Do you have geeky hobbies, inactive lifestyles or work at a desk job but still want to find a way to get in shape? Don't worry fellow geeks and geekettes you can still get healthy and in shape like you have always wanted. Getting there will take a bit of hard work, dedication, and a game plan but it can be done. Soon you will be a Tech with Pecs, a Geek with Obliques, you can go from I.T. to F.I.T. Who says you can't have brains and brawn?
For this installment of Picture of the Month I chose this picture of how the best of me is yet to come. Firstly let me apologize that I haven't posted on my blog in a while, I have recently been extremely busy with work and trying to get certain goals accomplished regarding it. Well, I also can't discredit the release of patch 2.1 of Diablo 3 and now the Warlords of Draenor expansion for WoW. Anyhow without further ado please let me jump right into why I like this motivational picture.
I feel this picture has two messages built into it, both of which are a realistic but inpiriing messages. The first message is how as we start down the path to getting physically healthy and fit we can look forward to discovering the best of ourselves. After I started my endeavor to get in shape and become healthy I learned a great deal of new things about myself and how they can be applied to all sorts of other areas of my life. I learned that working out is hard and you constantly have to apply yourself at it to get results. Despite it being hard, with continued effort and determination you do obtain results each and every day you continue to devote yourself to it. This helped me to unlearn some of the helplessness I had developed and realize that any goal I set my mind to in life can become a reality if only I put my mind to it and continue to pursue it with determination. Besides this mental epiphany I also felt more confident about my physique and had much higher energy levels.
The second message I feel is the "Under Construction" subtext. To me this does tie in with the first message a bit, but this indicates that it takes time and there is a "construction" process that needs to occur along the way. I feel this is the hard hitting realism of the motivational picture. For instance when you decide to start something like working out to get in shape, despite all the bogus bull crap on TV about miracle diets, pills or workouts, it will take time to get there. Sometimes it might seem like a huge undertaking, I know for me it felt that way, but you just need to not overwhelm yourself with how far you must go but on how to get there step by step. Say for instance you were going to build a house by yourself, instead of trying to figure out how to put the house together all at once you would focus on how to build the house one element at a time. You would start off making the foundation, then the floor, then one wall at a time and finally a roof to finish it off. Once I realized how to apply this process to my goals they seemed far less insurmountable.I do this by creating incremental short term goals that I can work on each day or week to continually make progress towards the large end goal. To me that is the beauty of this motivational picture, because once we realize this ABSOLUTELY ANYONE can accomplish their goals. It all boils down to continued determination and working on it bit by bit till you achieve your goal. And this process can be applied to anything from losing weight, getting a new job, creating an invention, or even grandiose things like changing the world!! Hope all reading this find it motivating and have a great day. ^_^
Hey everyone, today I decided to talk about a game that has made a huge comeback in my library of games that I play, Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls. Reaper of Souls (RoS) is the expansion for the Diablo 3 (D3) franchise that came out on March 25th 2014 for PC and Mac. There was also a release of RoS for Xbox and PS4 that more recently came out on August 19th 2014. RoS was hugely anticipated due to the fact that it was bringing some very big changes to D3. I myself at the time of the PC release was very excited for these new changes and couldn't wait to try it out.
RoS had some very major changes slated for it's release, most notably the closure of the D3 auction house (AH). Blizzard decided to close both the gold and real money AH's because they felt that it was ruining the way the game was played. Blizzard felt that farming gold to buy an item on the AH was not what they were going for with D3 gameplay. Blizzard thought that the most rewarding and funnest way to get items should be by finding them yourself by killing monsters. To accommodate this change of removing the AH Blizzard made legendary items drop way more frequently and were subject to smart stat rolls. Smart stat rolls would ensure that if you got a legendary drop on your wizard that the vast majority of the time it would roll Int and not something useless like Str or Dex making it much easier and faster to find upgrades. Since they buffed drop rates and gave the items smart stats rolls, when legendary items were identified they became account bound. Items however can still be shared with friends, as long as you were playing in a game together when the item dropped it is tradeable for up to 2 hours afterwards. At first it felt a little bit like it would take forever to gear up since I wouldn't be able to buy missing pieces on the AH. I quickly realized though that this was a myth and that items dropped frequently enough to make it possible to gear fairly quickly. Since I have been playing I've geared up both my Wizard and Witch Doctor with enough gear to play the hardest difficulty Torment VI with several different build specializations.
