Day 66

March 7th, 2012: Another pound south.  301.  I’ve decided to change a couple of my milestones based on one of my hobbies, so my next milestone after I break this damn 300 barrier – which is also a gun caliber, and one of my favorite calibers – is 284.  My next milestones will be 270, 264, 257, 243, and 223, all gun calibers.  After that, my new my milestones are pretty much arbitrary until the goal of 189.  They are 218, 206, 198 and GOAL.  For some reason, after 270, the numbers that end in 0’s or 5’s are like sidewalk cracks – I try not to step on them.

True story: I was in Chicago one time and I had to go back outside from a building to the street through one of those powered revolving doors.  It was the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.  There was this bitter old man outside trying to get in (he had the dirtiest look on his face). He couldn’t decide when to enter the door, and when he finally did, it revolved him right in, then it revolved him right back out to the street again.  He couldn’t figure out how to step from the door part into the lobby. You could hear him outside cussing, then he tried it again, and the section behind him caught the heel of his shoe and he had to try to jerk it out of there.  By the time he had freed his shoe, it was part-way off and he was back out on the street again, cussing.  I decided to wait in the lobby and watch and laugh. Damn this was funny.  Finally, the dirty look disappeared from his face and he smiled and started to laugh and was able to negotiate the revolving door.  He looked over at me laughing when he got inside and said, “At least somebody got something valuable out of that.”  I just laughed even harder.

My mind has synapses firing all over the place, randomly, all the time.  And it’s because of this that I decided to relate the revolving door scene to dieting.  I mean, think about it:  You have to choose when to enter (start the program) and hopefully it spits you into the building where you’ll remain while you get your business taken care of (achieve and maintain goal weight).  Sometimes the door will just kick you back out into the street (you fall off the wagon).  Sometimes you get caught up in the door and mildly injured (you have hard times).  Sometimes you just have to laugh at your imperfect human-ass self.  Anyway you look at it, you have to go through that door to get inside some day.  And you will – in your own good time.  If you end up back outside, then fuck it, just try again. One of these times you’ll end up inside the building.

March 7th, 2020: In some of life endeavors or challenges, you can find statistics that say success is normal, while failure is the exception, if you do what you’re supposed to do.  Human beings are a complex lab-rat to study, and ethics don’t allow us to perform mind game experiments on each other that are potentially harmful.  Well, unless we need to know who sent you, then we’ll mind fuck the holy hell out of you.   But anyway, it’s tough to conduct experiments to really know for sure in what things should you consider success normal, and failure the exception, and with weight-loss, I honestly haven’t found any information to know for sure either way.

I have debated for eight years now about whether my success on the program should be considered normal or exceptional.  When I consider whether I would put the program out for public consumption, if I took it from the business perspective (i.e., wanted to sell it), I would tell you success is normal, failure the exception.  In all honesty, I can tell you that should very much expect success, IF you follow the mechanics of the program to the motherfucking letter, every single day.  I could say that about many diet programs though. Success comes from belief and patience, and that’s where I want to sort out the mind games of “The Program” so it sets itself apart in some way.  I don’t think I’m exceptional in comparison to anyone else, but for some reason, this has worked, and I want to find out why.  I want to sort out a way to explain it so you can feel normal in finding ultimate success, but also feel normal about setbacks and being sent back through the revolving door back out into the street from time to time. 

There is nothing in here that promises losing weight is linear and perfect.  In fact, just like I hope God has character (and when I look at kangaroos and basset hounds, I see evidence of that), I hope you do to, especially when it comes to the story of your weight loss journey.  I want you to experience success, and I think you should expect it if you do what you’re told, but I don’t want it to be all that easy though, because I want to hear a good story. I don’t want some boring bullshit about you just eating less and moving more, and bingo, there you were, a whole lot skinnier.