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.