Along with the removal of the AH they also decided to implement a new character to the game, the Crusader! The Crusader is a champion that uses their great faith and determination in the law to lay waste to the evils that seek to destroy the world. Crusaders have a slew of Holy abilities (along with many others) to help them dispatch the forces of evil. Crusaders are very durable with their plate armor and shields. Crusaders have some specific items such as Crusader shields and large 2h Flails that are used only by their class. The Crusader also has the unique ability to Equip a 2h weapon in 1 hand along with a shield. This combination allows them to be a hard hitting and still keep their high survivability.
In RoS they also did a major overhaul of the Paragon leveling system. In the new Paragon system they first removed the level cap which was really cool because this gives continued incentive to play because no matter what you can always continue making your character better via higher paragon levels. In addition to removing the level cap they also made it so paragon levels were shared on all your characters. This was an excellent change because you now don't feel like if you don't play your highest paragon level character that you are underpowered. This shared paragon levels made it much less detrimental to swap to another character to play because they were still getting the paragon bonuses. Paragon levels now rather than gaining a flat amount of predetermined stats you get points to spend in 4 different tabs with 4 different options in each tab. This allows you to customize how you spend your paragon points per character and per build. You can also reset these points as many times and whenever you want to try a different customizations for your characters.
Another new addition that came with RoS was the addition of Act V to further add to the plot of D3. With Act V there was also a raise in the level cap from 60 to 70. All the current classes in original D3 got a serious make over for all of their abilities to rebalance their power and to make them funner to play. At level 69 all the original classes also got brand new abilities to add to their arsenal. I will give just for a brief summary of the plot so as not to spoil anything for those who have not played the game yet. After you defeat the reincarnation of Diablo in the high Heavens the black soulstone falls down and is recovered by Tyrael. Tyrael, now human, decides to take it upon himself to hide the black soulstone because contained within is still all 7 of the prime evils. Malthael, formerly the angel of wisdom but now the angel of death, ambushes them and steals the black soulstone. Malthael feels that he must use the black soulstone's powers to once and for all destroy the demonic horde and end the eternal conflict between angels and demons. In his madness though this includes killing all humans because they are composed of both demon and angel within their souls.It then falls on the Nephalem to once again stop this evil act from reaching completion.
Besides Act V and the new crusader class, Blizzard added Adventure mode to the game. In adventure mode they have 2 main goals that can be accomplished, bounties and Nephalem Rifts. Bounties are similar to quests in any typical RPG game. You go to any of the 5 acts and Tyrael has 5 bounties for you to complete. They are typically to go clear a certain area of monsters, kill specific champions or rares, cleanse cursed shrines or chests, and always to kill one of the several bosses of the act you are in. Each of these bounties yields a large amount of bonus experience, gold, and sometimes rift stone fragments as a reward. Once you are done with all 5 bounties in the act you talk to Tyrael and he rewards you with a Horadric Cache. Within these Horadric Caches you receive several rift stone fragments, crafting materials, a few bloodstones and a rare chance for specific legendaries which only drop from within caches. Once you collect 5 rift fragments you can open yourself a Nephalem Rift. Nephalem Rifts are hard dungeons that are randomly generated and randomly populated with different monsters and elites that can come from any act of the game. At the end of the rift once you have cleared enough of it to fill the rift meter to 100% one of many different possible Rift Guardian will appear. The Rift Gaurdian is a boss of sorts for this randomly generated dungeon and will drop several items with a greater chance for them being lengendary items and a large amount of bloodstones. More bloodstones are rewarded for the higher the difficulty setting you are playing on.
