The Week of Eating Dangerously

In his seminal 1859 work on the theory of evolution On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin posited the idea that dramatic genetic changes that comprised evolution's basic ideal of survival of the fittest came in short bursts of drastic mutation separated by extended periods of little to no movement up the evolutionary ladder, the concept of "punctuated equilibrium."

Weight loss isn't all that different in its Darwinian timing mechanism. Plateaus will periodically keep you stuck on a number for potentially weeks at a time. I was stuck at 205.8 pounds for nearly a month from late December to late January. However, the flip side of this is that these long static stretches of little to no weight loss are bookended by periods in which the pounds just seem to disappear at chunks at a time for four or five days. Look no further than last week when a big meal Monday night could have pushed me close to 200 pounds before the requisite digesting, but by Saturday evening I tipped the scales after my workout at just 191.8 pounds, more than 27 pounds lower than my starting point just over three months ago.

The key to these stretches is to not disrupt the natural order. As Ray Bradbury noted in his famous short story A Sound of Thunder, in which a wealthy dinosaur hunter travels to the past and dramatically alters human history when he accidentally kills a butterfly, (Personally, I prefer the classic "Time and Punishment" segment from The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror V" episode), a slight change to something in the intended course of actions can have a dramatic and sometimes disastrous effect. When losing weight, one cannot disrupt the natural order if they intend to keep losing weight, and that means not simply exercising and watching what you eat, but harnessing and riding those periods when you can't lose pounds fast enough. If your exercise and diet are causing you to drop .8 pounds per day, behave like a gambler who doesn't understand the concept of quitting while you're ahead and let it ride.

Unless, of course, you're an idiot like me. If you are, rather than let it ride when you're this close to your next Chipotle burrito bowl and watching those pounds roll off, you're instead going to have a salty greasy dinner because you're watching some ridiculously stupid television event, which involves consuming a massive amount of pizza. And to make matters even worse, you finish in second place in your Oscar pool by one point because you didn't pick Innocente to win Best Documentary -- Short Subject, and fellow Millburn High School alum Anne Hathaway just casually disregards you during her acceptance speech.

The end result of not just eating this massive amount of pizza, but also overestimating my friends' appetites and having 11 leftover slices of varying levels of unhealthiness is that I have an absurd amount of leftover pizza sitting in my fridge. Heaven forbid I let any of that go to waste when I could have free lunch and dinner for the next four days sitting at my fingertips so instead, I'm going to walk a very fine line for the rest of this week while giving Darwin, Bradbury, Homer Simpson and my drunk scale the middle finger.

It's a bold move. Some would say a "stupid move."

Nonetheless it is the move I am taking because if I'm going to spend $85 on pizza  for a party I'm going to get my money's worth. After all, six of the aforementioned 11 remaining were either plain or mushroom, which is totally healthy because it hits multiple food groups. Come to think of it, the chicken parmigiana and the meat lover's slices (chicken, pepperoni, sausage and meatball) I still have sitting around are really just good ways to get protein after a hard workout anyway. So really the 11 slices of pizza I'll be consuming over the next four days are actually pretty healthy for me.

I should probably do this every week.

And if it turns out that eating this much pizza in such a short time frame is actually bad for my weight loss plan, maybe I'll be so sick of it by the time I finish that I won't have pizza for months on end. Or really, since this is supposed to be a joint effort between myself and the readers (look at the url, people), I'll just have to blame all of you for doing a shitty job of keeping me on the straight and narrow this week. It's all your fault, people.

Regardless of what happens though, and considering I will still be working out every morning, I'm actually not overly worried about what eating all of this pizza will do to me, even if it does push my next Chipotle burrito bowl back a week. With just over three months gone in the weight-loss plan and just under four months to go, I need to lose roughly 19 pounds, which shouldn't be the most impossible thing to do considering the 26 or so I've lost already.

If it ends up being a significant obstacle, or even sends me in the other direction, it will just have to be a lesson learned about how not to stop those stretches when weight loss seems so easy. In the future I'll have to avoid having an equilibrium that isn't quite so punctuated anymore. Should that happen I suppose it'll be Darwin getting the last laugh. Too bad he won't be around to see it. He would have just turned 204 years young last week.

The fool must have stepped on a butterfly somewhere. Or eaten too much pizza.

CROWD-SOURCED WEIGHT LOSS PLAN DAY 95!

Days until wedding: 117
Target weight: 175
Starting weight: 219
Weight today: 193.6