Building An Iron Man Suit Is Saving My Sanity

I am trying to build a 3D-printed Iron Man suit, lose 40 pounds, run three businesses, and be present for my five year old. This is roughly what a normal day looks like.

I want to be honest right at the top: it does not always work. I have built systems for the chaos and most days they hold. But today was not a perfect day. I woke up late. I did not feel like doing half of what I needed to do. I did most of it anyway, badly.

That's the version of "day in the life" I think is actually useful. Not the choreographed one.

5:45 AM: the alarm gets dismissed

First alarm at 5:45. Snooze. I lie there thinking about the frog I need to eat. Snooze again. The second alarm wins around 6:45 and I get up.

I drink coffee with a couple of drops of stevia, because I am not a real man yet and black coffee is a bar I have not cleared. I take 15g of creatine, of which maybe 12 actually make it into me, because some always stays at the bottom of the glass. Maybe the dry-scoopers are onto something, but I cannot get through a dry scoop without coughing a lung up.

My son is downstairs already, watching cartoons in French. (Deliberately, because he gets French exposure from anywhere I am not actively talking to him in it.) I pour him cereal. Morning ritual done.

Eat the frog: consulting until lunch

The frog is software consulting. It pays for everything else, and it is the work I enjoy least in my day. Golden handcuffs. I love and hate them in equal measure.

The setup took years to build. Fully asynchronous, US clients, no meetings, no calls. Just a prioritized task list. I bill by the hour, work when I want, and aim for 40 billable hours a week. I have recently brought on help so it does not all have to be me.

I used to start the day with side projects because they are fun. I stopped. Consulting needs my sharpest brain. I get distracted easily, and boring tasks are the ones distraction kills fastest. The fun stuff (YouTube, Devmystify) can wait for my second wind in the afternoon.

Between consulting blocks I do small Iron Man bits. Check on the latest 3D printed pieces. Schedule the next prints. Review a cut from my editor and send feedback. The point is to keep the suit moving without losing more than 20 minutes at a time from the work that funds everything.

Around 8 AM the coffee kicks in. I weigh in, take a progress pic, and brush my teeth, which is apparently very important to put in a YouTube video, according to Ryan Trahan. I am standing on the shoulders of giants here.

Back to work until 11:30.

11:30 AM: gym

"Mens sana in corpore sano." A healthy mind in a healthy body. A Latin tag from Juvenal that I keep coming back to.

I have always believed in it, even with a body that does not cooperate. The problem, for me, was always that food has been both my escape AND my reward. You can imagine the result.

This Iron Man challenge has been the easiest weight loss journey of my life. 10 kg down so far. Zero plan to stop.

Three full-body sessions a week. 45 minutes of strength, 5 minutes of boxing, 10 minutes of stretching, 1 km outside (Phuket heat over treadmill, every time). The strength work is built around my hip, so no bench press, no squats, no push-ups. Pull-ups, dips, stiff-leg deadlifts, Bulgarian split squats. The full programming is its own post.

I fast until lunch. Coffee fights the hunger, then I get two bigger meals later that fit the macros.

1 PM: ketchup, rice, and Eric the Electric

Back home. Shower. Basically getting ready for the day a second time.

Lunch is chicken, vegetables, rice, drowned in ketchup. Judge me all you want. Ketchup and sriracha have genuinely been one of the biggest reasons I have managed to lose 10 kg without losing my mind. Calories are negligible, and flavor turns out to matter a lot when you are trying to stay on a cut for 4 months.

I eat while watching Eric the Electric demolish a small mountain of food in a 25-minute video. Is that weird? Probably. Let me know in the comments.

By 1:30 PM, back to consulting for another three hours. By 4:30, the billable work is done.

4:30 PM: side projects, where ADHD gets paid

This is where the day gets fun. Three side businesses (Devmystify, this YouTube channel, and a couple of smaller things). I am not building them for fun. I am building them to slowly stop selling my time, so I have more of it to point at what matters.

Trying to build three businesses simultaneously is, on paper, a terrible idea. Most people need to focus on one thing and lock in. I have tried. I get bored. I seek novelty. I quit.

So I lean into the opposite. Constant context switching, plus the perpetual novelty of starting a new YouTube video every couple of weeks, has somehow turned my ADHD into a feature instead of a bug. It is both exhausting and amazing. The chaos works. For me.

Today is an edit day. Songkran is coming up so my editor is on holiday. I do a final review on the workbench video that ships in a few days. I queue the next one (the 3D printing farm). Three weeks of content is queued, which finally gives me a stretch to focus on the suit proper.

The suit is partially printed. Now the work shifts: assembly, padding it so it is wearable, the electronics (which I am genuinely not good at yet), painting. I want to start with the helmet, partly to test my process end to end, partly because three years ago I tried to motorize an Iron Man helmet and failed completely. I want to know if I have gotten better.

But yeah, today is not a "push hard on the suit" day. It is a "stay afloat" day. After Devmystify and editing, I have about an hour left and no appetite to start something new. That is fine.

5 PM: family

Around 5 PM I close the laptop and we go out as a family so my son can practice riding his bike. Best decision of the day. We have a good time.

A bit more editing on the 3D printing farm video when we get back, then bedtime routine, then dinner.

Dinner and shutdown

I eat roughly the same dinner every day. Decision fatigue is real, especially by 7 PM.

Tonight: a big egg sandwich (a couple of eggs plus 200g of egg whites), then a Greek yogurt bowl with fruit and a couple of Oreos. I just got a new protein powder so I tried it as a protein mug cake. Surprisingly good and surprisingly large. This might become a new staple. I am thinking about dropping calories to 1,500 a day for the next 5 weeks to push through the plateau I have been on.

Shower. Bed. Wife. Watching something. We just finished Young Sherlock (excellent). Tonight we started A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (first episode solid; not sure the pooping-behind-a-tree scene was necessary).

A bit of reading. Right now One Piece, because I am trying to get to Luffy unlocking Gear 5. I did not make it tonight.

Lights off.

The why

I am putting this much detail in a post partly because people keep asking how the math works. The answer is: it does not, perfectly. Today I did 7 billable hours instead of 8. I will make up the hour on Saturday. The Iron Man suit got 60 minutes of attention instead of 4 hours. I got tired and went to bed.

But it added up to this: weight is down 10 kg, suit is mostly printed, family is intact, businesses are running, body is fine, brain is fine. Not perfect. Not stuck.

The Iron Man suit is the engine for the whole thing. Without the deadline, the gym would not have been consistent. Without the gym, the writing would not have been sharp. Without the writing, Devmystify would not have grown. The challenge is the thing that pulled all the levers in the same direction.

Saving my sanity is not a metaphor. Lights off, smile on, alarm set for 5:45.