Halfway Through. Down 7 Kilos. Everything Else Is on Fire.

60 days ago I made a promise on YouTube: get fit and 3D-print my own Iron Man suit by May 17. Two lifelong dreams stapled together with a public deadline. A complete recipe for success, as I said in the announcement.

Today is the halfway point. I figured I would do a status update. Honest version.

The short story: the diet is going great. Almost everything else is on fire.

The half that's working: down 7 kilos

I weighed in at 90.6 kg when I started. As of this morning, I am at 83.6 kg.

That's 7 kg in 60 days, or about 15.4 lbs for my American friends. It is not the perfectly even 1 kg per week I planned for, but it is exactly half of my 14 kg goal on the exact halfway mark of the challenge. So technically, I am on schedule.

People have noticed. That feels great. My wife noticed. My son also noticed, in his own way: "Papa, why is your shirt so big?" Five year olds do not soften the message.

The system I am running

I am an engineer, so I went with KISS: Keep It Stupid Simple. Four rules.

1. Track everything. Not most things. Everything.
2. Eat around 1,700 to 1,800 calories a day. That is roughly a 500 to 600 calorie deficit. Aggressive enough to actually lose weight, not so aggressive that I am miserable.
3. High protein, around 160g per day, or 2g per kilo of lean mass. The point is to keep the muscle I have while the fat drops.
4. Take creatine. 5g, every morning, in my coffee, where it does not belong.

That's the entire diet. There is no trick. There is no protocol.

When I say track everything, I mean it. That glass of wine on Valentine's Day went into LoseIt. The mini apple pie at a wedding went in. When I eat out, I "guesstimate" as I like to call it. I am probably a bit off, but the act of having to log it makes me lean toward food that is easy to track: chicken breast, potatoes, rice. Not whatever was drowned in butter on the buffet.

Food-wise, I am very lazy. That is, in fact, how I got and stayed fat. Ordering food twice a day for years. Now I am mostly on autopilot:

• Chicken
• Rice
• Broccoli

Snacks are Musashi Rocky Road protein bars. Dessert every evening is 0% Greek yogurt with frozen berries and cinnamon, which sounds like depression in a bowl, but is genuinely good and lets my brain feel like I "had dessert".

Weekends I'll have a Big Mac and nuggets, which sounds like falling off the wagon, but absolutely fits in my calories for the day. It is fine. Anyone who tells you a Big Mac will derail a diet does not understand thermodynamics.

For training, three full-body workouts a week. I am not trying to get stronger right now. I am trying to keep the muscle I have while the scale drops. There is a twist in the workout side that I will save for the next video, because it makes for a better story on its own.

So fitness-wise: working. Better than I expected, honestly.

The half that is absolutely not working: the suit

Now the other side.

I am in Phuket. Phuket is hot and humid. Filament hates hot and humid. PLA and PETG have a kryptonite, and that kryptonite is water in the air.

So I am now running the AC constantly in my workshop and a dehumidifier 24/7 just to give myself a chance at clean prints. The electricity bill is its own challenge.

Even with that, the print queue is a disaster. I thought I could just... start printing. Pick a part, send it, wait. Turns out you actually need to plan: what prints first, what fits to what, how long each piece takes, which orientation gives you the strongest layer adhesion. The kind of planning I would do for a software project before writing the first line of code. The kind of planning I completely skipped here, because I was too excited to start.

So 60 days in, here is the suit:

• Helmet: done
• Both arms: done
• Both feet: done
• ONE calf: done
• The OTHER calf has failed three times in a row and I am at my wits' end

I am still missing both legs (mostly), the back, and the entire chest piece. And that is only the 3D printing. After that I need to post-process every single piece, assemble them, wire in the electronics I have not actually learned yet, and paint everything.

To make it worse, my printer's hotend keeps clogging. First time it happened I had to order spares, wait a week, and learn how to replace one. I changed it. It clogged again the next day. I changed it again. It worked for a month. The other day it clogged again. I am now waiting for another shipment.

For anyone who has not 3D printed before: a clogged hotend is the printer equivalent of your car not starting because the engine has decided to fill itself with peanut butter. There is no quick fix. You take it apart, you clean it, you swap parts, you hope.

The thing that hurts more than the printer

The hardest part of the diet has not been the food. It is the social events. We live in Phuket with a 5-year-old and a big group of friends, which means there is always something. A birthday. Someone's last night before flying home. A new restaurant. Drinks at the beach.

Saying no to most of it has sucked. I made a promise on the internet so I am sticking to it, but a real Iron Man would not have to dodge his friends' birthday dinners to hit a macro target. That part is just discipline grinding against being a normal social human.

The realization

Here is the thing I did not want to admit until I started editing this video.

I have been treating this challenge like a side project. It is not a side project.

I work 70 to 80 hours a week. Half of that is consulting (the work that actually pays for everything). The other half is building for this channel and for Devmystify, the AI and dev education brand I run on the side. The Iron Man suit was supposed to slot into the cracks.

It will not slot into the cracks. It is too big.

It hit me when I was working on the One Piece epoxy sculpture a few weeks ago. I looked at the timeline and realized that finishing it was going to eat weeks I do not have. Weeks that should have gone to the suit. And I was the one who chose to start the One Piece thing. Nobody made me. My ADHD brain saw a shiny thing and went chasing.

If I keep doing that, I am not finishing this challenge. End of story.

The plan for the second half

So for the next 60 days, the rules change.

No more "I'll just do this on the side". Every minute that is not consulting or family or sleep is going at the Iron Man suit.

The video order I am committing to:

1. Next: the workout video, with the twist
2. Then: fix the printing situation. Probably an actual second printer (Bambu, almost certainly)
3. Then: learn electronics properly, because right now I genuinely have no idea how this whole motorized suit is supposed to come together
4. Then: more challenge videos, all in service of the suit
5. Then: the suit walks. With cameras rolling.

And, because I just admitted on camera that I am in the lucky position of being able to throw money at the printer problem, I want to do the opposite for someone else. So this video also announces a giveaway: a Bambu A1 Combo, going to one person in the comments who tells me what they would build with it and why it matters. I will pick the one that hits hardest.

The honest ending

I am 60 days in. I am down 7 kilos. I have a helmet, two arms, two feet, and one calf. I have no chest piece, no back, no legs, and no electronics.

I do not know if I am going to make it.

I am also not stopping. Two lifelong dreams, one deadline. Second half starts now.