Indeed, it has been a night and day difference between what I was doing back at the turn of the year, pressing hard to lift a sustainable fast off the ground into late March to this day in May. The thing is: fasts aren't sustainable. Even the ones I took to 29 days...end. In essence, it's like a rolling boulder: its initial inertia is great, but despite all of its past roaring, it rolls to a stop—a new home for moss. And it's hard to get a boulder to roll.

By comparison with what I'm doing now, this regimented nutritional program and these 4AM workouts, is by far easier. And curiously, like fasting, it transforms my spirit.

One aspect of this which I find appealing can be summarized by the song title Destination Unknown, incidentally a song from another Tom Cruise movie. As I begun this program, even in the planning stages finding optimal foods, I didn't know how it would shape. Even when I began through that Jumanji workout, I didn't know what exercises I would integrate, styles, methodologies—flirted a bit with martial arts, and here I am today: all-cardio with a quality elliptical of all things. I look to the future and I am curious to what lies in the months ahead. I'd reasonably expect that there will be further changes for the better and I'm excited to see them. I wish I could integrate them now, just like I wish I could have told past me to do what I'm doing now.

But sometimes, I need the time it takes for the preparation to reach where I am.