Along with all this exciting new game play they added in 2 new vendors to the game. There is the Mystic and the bloodstone vendor. The bloodstones I had mentioned in the previous paragraph that are obtainable from bounties and Rift Gaurdians are used to "gamble" at Kadala the bloodstone vendor. Kadala has all the armor slots to choose from and several different weapon and off hand categories. Say you have lots of good legendary items but you still need a good set of legendary gloves, with Kadala you can spend all your bloodstones on gloves trying to get a legendary. This can greatly speed up gearing out your characters because you can focus on the pieces you are still missing. Just remember that you cap out at 500 bloodstones, so make sure to spend them before then. The Mystic is an indispensable new tool that everyone utilizes to perfect their new gear. What the mystic allows for is to take any item and for a certain cost you can pick one single stat on it to reroll to another. Say for instance you get bonus armor and on that particular item you would rather get crit %. You can then pay the cost and reroll that stat for a 2 chances to potentially get what you want. This however can be a double edged sword if you are unlucky as each time you have to reroll the price goes up to continue rerolling. This can sometimes make you run out of gold and crafting mats very quickly so be careful. Also a good thing to know about rerolling is that when you get the 2 options from the reroll instead of picking one of those 2 you may instead select to keep what the items current stat is. This is good because let's say in the earlier example you finally rerolled your crit % on bracers but it rolled to the lowest possible value of 4.5%, you could then continue to roll trying to get the maximum of 6% but if neither of your options that you rerolled were crit % you could continue to select the 4.5% to keep what crit you currently have. Sadly I didn't know this little tidbit when I first started playing RoS and wasted a lot of gold and materials until I figured out otherwise.
That pretty much concludes all the new additions that have been implemented to D3 in the RoS expansion. I now wanted to take a look at some up coming changes that have been in the works for Blizzards first major content update for RoS patch 2.1. Patch 2.1 looks to be very exciting since they will be adding several very big additions to RoS's available content. It has been in the works for a few months now and I am still eagerly anticipating it's arrival, but I think it should be coming out very shortly. I think they waited as long as they did to perfect some of this new content and at the same time to wait for the release of the console additions so that they could release the patch for both PC and console versions at the same time.
Without further ado the first notable change slated for patch 2.1 that I will talk about is Seasons. Think of Seasons as a competition system that takes place over a set amount of time. In each Season as the come you will have to start a new character for that Season. In this competition your success will be tracked via leaderboards. I'm assuming there will be leaderboards for highest overall paragon, highest paragon for the class you are playing, and several other things. In seasons there will also be challenges that are tracked called conquests. Conquests are very difficult achievements that only be able to be accomplished by first 1000 players able to finish them. I'm again assuming these will be tracked via leaderboards for who completes them the quickest and also who completes the most of the available conquests. Also in seasons there will be some exclusive legendaries that will drop during the season that only players involved with that season will be able to get. If power leveling and gearing to compete against other players in an attempt to achieve high rankings on leaderboards sounds like fun Seasons will definitely be the thing for you. Oh and if by chance you don't feel like doing Seasons don't worry those exclusive items will roll over into the normal item pool once the Season is over and a new one begins.
With how they added Nephalem Rifts in RoS they are going to take it one step further by adding Greater Nephalem Rifts in patch 2.1. Greater Nephalem Rifts will be another thing that will be tracked on leaderboards in both Seasons and regular gameplay. What a Greater Nephalem Rift will be is a continuation of a normal Nephalem rift that will chain into higher difficulty for each subsequent one completed. Once you complete a regular Nephalem rift the Rift Gaurdian will drop a greater rift fragment which will allow you to open a Greater Nephalem Rift. The Greater Nephalem Rift will be slightly harder than the regular rift you just finished as well as timed. In order for you to get the fragment to open level 2 of your Greater Nephalem Rift you will need to defeat the current one and do it within the time limit. It will scale like this for as high of a level of Greater Nephalem Rift as you can continue to defeat. The higher the level you get continues to be harder but at the same time will also yield greater and more bountiful rewards. Also the higher and faster you get there the more fame you can possibly achieve by gaining high rankings on the leaderboards for Greater Nephalem Rifts.
