Starting 2026 Strong… Then Reality Hit!

I wanted to start 2026 strong, with new goals, and that’s exactly what I did. But it’s already starting to unravel. Hopefully I can excuse it as a small blip, but only time will tell. So, what’s the story?

Coming into 2026, I had a few goals I wanted to achieve. I wanted to stream way more and be consistent. I wanted to exercise more and tone up or lose weight. I wanted to improve my diet by fasting for 16 hours a day and generally eating better. I also wanted to take supplements to cover what I’m usually lacking, and drink more water while cutting back on Monster and Pepsi.

Since Christmas and New Year are stressful enough with things happening almost every day, I decided to hold off and start a new journey on Monday the 5th of January. At 8pm on Sunday the 4th, I stopped eating and drinking anything except water. I hate plain water, but adding anything to it would almost certainly break the fast, so I used my AirUp bottle. That way I could taste flavour while still drinking pure water.

I went back to work on the 5th and managed not to eat until 12 noon, which officially kicked off the intermittent fasting. I’m happy to report that I’ve stayed on top of this since starting.

Monday night came and I was live streaming on Twitch by 7:30pm on the dot. Another solid start. During the stream I announced a new schedule: streaming on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. After the stream I exercised as planned. The following day, which wasn’t a stream day, I went straight into exercising again while keeping the fasting on track. I even went for a walk. So far, everything was going exactly as planned.

Wednesday’s stream is where things started to go wrong. My automation looked like it had failed, although it hadn’t. It just appeared that way. I fought to stay live, and if you knew my setup you’d appreciate how stressful that was. Once I got past that issue, I decided to open up Fortnite since it had been a long time since I’d played.

That’s when things really took a turn. My bitrate dropped from around 8000 down to 200 almost instantly, and there was nothing I could do to fix it. After several minutes of trying, the stream died. I went back live as quickly as I could and managed to muddle through to the end. Once I came off stream, I exercised and planned Thursday’s stream as normal.

I woke up on Thursday feeling ill. I was coughing a lot and felt completely drained. All day I debated whether I could manage the stream or whether the coughing would just make it annoying to watch. The more I thought about it, the more I questioned why I’d moved to Thursday night streams in the first place. Cancelling felt like it might be the start of undoing all the focus I’d built, but going back to Friday nights also felt like the better option.

In the end, I decided to take the night off streaming, focus on exercise, and move back to Friday nights instead of Thursdays. By the time I got home from work, I had a pounding headache and a really bad cough. I was exhausted, not from training, but from poor sleep, which is something I already struggle with. I felt so rough that I had no choice but to rest. That didn’t bother me too much because I don’t skip workouts, I always plan to catch them up later. It just meant doing more on Friday and over the weekend, which should have been my rest time anyway.

Friday morning made things worse. I got up, got dressed for work, grabbed my jacket, and as I was putting it on I started coughing badly and pulled my neck or shoulder muscle. Ten minutes later I was back in bed, barely able to move without pain. The whole day was a write-off. I hoped it might ease later in the morning so I could still get to work, but it only got worse. That meant no work, no stream on Friday, and nothing all weekend. I couldn’t stream, I couldn’t exercise, but I could at least stay on top of the fasting, so I did.

On Sunday I weighed in and was less than impressed to see that my weight had gone up rather than down. Disappointing, but also a good lesson in how quickly plans can be affected by something completely unexpected. I stayed strong with the diet, I’m now two days behind on training, but I will catch that up. As for streaming, I’ll be back live tonight and pushing as hard as possible again.

I wanted to be held accountable for not streaming, not exercising, and having to catch up yet again, and that’s the reason for this post.