 Do not fall victim to this stuff. They are praying on those of you who are desperate, who are emotionally vulnerable, who are seeking help out of your mental despair, out of what you feel is this tyranny on your life caused by HIV or the threat of HIV, and they're trying to exploit you and take your money. I don't mean to game, I was on a bench, on a bench. First I was writing, now I'm collecting rent. Hey fam, Raif Derrazy here. As you can see, we are not in my office today. We are in my kitchen. For no other reason than I wanted to switch it up. And there's beautiful, gorgeous, natural light coming in. It's a beautiful day here in LA. Yeah, so why not take advantage of it and do something different. And by the way, while I'm doing this, I also want to do my smiles direct because, so smiles direct is basically like invisible line, they're aligners for your teeth. And I originally signed up with them. By the way, no affiliation, no partnership, no money, no nothing, no, none of that. This was years ago. I started to do my aligners, then I stopped doing it consistently and then I fell off completely. I haven't done it in years. And so I reached out to them last year, 2021. And I asked them if there was any way that I can start up again, what do I need to do? And they were kind enough to just send me. They give you molds to do for your teeth so that they know where you're at right now. That's going to be the same as it was when I first started. I should have just told them that. Yeah, just use the originals because my teeth haven't changed. And so they sent me some molds and so I need to send that back to them and then they're going to give me a fresh batch of aligners. So, and I've been wanting to do it for a long time but I was like, let me do it on a vlog. Wow, I'm rambling. Anyway, so that's what we're going to do today. And I wanted to just talk about some things that have popped up into my mind in the last couple of weeks. So here's the box that they come in. Let me angle this camera down so you all can see what's going on. That's better. So this is what we got going on. Some pamphlets, a sticker, nobody cares about. Looks like these are the trays for the molds. Putty, different colors, I presume for different reasons. Tray one, make a great first impression. Tray two, second time's the charm. So yeah, you're doing it two times. Return shipping label is already on the box. Super easy. Oh, it looks like some gloves that I probably won't be using. Oh, by the way, this goofy mug over here, I bought this for Bo for his birthday last year. My boyfriend, for those of you who aren't aware, because for his birthday, he said he'd never been to Disneyland and I'm like, you have to have gone to Disneyland or Disney World at some point in your life. I couldn't believe it. So I took him there for his birthday and I had that waiting for him in the hotel room. Ooh, okay, so a warning, you have about 90 seconds to prepare your impression material. I don't know if I showed my teeth. I'm just not even trying to fix right here. That's the biggest issue for me. And I have a bit of an overbite. I don't know if it'll help with that very much, but at least I want to straighten out a little bit more. It says you have 90 seconds to prepare your impression material before it begins to set. Phone timer, stopwatch is there. So the reason why there are two colors is because you need to mix them and then once you mix them, the chemical reaction or whatever so that it'll start to set. It's like honey, kind of like, remember GAC? It doesn't smell, it doesn't smell like it, it feels like that. I just dated myself by talking about GAC. These days, it's slime. You know, I have 30 seconds of time to do this. This is probably the part where I'm supposed to wear gloves. Maybe the oils in my hands and the moisture in my hands might mess up how effective this is, but I can't be bothered. Last time I did this, I went into their shop and they did it, like they used a light to make a 3D image. That was probably what I should have done, but here we are. Okay, so I'm gonna place it into the tray and it says to do the bottom teeth first. See what I'm gonna do. If I put it in the tray, see there? Each impression takes two and a half minutes to harden. Okay, I took it out of my mouth. It definitely hardened quite a bit and as you can see, got a pretty good impression. Hopefully it's good enough. I don't really want to do two of each of these. Just suck it up and do it, right? I'm gonna do the upper teeth. Okay, so that's done. That was kind of not an enjoyable experience. Things like that, when I go to the dentist and they have to like fill around in my mouth for too long and my gag reflex kicks in, it's really annoying and it's, ugh. No one wants to feel like they're constant on the verge of trying to fight the feeling of wanting to throw up. If I had to do it again, I would probably just go to a shop and have them do the pen thing where they make a 3D mapping of the teeth rather than this. So I'll