I have retired my Expeditionary construct for weightloss. It's not that I don't remain focused on optimizing my fitness, rather, that which defined The Expeditions, is no longer applicable.

Until the 13th, they were:

• Designed to be a low-calorie, low-carb approach with fat as a macro only in the 40% range;
• Scheduled workouts Monday-Friday 2+ hour, pre-sunrise sessions with options for the rest of the time, culminating into a 30,000 daily step goal;
• Spaced out to 6-week intervals for weigh-ins;
• Bracketed by a selection of songs to act as a soundtrack.

While it always took a lot of willpower to reach liftoff, I cut a LOT of weight. The thing is, The Expeditions were susceptible to blowing up, leaving me in a place of daily trending upward on the scale, dropping me off at the same place I started. The 11th Expedition is a great example of this in 2020 (chart).

The great takeaway from The 11th (and really the nameless 12th), is the need for re-evaluation, and fortunately, I ran across Gary Taubes's The Case Against Sugar, which opened the doorway to an entire realm of cascading keto books.

With this new focus on fat power, the 13th and the 14th have not required such a herculean passion to pull off. I do not feel the need to proudly keep score of each passing day, because, frankly, it's not that hard. From an aesthetics perspective, I do miss my Galaga arcade style HIGH SCORE on the top of this site, but, it's no longer needed for motivation.

And the weird thing is that I don't feel the need to work out daily—not in the conventional sense, anyway. I'm considering an eccentric movement workout—no, not a Michael Scott's "primal art form" on a booze cruise type of eccentricity—it has to do with the lengthening of the muscle. I'm planning a once-a-week session, but, it remains on the drawing board. Overall, I'm looking for greater meditation and strategies of mitigating & lowering cortisol levels—yeah, I'm evolving beyond my past's⚡ THUNDER ROCK 🤘 sessions.

Is all of this in my fruit basket the bounty from my departure from Spotify? I think so. There's no longer this tension between listening to audio books and feeding stats to Last.FM. With no playlist to follow, the spirit of an Expedition dissipates into the timeless mists. And if I'm not absorbed within a Spotify playlist during a workout, what do I consider? The End Game, of course!