 Well, this wasn't the video I was planning to make today, but I think it's time that I give you guys an update on life, an update on life in video games, maybe a health update in here as well, and just some general cleanings up that I think I just need to do for my mental state of mind, because it's important to take care of yourselves, both mentally, physically, etc., etc., we all have our responsibilities and our bills to pay, and if you're a parent like me, you have children to take care of, but it's important to take care of yourself as well. And it's no secret that I have had a few health issues over the years, some of those health issues were not necessarily caused by me. One of my kids, you know, smacked me accidentally, it didn't mean to do any damage, just kind of ran into me when they were really little and that gave me a hernia. You guys have heard me talk about that before, I did get it taken care of and isn't too big of a deal outside of the fact that some of my internal organ protection fact came out through the hernia and the surgeon chose not to remove it, which is really crappy when you fast forward a few years and I still have it because now it's considered a cosmetic surgery to get rid of and health insurance won't cover it, but that's a sort of a minor thing. Some of you guys do know that I also had a heart attack, you know, a handful of years ago as well, you know, it was mostly stress induced, but it wasn't helped by the fact that I'm overweight and I do have high blood pressure. Now, the blood pressure thing is kind of under control. I use, I'm not wearing it right now, but you guys might see some of my videos or my live streams that I'm wearing an Apple watch. I'm not actually wearing a smartwatch because I care that much about it, but I actually just want to know what my heart rate is. Now, heart rate's not the same as blood pressure. There is a difference, but if your heart rate is too high when you're in a resting position like I am here in a video like this, that I need to pay attention to that and go check my blood pressure and see if I need to take some blood pressure medications. I obviously don't want my heart overworking itself when I'm trying to not do things like when I'm working out is one thing. When I'm not working out, it shouldn't be working that hard unless I'm doing something physical. You know, if I'm painting and I'm doing it all by hand and you know, or I'm doing some work around the house, fine, but you know what I mean, right? If you, if you've dealt with high blood pressure, you've ever had any sort of heart attack situation, you'll know that it is something you need to be serious about and pay attention to. And that happened a number of years ago and I'm doing mostly fine today. I'm also overweight. So we're getting all this hell stuff out of the way right away. And you guys know this, it's no secret. You can talk about looking at me, even just my face alone, my hands, even, you know, a little fatter than I want them to be. I am overweight. I'm obese. There's no other way to put it. I am obese. I'm five five. I'm supposed to weigh anywhere between one to 45 and 160. Now, again, a lot of this BMI isn't like this perfect measure of anything because I have a bigger bone structure as well. So probably should be a little bit heavier than the 150. That's why I threw out the 160 mark, but I'm well beyond that. I'm a hundred pounds plus above that. And that is not okay. It's not okay that I continue to live that way regardless of whatever excuses I want to make. So for those that aren't aware over the last month, it's almost been a whole month, not quite yet. I think I'm at like 26, 27 days or something like that. I don't know, Paul Gale Network knows because I have undergone a health transformation and what does that mean? I've been taking on a very strict weight loss related diet. Now, this diet isn't going to be my diet for the rest of my life. This is just helping me get my weight under control. But it is also training me to have smaller meals more often. And then once I can add more calories in, because then I'm just maintaining weight or just doing muscle growth, that's a totally different thing. But I am on a very restrictive diet that is working and I'm happy to report and I was going to post this on social media. But I guess this is this basically is social media, right? I'm down 20 pounds and that is a big deal. That is a really big deal. I started at 284. I am down to 264 as of today. Today was my weigh in. I weigh in like once every four or five days. And that is a really big milestone for me just to lose 20 pounds. Now, I have a long ways to go, right? I started at 284 and I'm at 264 and I'm trying to get another hundred pounds off, right? So it's going to be a lot of work. And, you know, as I get down to 200 and at last 40 pounds, it's going to be tough. And I'm going to have to make even more probably lifestyle changes, right? Whether it's cutting out all soda in my life because I haven't cut out soda consumption, all alcohol consumption or whatever I'm going to have to do. We'll see how my body's responding right now. It's responding very well to my low calorie diet, but not just that. I'm also working out. And this is a credit to Paul Gale network as well, who helped me change my diet routine and he also helped me work out. I work out at least every other day. I'll just say this, it's four days a week period. So there are times that it's