set those off. Hopefully they're good. If not, then I'm definitely going to the shop. I'm not doing that again. So it's officially 2022, 2022, 2021 is over, 2020 is over. You know, 2021 did not save us from 2020 the way that we thought it would. In fact, some would argue that it was worse than 2020. I think they were both equally very challenging years and I don't foresee the fact that it is, that January 1st, 2022 has come and gone that suddenly everything's going to change. In fact, I believe it's not going to change just because of the date on the calendar. So we have to deal with present reality and move along as we did every day before that. So it's 2022, January, this is typically the time that people make New Year's resolutions. You know, I do make an effort to make resolutions and goals year round. I don't think that you need to wait until January 1st before you start new resolutions at all. In fact, I like to constantly reevaluate and do new things. Yuki, are you coming out here? Come over here. Come join us. He's been laying on the floor in my office because he assumed I was going to come back. And I didn't. Come on Yuki, come join us. I guess what I'm trying to say is that even though it's the time of the year when everybody should be making resolutions that's like the goal. I believe that we should be reevaluating and creating new goals all the time. However, I understand that it's helpful to have like a set time each year where you go over your past goals, evaluate, see how you did, maybe make improvements, things that didn't work, throw them out the door, come up with new ways, new things that might work, take those on and then move forward, creating new goals for the new year. There's value in merit in that. It's what we did at my parents' business. We had our annual review. Our business consultant came in, flew in from Hawaii, spent half a day with us and we went over all of our goals for 2021 which we definitely met and exceeded which was awesome. So it was a really good year for us. And then we created new goals for the new year for 2022 that would stretch things further and get us to a new level. That's the goal. You don't always meet the goals and that's okay. That's part of the journey but the important part is that you're making the goal. That you have a vision, you have something that you're working towards and that you have a measurable attainable practical way of achieving those goals. Not just the goal. You don't wanna just say, I wanna make this much money this year. You say, this is what I'm gonna do. And it's not, I'm gonna work really hard. It's gonna be like, I'm gonna make this many phone calls. I am going to spend this many hours every week writing or something like that. It's gotta be very specific. That's really good for making goals specificity. And one of my goals personally is to put forth more effort and energy into social media and creating my vlogs and creating my Instagram and all that stuff because I've definitely fallen off that bandwagon since the pandemic. A lot of you know who follow me that I've been struggling battling with my mental health. Uh, excuse me. And so it's been a lot of like up and down, up and down with gyms being closed and opening and mask wearing and being stuck at home and not feeling well and gaining weight and losing muscle mass and you name it, all the anxiety and the stress and the economy and a lot of people are dealing with mental health. But in the past couple of months I ended up talking to a therapist that really helped a lot. I haven't actually spoken to him in a month and I need to make an appointment before I forget it. But with that said, anyway, I've been making steps towards kind of regrounding myself and setting up my foundation. And I've been getting back into my old routine, you know, things, at least in my immediate sphere have stabilized a little bit. So that's allowed me to rebuild my routine and all the Jenga pieces that I had, I had stacked neatly on top of each other and fell apart during the pandemic. I'm able to start building again. The diet, the supplements, the going to the gym regularly, the getting enough sleep, the having me time, the working on the stuff that I'm passionate about, getting caught up on work and taking care of finances and things like that. They're all so important for our overall mental health. What I realized after our annual meeting at my parents' business is that the specificity of the goals and that we went over them and there's even, we have weekly leadership meetings where we go over the things that we want to accomplish every week. Did we accomplish it? How close did we get? How far were we from it? Things like that. And I like, I can't expect myself to be as successful as I am in their business when I'm not doing those fundamental things for myself. I've never done that. So I'm like, why don't I set weekly goals for myself? Why don't I set a schedule of stuff that I want to get done every week, every month, every quarter and then set