Along with these two new game modes (well Greater Rifts being more an addition to an existing game mode) there will be many new items in patch 2.1 along with some upgrades to existing ones to make them more interesting and viable to use. Some of these redo's are on several of the existing class specific sets that were underpowered compared to the others that no one used, as well as multiple legendary items that players never used because they weren't viable. If you currently have a full set for a class that you play that you don't use because it is underpowered hold on to it because the changes for set items will be retro active! Legendary items that are receiving buffs however you will have to go out and find new ones because they won't be retro actively upgraded. Along with this slew of new items and buffed old ones they plan to introduce Legendary Gems. All I know so far about legendary gems is that they will only be able to be socketed into rings and amulets. Along with that these gems will only be dropped in Greater Nephalem Rifts and will be able to be leveled up to greatly improve their power. There will be a set amount of different types of Legendary gems of which you will only be able to have one of each account wide. This means if you have Legendary gem "X" on your wizard it will not drop again for any of your other characters. You can transfer it to other characters but in total you will only be able to have 1 Legendary Gem "X" on your whole account, so make sure to equip them wisely to your characters. And the last new item I would like to mention that could be a very serious upgrade would be the new Hellfire Amulet. Currently there is a Hellfire Ring in game (which sounded like it would get a revamp). The special ability of the Hellfire amulet that will make it worth while is that it can grant you an additional passive ability so that your character at level 70 could potentially have access to 5 passives. I look forward to getting one of these because this could greatly boost your character's overall power.
That is my summation of all that is new in the D3 expansion of RoS and the upcoming patch of 2.1. I personally feel that with the release of RoS that Blizzard did an amazing job of breathing new life into what I felt to be a dying franchise. The original D3 was a very monotonous endless grind that yielded very little results due to horrible drop rates of items. This resulted in the game becoming about grinding for ok items to sell (or if you were super lucky getting one god like item to sell for absurd amounts) so that you could find and buy the gear you needed via the auction house. There was no fun in identifying items because 99.99% of the time they were useless and you never had that excitement of finding a drop on your own that would be an upgrade for your character. Also the way abilities were in original D3 for the big majority of classes there was only one viable build to play the game at high end. RoS brought back the excitement of getting those new drops to upgrade your character as well as making multiple builds for each class viable for doing high end difficulty. This made it possible to be able to play the way you want and customize your character in a variety of ways to play however funnest for you. Not to mention that fact that Blizzard, to accomplish a lot of these changes, took out the the real money AH which was a big income for them. To me this speaks very highly of Blizzard's dedication to make a high quality game that they are willing to remove an asset of the game that makes them additional revenue. I also like the fact that they are continuing to add new and exciting content for patch 2.1, which just further shows their dedication to continue making D3 even better. So if any of you out there are thinking about either picking up the D3 franchise to give it a second try or want to become a new player I would highly recommend D3: RoS as I feel it is a fun experience and a must play in my book!
In the Spring of 2013 I decided to focus solely on workouts and diets to promote additional fat loss until I reached a body fat percent that I was happy with. Over the last couple years I had been playing around with my diet enough to realize that for me there are two modes of dieting. One I can eat in manner to maintain strength and build muscle but I will not lose any body fat on this eating regiment. The other is to eat at a caloric deficit to lose body fat, however when I sustain this type of diet over an extended period of time I begin to lose some of my strength. If I had an outstanding genetic makeup like some people (Arnold Schwarzenegger for example) I could use my maintain diet to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously, however that isn't my body type so I have to use different eating methods to accomplish my goals.
At this point I had first decided to change my diet up. Ever since I had got back on track and had converted over to Intermittent Fasting (IF) I had been getting decent results and was steadily losing weight each week. I decided to add one more element to my diet, Low Carb. My goal was to keep my daily intake of carbs at around 50 grams or less and then on Saturday I could eat my fill of carbs to refill my muscles with glycogen. Glycogen is how carbs are stored as energy in your muscles. Glycogen is where your body pulls from first to burn energy, after you run out of glycogen it has to pull from other sources such as fat. This is why Low Carb is effective, because once you run out of glycogen you have to burn fat. However when doing exercise on a consistent basis it is important to have one or maybe even two days with carbs (preferably on a workout day) so that you aren't constantly exercising without glycogen stores in your muscles. Low Carb is an absolutely excellent way to lose fat but it can also cause muscle loss. If I was working out with depleted glycogen all the time due to the Low Carb it will hasten strength and muscle loss. This muscle loss occurs because of burning additional calories from the workouts and constantly eating at a caloric deficit and having no glycogen stores in your muscles causing your energy production from burning fat cells not to be able to keep up. When you get to this state of being energy starved from your fat not producing enough energy your body will start to "burn" muscle. This effect is the same as what happens to starving people and why their muscles are so atrophied. So to avoid my body losing muscle I made sure to have at least one day to refill my glycogen with carbs.