two days in a row. Usually that happens between the weekend and then the following Monday because we do a Monday stream where we work out with Paul every single Monday. So there's always usually a workout on Sunday or there's like a workout Friday, Saturday kind of just depends on how it all lines up. So basically goes Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And then that extra workout between then and Monday ends up either being a Saturday or Sunday. It just depends on which day I choose to do it and how my body's feeling and where we are. We work four different key areas of my body. We work on my legs. Of course, you work on your chest. We do abs and then we do she do arms and shoulders, most of shoulders on one of the days as well. So that's really cool. And I've been crushing the workouts, I have to say. I don't know if I'm I don't know them where I want to be with them. And sometimes a workout I did the week before when I have to repeat it the following week is actually harder the following week. And the varies. But hey, you know, I'm 37 years old and I'm getting back in shape. I'm feeling better. I have more energy and, you know, even clothes like this that I wasn't wearing much until like the last week are fitting better. So I'm starting to where it started to get the point that some of my biggest clothes I have my a lot of my three X shirts and stuff I was wearing are kind of like dresses on me in some in some some instances wasn't for this little hernia thing here. They probably all be dresses, but it's whatever. I'm very happy about that progress and I wanted to make sure I shared that with you guys because one, I want you guys to hold me accountable to I don't know if you've even noticed that I've lost weight. But more than that, I just want to address that in general. I'm not dumb every Monday night when we work out. There's there's always one or two people in the chat talking about how fat I am and how big my titties are some dumb stuff. And that's just the negativity that is something that I actually is kind of unique to the internet. You could be a big fat ass and go to your local gym or YMCA or whatever. And all the people there will treat you very respectfully because they're happy to see you getting in shape. The internet sees it and all they want to do is make fun of you. It's kind of sad, but that's not a majority of people. So thank you for all the people that are supportive and those that have been joining us on our workouts every Monday. I hope you continue to do other workouts throughout the week to help you out or maybe just work a manual labor intensive job and don't need to work out as much and that's fine. Or you just have different genetics, right? Everyone's genetically different. I have some pretty bad genetics in my family. One of those, including being a genetic that actually makes you gain weight when you shouldn't. And it's really weird. But you know what, for the most part, I'm really happy with what's going on. So that's good there. I also want to talk about obviously life in video games. And I say this because something that's been happening over the last month is I've been playing more video games. And I know right on Nintendo video game YouTubers playing video games, but I'm not like most of my content is news based, which technically doesn't mean I have to play the games, but I do play a lot of games. And I started doing these YouTube shorts, vertical live streams about a month ago, and it's been very, very successful for the channel. We've obviously gained subscribers. Some of them have had, you know, random super chat stuff going on, which I never expected on YouTube shorts. And on top of that, we beat Ocarina of Time for the first time in a long time. We beat Majora's Mask for the first time in 20 years. We played a little bit of Hogwarts Legacy. I don't know what we're going to do next. We might play some Fortnite or something else. I don't really know. Maybe Princess Peach Showtime this upcoming Friday, right? Like that might be a good game to kind of get out there and just see how what people are thinking. But it's been kind of fun because obviously I'm playing games off streams as well. So I combined the on stream with the off stream and I'm actually playing games more now than I have in a hell of a long time. So that's been really, really nice because mentally, you know, things are what they are. I am a father of three children. I love them to death. They're eight, 10 and 13. I have a lovely fiance I've been with for a long time. But we've had our ups and downs over the last 12 years. And life comes at you in droves. They always say when it rains, it pours. And I've had a lot of stress going on. I've had battles with depression myself in the past, probably still still today, if I'm completely honest, went to therapy for 13 years. My big thing is there's been a lot happening in my house. Some of it's involving my children, which I absolutely refuse to really get into that in an online setting because they're literally minors and I don't think it's appropriate. But there's been some kid related stuff going on. I'm mostly with mental health and stuff like that, that we've been doing our best as parents to deal with because we're not one of those parents that's afraid to admit that our kids have problems and we're doing our best there. But besides that, my fiance is an amazing woman and she has amazing struggles as well, both good and