I may have cursed out Isaac Newton in college a few times when I was studying calculus, but after I got through all that, I had to admit that old chap knew a few things.

One of the most important concepts that Newton articulated was his first law of motion, which coarsely and somewhat over simply stated is that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Of course, this can be influenced by outside forces.

I'm not an expert in metabolism and I don't even know if my own metabolism is higher or lower than average, but what I do know about myself generally is that if I've got nothing going on, I tend to continue to have nothing going on. If I am doing things, I tend to do things. I'm not sure why that is, but I do know that I have tend to run in cycles a little in terms of my tendancy to generally get things done and not get things done. I have gotten older, I have gotten better at recognizing when a pattern of lethargy is setting in and working to reverse that trend. I think my weight history is a proxy for a lot of things in my life and hopefully, I can get my weight and overall health where it needs to be and minimize the periods of time where I'm an object at rest in that area, so to speak.

I may be trending away from a physics analogy and more toward psychology here, but my point is that while I have worked in other areas of my life to try and improve myself, I have not spent adequate energy on establishing and maintaining a healthy way of life, despite earlier attempts to do so. While I am going through this weight loss program, I am thinking about after I get to a target weight how am I going to maintain. How am I going to stay in motion and not tend toward being an object at rest.

I have said a couple of times that I've done this kind of thing before. When I graduated from high school, I weighed 162 pounds. That is pretty skinny, but that was how I was all the time that I grew up. I've never had great core strength, but I played basketball, ran cross-country and track and as a result, I was pretty thin. My senior year of high school, my school started emphasizing weight training and I made some pretty dramatic gains, and I could tell the difference on the basketball court and in my track results. I trimmed a nifty seven seconds off my 400 time as a senior, and I think a lot of that came from weight training.

I graduated from high school and started college and that was pretty much the end of my weight training. I played basketball in college a lot, but I gained some weight and I graduated at about 210 pounds, which isn't really a bad weight. My first few years of working, though, saw me not doing much more exercise. I went to grad school while I was working and by my last year of grad school I had gotten up to 230. I got disgusted with myself and bought a Schwinn AirDyne and started riding it every night. I was able to drop 40 pounds and was down to 190. I was lean and in excellent shape. I could play basketball all day long, no problem. But, that spring I graduated and I pretty much gave up on the workouts and started to put on weight. In the next five years, I went up to 255. Once again, I was upset and I started another program and dropped 50 pounds. Once again, I used the AirDyne and added some light weights. I was again in pretty good shape and now I was 35 years old.

Having learned from the first time, I kept working at my conditioning and over the next couple of years, I gained 10 pounds, but I did work out. My first year of law school, I ran on a treadmill nearly every day and I was quite happy about keeping the weight off for what was about 3 three years. But, then I started working and going to school. I dropped the working out and added a lot of fast food meals. This time the weight came back with a vengeance and I got all the way up to where I was here, at 285 pounds. I have been there or on the path there for almost 10 years. I realize that this has to be the last time that this can happen. I have to get down and stay down.

I know that I am in motion right now. I am focused like a laser on the diet, but the important part will be the long term maintenance. I would be lying if I told you I wasn't worried about that. One good thing is that I have become a lot better at keeping myself from sitting at rest in a lot of other areas of my life, so I know that I can do something about this. I also know that I had some success after the second weight loss. Also, I have a gym membership and will add weight training again in a couple of months. Plus, I'm pretty sure I never want to have to do what I'm doing now again. So, I will have to figure out my plan and stick to it. As you know, there are challenges for me because of the lifestyle I lead. It's a lot easier to buy something quick to eat and go. I have to avoid that and plan ahead to make sure that I have healthy options. I also have to add exercise when I'm here in ND. That's not easy, but none of this is, frankly. It's just worth it.

Day 54
Weight: 257 <-- on the heavy scale and still a new low Total Loss: 27.5 <-- actually it's about 30, but I can't confirm exactly Average weight last 30 days: 263.6 <-- something that will become more important when I've finished the diet phase of this plan Percent of goal: 32.54% <-- really? I'm only 1/3 through? I look at the several notches that I've moved on the belt and that makes me happy but then I look at Buddha and realize, yep, still a long way to go