goals for revenue for myself as well and push myself so that I have something that I'm working towards and it's not just this like ethereal, like, oh yes, I want more success. I want more money, I want more, whatever it is. And I think that's really gonna help me. So I'm excited to start doing that. And with that said, I encourage all of you, if you have your own, a lot of people started their own independent contractor businesses, whatever small businesses during the pandemic, it felt like the right time. We're all stuck at home working from home. Why not figure out how we can always work from home? That's something you're doing or if it's just a hobby that you've been wanting to start or any kind of project or anything that requires consistent work over time to accomplish, why not set those goals, those small goals and those medium goals and those large sized goals and make it very practical and tangible so that you can hold yourself accountable on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual basis. And I think that is a major key to success in that department. As far as my weight goes, listen, do I wanna share this right now? I don't know. So there's a handy little app called my fitness pal. It's right there. It used to be in partnership with Under Armour. Now it's not, it's independent, but it's free. That's the important thing. And again, no partnership, no affiliation whatsoever. You can go on and you can track your weight every day and you can take a picture of yourself in the mirror every day and it'll show you your weight progress over time. And then you can also put in all the food you eat. You can scan, because if you have a favorite food that you like to eat, it has the barcode. Scan the barcode. Most of the time it'll pop up. It'll show the calories that give you the nutrient breakdown and you can track what you're eating at each meal, how many calories you're eating every day. Put in whatever exercise you're doing. It deducts that amount of calories. And then you can really kind of get a sense of how you're eating and what your calories look like on a daily basis. And then you match that up with your weight progress. Is it going up? Is it going down? Is it staying the same? And then you can adjust accordingly. And when I say adjust, I mean in small increments. We don't wanna go crazy and be like, I'm gonna eat a thousand less calories every day. No, you're gonna crash hard and then you're gonna go right back the other way and consume 3,000 calories a day. So what we wanna do is if we need to adjust, we do, okay, let me all just adjust by 150, 200, 250 calories a day. Try that for a while. See if I'm getting a good response. If my weight is responding, great. Stick with that for a while. If it starts to plateau, consider doing it again. It's that kind of like give and take, feedback, troubleshooting, experimenting that we have to do with our bodies. Look, I just want you to see this because I want you to realize how non-linear progress is. Now keep in mind, I'm not on any kind of diet. I'm not on any kind, nothing whatsoever. I'm just trying to be a little bit more mindful, do some more exercise, do some more cardio so that hopefully over time I can see a downward progression in my weight. This is from November till now, beginning of January. So I started at 203 pounds. Today I'm at 197.6. But look at, look at all the fluctuations. Look at all the up and down constantly on a day to day basis. If you're married to the scale, if you are like hanging onto it's every daily reading, you're gonna get crushed because you're gonna see your weight jump up and jump down and go sideways and all kinds of stuff. And that's normal. That's just how our bodies are. It's a biological living organism. It doesn't dictate by the fact that you ate rice every day for the past week and therefore it should go down every day. That's not how it works. So many things will influence our weight, including water, including carbon take. The amount of stress and cortisol we have running through our body, how much sleep we're getting. All of these things impact our day to day fluctuations. So anyway, I highly suggest looking into this. It's a great tool to use. And the thing, oh, the other thing I wanted to say about my weight is that it's not just about what's on the scale. It's also the reason why I say, you know, you can take a picture of yourself in the mirror and that's not about vanity. It's about part of the journey is liking what you see in the mirror. And sometimes, and oftentimes actually, you won't see a difference on the scale, but you'll notice a difference in the mirror. And again, the body is rejiggering things. It's moving things around. You know, you might be losing a little fat. You might be gaining a little muscle. And then on the scale, you don't see any difference. But in the mirror, you can see it. I'm even starting to see like veins in my arms, starting to poke through a little bit here now and then. There was a while where I no longer could see