I'm tired of it. It's been a little over a month since I quit on my diet & training program. I've been feeling awful. Like the prodigal son, I've been living to the extreme. Bad food—it just CAN'T be that good. Take a step back, what is the driver? This food—let me clear, specifically food with empty calories with a poor nutrient to calorie ratio—just isn't CAN'T be that addictive. But like a meth head's gnarled face, eating bad foods wreck yourself...and you got it: I gotta check myself (while true, yes, writing that even made me groan).

Food doesn't live in a vacuum. Good or bad, whether food is a symptom or a change agent of good or evil, I do not know. Does my culinary choice reflect who I am? Or, does the fulfillment of my selection change me?

-or-

Do I eat a Twinkie because I'm a Nacho-to-the-Max kind of guy or is the Twinkie the blue pill?

After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth.

—Morpheus, The Matrix

I'm returning to my more wholesome ways. However, I'm more ably adopting a mindset that does away with the week mentality. In the past, I blocked off time through weeks; weigh-ins and training methods relied on weeks as intervals, even if it was six of them at the time. I compartmentalized them so that success was dependent on their individual outcome and the overall vision, while fueled by the specific successes, was secondary in scope. If a week turned rancid early on, there might be a would-of-should-of-could-of moment, but I'd just chalk it up as a loss and wait until the next Monday rolled around for a reset. And the thing is with that approach, there's a lot of time for things to go further out of rhythm.

Instead of viewing it by the week, I choose to go into day mode, that I try to glean as much success a I can with today and tomorrow, I'll compete against that success. You can't go wrong trying to beat yourself—that's an effective approach for change. There's no room for off days...different days, to be sure, but no days that will wreck the program.

Yet in this context, I'm disinterested in daily weigh-ins. I must ask myself, will a weigh-in motivate or de-motivate me? If I don't quickly get the results I want, it's obvious. And if it's immediately the results I want, does it show in my appearance—as subjective of a scale as that can be from a first person perspective. I've got my start weigh-in on the morning of New Year's Eve 2017 of 331. I'm only interested in reaching the morning of New Year's Eve 2018. The rest are just chapter notes.

So how do I gauge achieve daily success if not by a scale? I'm a rather passive participant to whatever happens on the scale. Oh sure, the things I do away from the scale does change the numbers toward a direction. That said, rather, when I'm on the scale, is there anything I can do in of myself? Of course not. The scale is another method of determining fitness. Daily success is based on what I do. Dieting is the primary approach; the time I spend working out is a secondary contributor. Thus, daily success is achieved by eating the food I planned. Working out is an accelerator.

And while the little successes of each day pile up, the overarching focus is on EOY. It's why the days perspective is effective: who really cares about the success or failure or a week or six weeks: it's about where I am at with 2018's EOY in comparison to 2017.

Thus, I won't weigh myself until the morning of New Year's Eve 2018.

Did I leave a lot on the table up to now that would have been useful? Sure, but unless I can generate 1.21 gigawatts, there's nothing I can do about beyond tucking it away into my playbook for future reference. I'll remove what didn't work or led to bad excess and pour into what I'm doing what works and leads to—you guessed it—GOOD excess. Because in order to change everything that went wrong, to bring us back, we gotta do more than just to maintain. We gotta exceed—we gotta have awesome-blossom good excess!

My flagship of this change, specifically weightloss that will one day lead to weightgain, is this website. I now recognize the correlation to this website's uptime to my own pursuit of better choices. This site serves to share my success and methodologies. I'm redoubling my efforts to employ this website as a tool for just that purpose.

As much as I liked the application of The Expeditions, each series of six-weeks their own entities in competition with each other, I'm retiring that construct.

It was too time dependent—not that time doesn't play an integral role. But, I ultimately didn't want to manifest time as a character; rather, I'm more interested as how contributes as an attribute; instead of playing a supporting role, I'd value time far greater as the atmosphere.

Instead of divisions of time, I've adopted being.

It's the entire package I'm trying to achieve, isn't it? It's not merely weightloss—yes, it has a huge impact, but not as a direct player; rather, it is the passive result of the soul's fundamental shift. It results from a course correction, adjusting life's approach. When I see obesity, I see that there is a reason for that...in a very few situations, there are those whose athletic lifestyle requires copious amounts of calories, but I am not an NFL offensive lineman—I love this recent weightloss tip from the 50-lb lighter and counting, ex-Browns great, Joe Thomas:

You just don't eat until you feel like you're gonna throw up at every meal and all of a sudden the weight falls right off.

No, I didn't stuff my face with food on somebody else's dime, I did it for no other reason but to fail to satiate my soul's longings. Am I too out of line to view food as meth?

