You Can’t Play With My (Weight-Related) Yo-Yo

For the past eight years, when it comes to exercise and health, I’ve only had two modes—all in, or all out. I have either worked out six days a week and watched my diet with the intensity of a thousand suns, or I’ve sat on the couch and consumed four Cokes a day. As a result, my weight has tended to have massive amounts of fluctuation. I scrape the bottom of 5’9″ on a good day, and when I’m super healthy, I weigh around 160. When I’m not, I weigh around 195.

Three months ago, I was right at that 195 number, literally fat and happy. I had a wonderful job, healthy and content children, finances under control. And then I lost my job. Having that life changing moment made me analyze a great many things about myself. I may have been fat, but I wasn’t happy at all. When I’m overweight, I don’t feel good about myself. I shy away from having my photo taken. I wear loose-fitting clothes. I make a ton of excuses about why I can’t be healthy, but I know that they’re all lies.

Thankfully, I landed on my feet, but I decided to use that massive change in my life to enact another massive change—I started another round of P90X3. New job, new life, new Bark, you know?

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Yet Another Place For You To Go Read Things With Which You Disagree

bark m indulge magazine

Starting with the November issue, I’ll be writing about luxury automotive for Indulge Magazine. It’s a lifestyle-oriented magazine that has a subscription circulation of about 60,000 in the Miami-Dade market, with readership of about 280,000. It’s specifically targeted at higher income/net worth individuals, so my first piece is going to be about some of the exotic hybrid sports cars on the market, and driving them around Miami and taking pictures at iconic locations. Neat, right? Also, this will probably be the first time that I’m just plain ol’ “Mark Baruth” in the byline.

Unless you live in Miami, you won’t ever see the articles in print, but I’ll link to them when they’re online.

That’s all!

The Critics Respond, Part Forty-Seven

This one is funny, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it shows everybody’s favorite troll, Deadweight, in full-on Baruth Derangement Syndrome mode. Guys like this fail to understand the economics of the internet—if you really hate me so much, the absolute WORST way to protest me is to click on everything I write, read every word of it, and then leave a comment. Seriously, that’s a triple fail.

The other reason that this is such a poor troll is that he’s protesting a guy who has literally made it his job to call out unethical behavior in others. I am the reason that TTAC has a disclosure policy. You can read my arguments for it here. I have never accepted anything over $50 in value from an OEM, and I’ve left a few presents behind at the hotel that were excessive in nature.

Let me go ahead and recap everything I’ve ever accepted from a manufacturer in my five years in this “business.”

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