Six months ago I was doing the same thing most desk-job engineers do — working long hours, sleeping at 2AM, eating inconsistently, telling myself I’d start properly “next week.”
The problem wasn’t motivation. It was system design.
I’m a systems engineer. I build immutable infrastructure for a living. I understand that a system without observability is a system you cannot debug. And yet I was running my body as a complete black box — no inputs tracked, no outputs measured, no feedback loop.
So I built one.
What changed
The shift was treating my body the same way I treat infrastructure. Metrics first. Then intervention. Then measure again.
Weight every morning. Waist every Sunday. Photo every month. Workout logged every session via Hevy. Food roughly tracked — not obsessively, but enough to know if protein hit 85g.
Within three weeks I had more data about my body than I’d had in three years.
The unexpected insight
The data immediately showed something I hadn’t expected: my sleep timing was the primary variable. Not diet. Not training. Sleep timing.
Sleeping at 2AM and waking at 10AM — even with 8 hours total — produced consistently higher next-day hunger, lower training energy, and slower recovery than any other variable I tracked.
Fixing sleep timing moved more needles than any diet change.
What I’m building toward
Body recomposition — simultaneously losing fat and building muscle. Target is 15% body fat from ~23% current, while maintaining or increasing strength across all compound lifts.
Timeline: 6–8 months of consistent work.
The system is in place. Now it’s just execution.