Meth warps people's bodies. It is a condition of the soul that is an unholy potter, twisting pain into the sculpture—you've seen the time-lapsed mug shots. Flip open a high school yearbook to the seniors and then fire up Facebook for a little comparison/contrast...even after taking in account for 23 years of aging, what conclusion are we left? Perhaps the meth analogy isn't hanging out in left field. So what's really going on here?

Now in practice, perhaps I'm unfair. I haven't even seen my high school yearbook in years as I tossed it and my diploma into the trash. There's this great lyric from Paul Simon's Kodachrome:

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match
My sweet imagination
Everything looks worse in black and white

It hasn't been an entirely bad 2018 for me; halfway into it, I have loss 53 lbs with the majority of it starting in April, but it's far below what should have happened if I didn't get derailed a few weeks back.

I'm fortunate: I don't adopt a false perception of my physical appearance. When I calculate my BMI and its far past the overweight category and deep into obesity, I recognize that I'm not jacked—I don't have an 8-pack and don't have towering, bowling ball delts. I'm not going to say how healthy I look when the numbers aren't there to support it. There are those who do just that and I don't get it: is there a belief that they are some sort of mage and just one well-placed, cleanly-articulated incantation can just whip their doughy-middle fantasy to a rock-hard reality? It seems to me that they are more like a used car salesman singing a John Mayer derivative, Your Body is a Lemonade Stand.

No, your fitness fantasies are just that. And if I may misappropriate a Demon Hunter song and apply those eating habits in context to your heart, both as a metaphor for your soul and the pump of your cardiovascular system, your heart...

...will fail you
Of that I'm sure (Your heart) will remind you of the pain forevermore
And when (your) sins are just a memory
Faith restored
(Your heart) will fail you
To the core

We should reject aggressively the slippery slope of apathy. Frankly Stuart, you are not good enough, not smart enough, and people don't like you enough for you to just sit there and bask in these daydream illusions of fitness. Like a car, how does your body respond to your driving it?

And after taking an honest look at the numbers, is there any other conclusion that can be reached? If fashion was a fix, then we would all just run around with a paper bag equivalent over our heads. But weightloss is like time: it is the atmosphere. Where is the heart of a methhead? What is the driver of obesity-causing behavior?

Though I've had a strong desire to return to what has worked so well, I've been distracted and/or just zapped. What had worked really well was a markedly different shift of course, the 3 hours a day workouts, the vegan diet and all the copious amounts of spinach that goes into that!

How did this happen? I was so headstrong! It's easy to blame anything really—circumstances, etc., but at the end of the day, I did it...or, I did the lack of it...err...I didn't do anything...err...I DID "didn't do anything."

Ok, more pragmatically, I lost my vision. For weeks, I was fueled by what I would be doing in the fall season. However, when I adopted a long view of life, the blazing fire of my short term perspective died down to mere embers.

To a degree to which it might contribute, I am affected by the lack of community. Sure, I use the boon of a Facebook return for some motivation, though I wonder if is merely a mirage. A shadow of their former crowd, the analog, offline people from the past are now conveniently digitized and categorized into the cloud. I don't like that and I don't like that done to me. Is it a symptom of this information age, or is this just life in this demographic expanse? It's not like past friends are hanging out at the coffeehouse or at a LAN party; they are just like me, juggling responsibilities and kids then injecting the nightly anesthetization of entertainment.

Of course, I don't even know HOW to approach friendships in this expanse. You see, I value the individual. I see the construct of friendship as a relational 1-to-1 vehicle. But in practice, is this true? There tends to be this dragging into a friendship a whole, cluttered, hanging mobile with spheres of influence swapped in for the orbits of Venus and Mars—far more messier and involved than I'd prefer and more akin to a marriage where one is saddled with in-laws. C'mon, man, I'm a straight-up Allman Brothers' Ramblin' Man!

And perhaps my frustration is part of what I choose to do. I have the unique opportunity of being a stay-at-home dad whom homeschools his kids. There's a myriad of reasons why in this context trading earning potential and societal position to teach my kids is the superior choice over a government education—and I get to use my MA in English! However, the culture of the American South has its own challenges and perceptions: I've never felt the luxury to hang out with the moms at the park or do whatever they do on play dates—there's gotta be a Madden tournament play date out there somewhere! Now in theory, my gender shouldn't matter, as the focus should be on the ability and willingness to teach, but in practice, it comes off a bit like house arrest—not like this either:

Yet, I recognize that this is the season I find myself. And for now, this season is...

WEIGHTLOSS through veganism and being AWESOME.

And as I'm Born to Run, look for my running race schedule for 2019...