seeing where I end up for the moment. Who know... maybe one day I'll fit my medium nappies again!

Anyway, thank you for listening to my ramblings about stuff. I want to thank you all again for being here and hope you continue to enjoy my stories!