Along with this additional change up I decided to give HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workouts a try. I had been doing long 30min - 45min cardio sessions, these were the first exercises I changed over to HIIT style. Instead of running on the treadmill, or whatever machine I was on, for those extended durations I would run fast for 1 minute and then do a slow jog for 1 minute to catch my breath. I would repeat this process until I had done 8 sets of running with jogging at the start and finish for warm up and cooldown. This lowered my cardio routines down to 17 minutes. Not only does it save you a bunch of time, but I still got a superb workout because of how much energy I exerted while doing the fast running. If you want to try this make sure you build up your stamina first before just trying to jump straight into HIIT style cardio. Either do steady slow running or begin with shorter run intervals like 30 seconds running and 90 seconds jogging. I also went to a HIIT style of weight lifting called Hundreds. In hundreds You do 10 sets of 10 reps in quick succession with low weight (enough though that it is still a bit difficult to complete 100 reps) then you follow up with like 3 sets of 5 with a heavier weight.
With these combined efforts of low carb and HIIT workouts I felt that this was a good combination for me in being successful at burning fat. I lost quite a bit of additional fat and lowered my weight even more. With this combination of diet and exercise I got down to as low as 191 lbs. Just remember though if you want to plan out a similar diet and exercise regiment make sure it will be something that is designed for you. You will want to make sure that it will be something catered to your nutritional needs and that the exercise routine will be something your current level of fitness can handle.
This PotM (picture of the month) is all about being determined in achieving our dreams. I decided on this picture because I felt it was a good testament to how I feel sometimes. In my particular case I've been working on losing weight, and improving my strength and health over the past 3 years(since I started in 2011). Occasionally I feel like I'm not making progress but then I remember how far I've come and how much I've improved in my strength and health. I have to take a step back and remember how I am still continuing to make progress (as slow as it may seem at times) and am well on my way towards accomplishing my dreams and if I continue on they will become reality.
I know a lot of people suffer from this dilemma other than myself. It can be numerous factors that cause us to have doubts of being able to reach our dreams and goals. For some people thinking about the sheer time it might take to get to where you want is overwhelming. This can be daunting and make you want to give up because it seems so far away. It is important to have your end goal but if it is something that will take a long time to accomplish remember to set small attainable goals along the way that will help to keep you motivated in continuing towards your dreams and goals. The time it takes to get toward your goal can definitely be daunting at times. If you really sit down and think about it though, whether or not you are struggling towards making your dreams a reality the time will pass by anyway. What better way is there to spend that time than working on accomplishing your dreams or you could let that time pass by anyway fretting about how much time it will take. This was best stated in one of my favorite inspirational quotes, "Never give up on a dream because of the time it will take. Time will pass anyway." by Earl Nightingale.
Another thing that can be a big deterrent for people is if they run into road blocks or failures. Sometimes these setbacks can be a huge hurdle to get over, but more than likely we will run into them somewhere in life whether it's our goals / dreams in being fit and healthy or our success in relationships or success in our careers or any aspect of life where we set goals for ourselves. What matters when we run into these roadblocks is that we pick ourselves back up and shake it off and learn from our mistakes. If we learn from our mistakes we can then also realize that it isn't the end, that we are still alive and there is still time to work towards our dreams. Just because there was a bump in the road doesn't mean our dream has to end.
Hopefully this PotM will provide some motivation if you are having doubts about how long it will take or you are encountering setbacks in your path to your dreams. Just as this picture says there is no expiration on your dreams, as long as you have the will to keep on pressing towards it you can and will accomplish it.