veins in my arms because I had so much fat under my skin, subcutaneous fat in my entire life. I've always had like a map of veins on my arms. That was just something I've always had. And I never questioned it. And then as I gained the weight, they like disappeared and I was like, holy shit. I used to have a vein on the underside of my arm that was so big you could put a subway train through it. And all of a sudden it was gone. I'm like, that's crazy. I'm starting to see that come through again. So even though you see like my weight going like this doesn't seem to be doing much. I'm seeing differences in the mirror and that's important. Okay. So comment of the day is kind of like a reverse comment of the day today because it's actually like one of my least liked comments. But I think it's important that we talk about this. Let me read this comment that I see from Kim Sandra. I'm one of my videos. She says, I want to use this opportunity to thank Dr. Kogbo for the great work he has done for me and my cousin sister who was cured from cancer with his herbal supplement. I was cured from herpes, virus through his herbal remedy and my cousin sister was also cured from cancer. This is a great testimony for what doctor a Kogbo has done for me and my cousin sister. Oh, I don't even know what that means. I'm giving this testimony so that those of you out there can contact him while he keeps saving my relatives, send him a DM and get a better health totally. A better health totally. Hmm. Contact him via WhatsApp. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, bunch of random numbers. You can also reach him on his YouTube. Here is his YouTube link. So yeah, there are so many of these comments all over YouTube, all over my YouTube videos, all over Instagram too. In fact, I think a lot of them are bots because they just say the same thing. It's the same account and they just post it on anything that has like hashtag H-A-V or whatever. Please, please, please do not fall victim to this stuff. They are praying on those of you who are desperate, who are emotionally vulnerable, who are seeking help out of your mental despair out of what you feel is this tyranny on your life caused by HIV or the threat of HIV and they're trying to exploit you and take your money. That's all it is. It's a scam. There is no viable, practical, herbal HIV cure. Let it go. You gotta let that go. There is amazing medicine. There is amazing remedies for those of us living with HIV. There is functional cures out there. There are impractical cures for very highly selective situations but for the everyday person, you cannot, you cannot WhatsApp somebody, pay them some money and get some herbs in the mail, highly dubious, take them and then suddenly be HIV cured. That's not how it works. Please, please don't fall victim to this stuff. It's BS. Some of you have offered me money and I kindly have said no thank you because that's not how I work. That's not how I operate. I do a lot of what I do of my own time and my own energy and if I were to do something that required compensation, it would probably be on a donation basis or it'd be something like if I asked you, if you wanted a video, if you wanted to do a chat or whatever, something that is a real investment of my time and my expertise. There are plenty of free organizations. There are plenty of free, free resources that can help you and will help you for free. So don't let people take advantage of you or convince you that you need to give them money in order for you to feel happy or secure about yourself whether you're afraid that you might have HIV or you have HIV. Don't do it. I can't stress it enough. I'm of the firm belief that when you offer things of value to other people, give them value first without asking for something in return. There's a lot of scammers and sleazy people and people who are just trying to get something and you can tell right away when you see those ads pop up or you see those posts or something, they are just kind of fishing for something. I don't, that's not how I operate. I'm about giving, giving, giving, giving, giving. Eventually there will come an opportunity where it can be a mutually beneficial relationship or whatever, but that'll come in time and right now I'm more focused about just establishing myself and bringing value to you. Anyway, that's all I got to say today. That was the quote of the day. I'm gonna keep doing them. I'll have more content coming for you soon if I follow up with my goals. Like this video. If you liked it, subscribe if you haven't already. Hit that bell so you get notifications hopefully and share this with anyone that you might think would find this channel helpful. You know, I have a lot of people who watch my content who follow me, who don't have HIV, who don't know anybody who has HIV. They're not afraid that they're gonna get HIV, but they still find value from this content because it's inspirational, it's motivational, it's authentic, so do it. Share it. All right, I'm out. Peace.