Viewer Appreciation - My Health Journey

Hi Everyone,
It’s me, John, with another health update and a few thoughts. I just want to say it’s been really great making these videos and I feel like I am learning, slowly, how to do a decent job of it. I’m not there yet, but I hope to get there eventually. I appreciate the patience of those of you who stick with me. My site is small and even though it says I have 750 plus subscribers, that number is misleading. I made a semi-popular video over twelve or so years ago and then didn’t pay any attention to RUclips for another ten years. Meanwhile, people subscribed slowly over those ten years and it built up. I don’t believe most of those old subscribers spend much time here.
I then did this little trick again two or so years ago. The video was even more popular, even though it was still far from a major hit, and has steadily brought me in more subscribers. To tell the truth, I’ve made 67 videos in the past three months, and they still account for just a fraction of my total traffic. My video on how to become a technical writer, which is over two years old, still gets almost all of my daily traffic. Just looking at the past 48 hours, it got 49 views, while the rest of my content combined got a total of 12 views. I’m not complaining. I’m still happy to have even one minor hit, but it shows that building an audience is a slow thing, and perhaps also shows that chatting about my health every day is not a one way ticket to RUclips success. A Quick Look at my analytics confirms this. My health content has brought in a total of 15 subscribers over the past 90 days. My two year old technical writing article has brought in 63 in the same amount of time.
In case you think the magic formula is to just do more videos about technical writing, I have. I put one out a couple weeks ago. It performed about as well as most of my videos, with just 26 views since its release. Making a hit video is not simple unless the formula is to just do one every ten years.
All of that is a roundabout way of saying I do appreciate all of you who come here because of the health journey. I love you guys. You may not be a crowd, but you show up.
That said, you may have noticed I’ve slowed down a bit on my postings. I managed to keep them nearly daily for quite a while, but now I’m posting every three or four days. This is for a number of reasons. I wanted to do daily videos was to hold myself accountable on this journey. That’s not really necessary anymore. Thanks to Virta, I now have a coach and a doctor monitoring my daily progress, and I enter my weight, blood sugar, ketones, and self assessment every day.
In addition, I have a set routine now. After nearly three months, I know I’m going to walk 10,000 steps and stick to my daily diet. They are set habits. I just accept them as my daily tasks. I don’t need to make a video to keep me on track.
That said, I like making the videos, I’m just going to limit the health ones to about once a week going forward, with the occasional extra if I have a health event to discuss.
In the meantime, my hope is that I’ll start supplementing those with other videos. Some will be about technical writing, but I don’t really want to limit myself.
I like making videos and I want to make videos I like, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not doing it expecting or even hoping for massive RUclips success. Some of the ideas I have will probably get me 20 or 30 views at best, but I still want to do them because they’re interesting to me. This is, after all, my little vlog.
That’s it for my big thoughts. Here’s a few numbers to leave you with. My weigh in today was 287.7, meaning I’ve lost 30 pounds since the beginning of the year. Hooray! That’s a nice big round number and something to celebrate.
On the blood glucose front, I’ve come in at 89 the past two mornings. That’s fantastic. It’s been over a week since my fasting blood sugar has been over 100. Even if I wasn’t losing weight, those numbers alone would make it worth continuing.
It’s kind of weird to announce daily ketones, since they say it really doesn’t matter as long as you’re over .5. I have managed to keep them over .5 every day this month with the exception of the first day, so I am solid there.
I’ve also managed my 10,000 steps every day, although my watch battery gave out on me yesterday, so I’ll just have to go by the amount of time I walked, but I’m sure I got there.
I’m not going to go over the other numbers now, but next week I’ll do my three month assessment and drown you guys in numbers.
Until them I’ll leave you with my Sir Terry Pratchett quote of the day. This one is from Nation.
“Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea.”
― Terry Pratchett, Nation
Thanks for watching. Please like. Please subscribe. Please comment. I’ll see you soon.

[@user-ft5yn4cb6l]

67! Wow

[@JohnHewittpoewar]

Not too shabby