She walked with a determination that would be altogether unfamiliar to her friends on the other side. What would they think of her walking down this hallway, with pillars of marble and a floor inlaid with actual, real metal? It seemed so far away from what she was doing now and yet the problems of there seemed somehow intertwined and familiar to the ones that she had here.

Nothing worked the same over there of course, and the orbs lighting her way were a constant reminder, being as they were all over this world. As she joined her troop, she steeled herself for the coming storm. The windows showed the battle that awaited them, and there was no turning back now.

As a group, they headed down the helical stairway, wondering how many of the thirty would come back, if any at all managed to survive the day. Everyone else seemed to be in the same mood. She slowed as she approached the door at the base of the tower, and took a breath before turning the handle that would signal to the other side.

Clanking of steel and a smattering of gearworks filtered through the heavy iconclad door before it swung open without a sound of it’s own. The roar of the rain and wind seemed to set the mood practically perfectly.

Charging out and standing aside, she counted their numbers silently as they marched onto the rocky plain which surrounded the rampart and lined up to the final pause before steel met flesh in the coming hours.

“It is dangerous out there today. I want you all to remember your training. It is vital that we hold the enemy, because there is little resistance that the others can offer. You were not all hoping for this, but it is now time to put your skills into action. Let’s move.”

The battle had begun.

Joe wasn’t all that great of a guy, but we all liked him okay, so when he left for his usual Wednesday lunch to the coffee shop across the way, we all sprang into action.

I was the lookout, which was fine because I wasn’t very active anyway, and everyone else ran around the office putting streamers over the exposed rafters, and putting signs up on the walls. Joe’s cubicle got the worst of it - it was packed with balloons that someone was hiding in a nondescript box in the back. I don’t know how they expect him to get any work done for the rest of the day - but then again I suspect that no one expected him to get any work done anyway.

It was hard enough to get him to come in for the day. We had to schedule an impoertant meeting that everyone needed to attend when we found out that he was planning on taking the day as a vacation day. I made a mental note to self - take a vacation day for my birthday and don’t listen when there’s an important meeting that you need to go to.

I sat at the receptionist desk, making sure that Joe’s car didn’t start down the long drive to his reserved parking lot and absentmindedly surfing the latest world news. A balloon must have gotten too close to the staple remover or something because a loud popping noise came from Joe’s cube and all the pastel balloons shuddered a little as Mark was putting the clear tape over the entrance so that they wouldn’t all pour out.

“Any sign yet?” Harriet asked when most of the decorations were done.

“Nothing yet, but it shouldn’t be long now, he’s almost never more than a half hour.” I replied. It had been 25 minutes since he left. Most of the office was quiet now, and people were just kind of milling about, except for Beatrice and Paul who were cutting the cake and putting out the disposable silverware respectively.

I spotted the gray sedan and gave the signal. Everyone in the front of the office returned to their normal working position, and I scooted off to the back.

“Have a good lunch?” Harriet asked, just like every Wednesday.

“It was very relaxing, thanks.” Joe said without stopping.

Click.

I couldn’t keep track of things anymore. They got a little too.. busy.

Click.

The car was a mess now, and it was maddening because it was just detailed a week ago. It was all shiny and new before, and it would barely pass for a demolition derby failure at the moment.

Click.

The gun was empty. I’m not really that angry, but shooting always puts me in a sort of meditative state. The range was unusually quiet for this time of day, so noone noticed when I went off into my own little world of concentration and thoughts. I looked at the target. I wasn’t a good shot when I was zoning out.

It’s a really bad idea to be unaware of your surroundings when you’re handling a firearm, but when you’re covering your ears with muffs that are specifically designed to block out 120 decibels and focusing on hitting a target 50 yards away, it’s a daunting task. I released the magazine and considered loading up again for another 17 rounds. I counted the bullets left in the box. Probably not.

I crawled into the passenger door before sliding over the gearshaft, since the driver’s side was fused shut now. As I rode across town, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to get in any accidents. There was only so much a guy could take in one day.

The full moon was out, which meant that there were more critters out than usual. Bunnies and squirrels scampered across the road at a red light. Too many bunnies in the neighborhood.

Someone was tapping on the window. I looked out and down the barrel of a shotgun.

“Freeze, just get out of the car,” the masked man said, “I just need a ride away from here.”

I rolled down the window.

“Buddy, you picked the wrong car.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about food, which is unsurprising because I’m on a diet or whatever you would like to call it. I’m calorie restricting, which means that I am eating less calories than my body needs in order to force it to use the fat reserves that it has accumulated over the years. It occurs to me now that I don’t exactly know how many fat reserves I have in me, which would be calculated using some type of body fat percentage. I should probably get it measured in some way - possibly as a reward for hitting an intermediate goal (270?) I should go to a local place that has a Bod Pod and find out exactly.

