Presentation: Lessons learned in overcoming obesity

I had the opportunity to share my weight loss story at the Blooming Sunflower Center In the last few years I’ve lost over 330lbs and gone from feeling entirely trapped in my body to being able to bike and rollerblade! It has been a radical shift in my day-to-day experience and has had a profound impact on how I see many things. I am very grateful to the hosts for the opportunity to add public speaking to the many skills I am working to develop during this process. In this talk I tried to summarize and articulate both the deep and simple lessons learned the hard way. One of my primary goals throughout documenting this process hasn’t merely to show that I could change, but to humanize all stages of the process. From my vantage point now, I can certainly see how much harder that was than I had anticipated. There is no way I could have come this far without the guidance, encouragement, and support I’ve received from so many different places. For that I am immensely grateful, and feel I owe it to others to be as open and transparent as I can be. What didn’t make this recording is that after the talk I had a very productive Q&A session with the guests. It was equal parts refreshing and instructive to be able to demystify the process while finding opportunities to refine my ability to communicate it. I certainly hope this isn’t my only speaking engagement on this topic, but either way I think it was a good start. I think now more than ever we need to focus on ways to help build each other up, and I’m excited to do my part. With many challenges and setbacks from 2026 behind me, I could really use support for my many efforts moving forward. Unrelated good news: Recovering from Technical debt One of the things that has held me back this year has been the lack of having my PeerTube instance. I have successfully migrated the videos of the weight loss journey to my personal site, which was built the same way the Libre Solutions Network was. This means I’m very much looking forward to ‘soft-rebooting’ the project as I migrate those videos back. This is a bit of a ‘half-measure’ as I want to continue my work on my RSS reader and custom CMS projects. As such, I’ll be very interested in doing interviews again about tech freedom as well as sharing some presentations. If you’re interested, please contact me or submit a guest post! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gaberocks.substack.com/subscribe