bad. And a lot of those struggles are internal battles. And I can't, well, not that I can't. I don't want to dive into all of it, but over the last week, it's been a very, very trying time, more trying than our typical week. And she's really been struggling and, you know, knock on wood today. She's doing really, really well. But you guys might have noticed last week, Monday, when we had our typical Paul Gale Network live stream, our stream got cut off and our stream got cut off out of nowhere because of something very serious that happened in my house involving Yulia. And came to her aid and did everything I could and tried to help her. And I'm still trying to help her. But it's a nice reminder that, you know, in life and in video games and just in anything that we need to make sure we take care of ourselves. Video games are helping me take care of my mental state, especially right now. We're actually we doing after this video goes up, we'll be doing another vertical live stream because I hey, I need to play some games and clear my head, right? And we still have our workout stream and stuff tonight. But also that you guys are taking care of yourselves. Like while I'm sitting here dealing with everything in my house and as as I'm often told by my friends and immediate family, I'm like the rock of my family, right? Like I'm not allowed to break. And it's kind of interesting because like this is the side I want everyone to see this nice solid foundation. But then really, you know, underneath it all, I have my little cracks and these little cracks I need to take care of myself. And that's why I do that's actually one reason why I started the vertical gaming live stream was to force myself to play games more. So I could de-stress from everything because I don't want to get myself back to a mental state that I was five years ago. And that mental state was I lost myself. I don't know if you guys know what that feels like, but you start to no longer recognize who you are anymore. You start to not know what to do with your day. You start to not you're just very depressed and don't and it feels off. Like it doesn't feel like you are you and how do you get back to being you? And for me, it was therapy and a lot of self-reflection and a lot of work took years, but I don't want to get back to that state. And so even this video here is more so just me like airing all my thoughts out, both from what I'm doing from a health perspective and what's going on in life and what's happening here. And this isn't always me. And I'm not trying to be like, oh, you give me lots of money that solves all the problems. Like, look, we could be billionaires and it wouldn't fix what's going on inside our heads. So and one even fixed what's going on with my body, right? Like, hey, yeah, I can get the surgery to remove that one thing from the hernia, but I still got to put in the work to lose the weight, right? So that's not going to change anything. A lot of the stuff we're talking about is not something money can buy and money can solve. So I just want to sit here and let you guys know that I know that I'm going through some stuff and I feel like I'm doing a pretty good job, mostly not letting it seep into my content. And because I just want to keep presented to you guys, the latest rumors and news and all that stuff and has a lot of fun on streams and give you guys my best self. Well, maybe I'm dealing with some stuff behind the scenes because being my best self in those situations helps me deal with that stuff behind the scenes because I'm so focused on my health and my mental health and mental health of my fiance and my children and everyone around me that I want to make sure that you guys are taking care of yourself too. And maybe you're not or maybe you're trying, you're not trying hard enough. I don't know what the answer is going to be for you guys, whether it's be a medicated or being on medicine or I guess it's the same thing. Getting whether you need therapy, maybe you just need to find more fun things to do with your life or find a hobby and a video games and social media like social media is wonderful and I exist on it and I'm thankful you're here. But for some people, social media can actually be draining and hurt you mentally. And, you know, if that's the case, maybe you need to cut back or cut out your social media consumption as much as that might hurt my YouTube channel. I just want you guys to take care of yourself. And so this is not only me just updating you guys, maybe doing a check up with you. How are you doing? No, seriously, you don't have to get too personal down in the comments that how personally want to get up to you. But literally, how are you doing? I hope everyone's doing amazing and wonderful. And I want you to know that I do hear you. I do care. I do read those comments. And hey, you want to talk more? I'll be live tonight, man. I'll also be live in a little bit playing video games if you want to just talk about some stuff going on in your life. I am here for you as much as I reasonably can be with obviously you guys understanding. I have other priorities and responsibilities above, you know, what I do here on YouTube and above you guys, but you guys matter. And if you ever feel like you don't, just remember that Nintendo Prime is right here looking you in the eye, saying you matter to me. And I mean that. Thank you so much for being here. And hopefully we get to some fun video game news tomorrow.