The feel of myself has been better in the last month or so, which I’ve been happy with. I don’t know exactly when I started noticing it, but I’ve been gradually getting too small for my pants, and I should really go out and buy some new ones. I really want to wait until I am at least one more size down though, because I will then be out of the “extended sizes” that are offered by the retailers and clothes will actually be cheaper. I got some new work/casual shirts a few weeks ago and they fit well enough, and I was happy about that. I also recently bought a new belt, not because the old one was too large (although I have one of those), but because it had broken and lost a screw or something holding it in. The new one should last me while.

There is a question which has been on my mind quite a bit recently, because of the steady progress over the last few months. What happens when I am done losing weight? I know the correct answer to this question is that nothing happens - you are meant to have changed your life forever by losing these pounds, and you will need to be vigilant about your diet for the rest of your life. The problem is that I am unhappy with that response. Seriously, I’m not even at the point when I need to think about it yet, and I am actually depressed. It almost feels like I will be cheated out of all of the hard work that I have put in to making myself thin, because there will be no end – it’s just the button, you have to keep pressing the button, or you will gain weight again and your life will be shit.

To that end, I’ve been thinking of supplementing the “cheat days” that are built into my diet plan and alternating them with a new type of cheat day: Practice Days. On practice days, you should not keep track of the calories that you eat throughout the day. Try to eat “normally”. Eat when you are hungry and then stop eating when you are full. Order the amount of food that you think is appropriate for how hungry you are, not because of how many calories you think are in the meal. This may mean that you actually avoid eating at places that you go to frequently because you know how many calories are in the sandwich.

After the practice day but within 48 hours, you should go back and think about how you did on your practice day. Attempt to estimate how many calories were in the food that you ate, and compare it against your metabolic rate not your diet calorie target. You want to be right around the number that would keep you at the weight that you are now, or maybe lower. For me, that means that practice days I can eat 1000 calories more than I would normally eat on my diet. Sit and think about what diet decisions that you made that day, and how you would make them differently in the future - but would still keep you happy with the day as a whole.

I think for psychological eaters or people who have a mental imbalance that made them fat in the first place, this will be very hard. I’m planning on doing it for a month or more, with the goal of them to have to not be in constant vigilance about my diet when I am “done” losing weight. If I succeed, I’ll be able to just eat when I want, because that’s what my body will tell me it wants, and what my mind will tell me it wants too.

My chart for the last 30 days is looking pretty good. I am happy with my progress. There was one day where I was above the trend line, but I am still on a steady decline. I would like to be closer to 2 pounds per week, but I can live with the numbers that I’m putting up now. The calorie deficit means that if I want to hit the 2 pounds per week goal, I should short what my calorie counting website is telling me by about 200 calories. I’ll try that for a few weeks.

This time, the yearly chart is telling me that I am losing faster than during the month. It’s pretty nice to see this one, that I have lost 15 pounds since the beginning of the year. The fitted line shown, if I keep it up, means that I will be at my goal of 250 around July. That is my next major milestone, and I want to actually re-evaluate my decisions around weight around then, and actually think about where the “done” point is.

Standing in front of the door, he thought over the events of the day so far, and pondered whether he should continue. The day wasn’t exactly going swimmingly, but at least it would be extremely unlikely for it to actually get worse than it was - or at least he thought that was the case. It was, in fact, a bad idea when he rapped at apartment 405.

“One minute!” said the girl’s voice from inside. He could hear the steps approaching and straightened himself up a little, nervously, and stood back. He could tell when she looked at him from the dimming of the interior light through the peephole. Locks worked themselves and then the door opened to reveal a dark blue dress, blonde curls, and a beautiful pair of legs in stockings.

“I was just about ready.. running a little late. Wait here.” He stood nervously while the door closed again, and he heard the girl moving around again inside. About half a minute later the door opened again, and the whole outfit was completed by a handbag and a set of matching blue heels. She locked the door and tossed the keys in the bag.

As they walked down the hall, he wondered if he would be returning to the same place later. Then he thought it was probably better to not be thinking about it the entire night, so tried to put it out of his mind. The distance from the apartment to the elevator was long, and the silence was awkward. The silence continued to the car.

“So, what do you like to do,” he asked when they were on their way.

“Well, I really am enjoying this, and I seem to be doing it a lot lately,” she replied, “but I really don’t do much of anything. I guess I just like watching TV and chick flicks. I used to do a lot of stuff with my ex, but he’s out of the picture now.”

Just at the end there, he chanced a glance away from the road, and thought that he saw an evil glint in her eye. Probably just my imagination.

The supernatural isn’t always as picky as they have been today. Usually they want something shiny, and are willing to take whatever is lying around and maybe return it later. Tonight was different though, they needed specifically something for their machinations. I was still in their debt, so now I’m awake at three in the morning.

How I got in debt with the sidhe is a long story that I’d prefer to not get into at the moment. The result is that now I’m their errand boy whenever they have a need for something that’s out of their reach, which means it’s on an island or behind some type of iron gate. They are for some reason repelled by these locations. I thought about moving to an island, but the real estate in the center of the city isn’t exactly in my price range.

Today it was both at once - some fancy mansion on the island that I would definitely never be able to afford, and probably would be turned away for just loitering around the outside for too long. As usual for these “missions”, I’m dressed in dark clothes and have a dark ski mask on so that I can avoid the surveillance that is omnipresent nowadays.

Strangely there isn’t ever a problem when I am successful at one of these even though I’m sure that I’ve been caught on some cameras a couple times. Maybe my contractors are messing with the evidence or something so that I am available in the future.

Somehow I don’t care as I finish picking the locked double French doors and quickly grab the small golden gnome statue that was requested. I’m in and out less than a minute from when I knelt down by the door to pick the lock. As I flee across the garden, I think about how I’m actually getting good at this.

She sat on the bench in the park, enjoying the lunch that she had packed that morning. There wasn’t anything special about it. Chicken salad, chips, juice. The juice was fresh-squeezed, but it was always fresh-squeezed because the got it from the cart just thirty feet away from the bench that she sat on, munching on the sandwich that she packed last night and stowed away in the fridge so that she would be able to spend this very moment.

She liked to take her lunch hour in the park. Parks were fun places, places where it was almost impossible to be sad or lonely. Even when it was a cloudy day, or if it was raining, somehow the park took it all in and made things okay. People would sometimes ask her questions about where something was, like the ampitheatre or the carousel. Usually it was just a nice quiet time with herself and her lunch though.

Today seemed different, though. She couldn’t put her finger on it before she sat down, but she was fairly sure even before she was crossing the street, waving goodbye to her coworkers who would head to the Subway or the Pizza Shack. She could feel it in the air. She had decided to enjoy her lunch anyway.

It was just normal park things, going on, so there wasn’t anything to be alarmed about. A dog was running around in the grass across the path, and there was his owner, tossing a ball and waiting for the faithful return every time. A couple runners making their way through the circuit training course, skipping the ones that they deemed not worthy of their attention. The trees were swaying in the breeze and it was warm but not bright outside.

It happened so quickly that she almost didn’t notice it at all. Then a bike sailed past her at an alarming speed – with no rider. Carlos at the juice stand was gone. The dog was gone, and it’s owner too. The ball tossed smacked her bench, splaying her chips all over the sidewalk.

It was quiet, and they were all gone.

Okay so this is a little later than it should be. In fact the charts are about two weeks old at this point, but I thought that I would write about it anyway. My diet has been going pretty well. January was a pretty successful month on the diet front, and pounds are coming off. My plans for exercise were working well and there was nothing really to complain about. Normally I have a pretty hard time keeping on the diet in the early part of the year because of all of the things that seem to coalesce and keep me from doing what I want to do.

This time it was no different, but I was more determined to stick with the diet because of all of the progress that I made all of last year, and so that I can make my goals this year, to be a smaller me. The things that all pile up in the beginning of the year are mostly just one big factor, and that’s people who are trying to lose weight. I know that it’s kind of hypocritical to be annoyed at people who want to trim the fat just like I do, but the problem is that they take up a lot of the space in the exercise room and make it too busy for the rest of us. I think that I am going to try a different tack in the next month.

Another thing that frustrates me about the new year is that there are a lot of holidays that come up and you want to eat at them. Usually the one that I have the most trouble with is Valentines, because there is so much chocolate around, and also I really like to spoil my sweetie with a big dinner and some candies and other gifts on Valentines. This time I will be scheduling a “cheat day” with the outage, so it won’t be that big of a deal I hope.

I’ve been a little less frequent on the Loseit group recently, mostly because I have been busy with client work that I hope that I will probably be blogging a little about soon. The stories there are still very inspiring and honestly the thing that I was bitching about last month with people who just want to lose a few pounds isn’t that bad. Reddit is a pretty good community, and loseit is an excellent example of that.

This chart is my triumph for the beginning of the year. An entire month with no red marks at all! I have been losing for the whole month according to my stats at PhysicsDiet, and that makes me happy. The calorie deficit is pretty nice, too, and the average weight lost per week is exactly in the range that I’ve been setting for myself. If I can just keep this up, I will make my goals nicely.

The yearly chart is a little more conservative on the account of me having those days at the beginning of the year where I was above the trend line. It’s still pretty nice though. I am not going to include the all-time chart except at major milestones from now on.

For February, I’m doing a new experiment with my diet. I’m forgoing the exercise completely in order to get a good gauge on how many calories I need to be eating to lose weight. That means that I’m going to be counting calories pretty religiously, trying to figure out how many calories are in things that are home-made (and estimating high when possible). I’ve been going on net calories right now, which means calories in minus calories exercised, and I have suspicion that the machines may be telling me the wrong amount. We’ll see how the graph looks later this month.

Because of a trick of how often I’m updating now (whenever one of my columns runs out in my weight log), I will probably update again in February on the diet. See you then!