Do or do not. There is no try.

What does it mean to fail? This is a question I've been pondering for the past few days as my weight-loss plan nears its terminus. See from the moment I set out to tackle this project it seemed I had always been ahead of the curve. Of the 45 pounds I set out to lose I was halfway there with nearly two-thirds of my planned weight-loss term to go. It seemed success was a fait accompli.

But as I noted many times, the closer you get to the end the tougher it gets. The ability to lose weight decreases exponentially when there's less of it to lose, or in mathematical terms, there is an asymptote as the limit on your presumed time of weight loss approaches infinity. In the case of weight loss, like drug addiction or a Rubik's cube, your job is never done, and you'll have to keep on working on it for the rest of your life no matter how close or comfortably settled in you are to that asymptote.

Now, I haven't opened a calculus textbook in 10 years, but the concept of a mathematical limit of a function has started to creep back into my consciousness, not because I suddenly feel as though I missed my calling as an astrophysicist, but because perhaps my body is reaching that asymptote. After all, my rate of weight-loss has declined steadily over the last two months or so and I've seemed almost terminally stuck between 175 and 182, struggling to get ever closer to the finish line while time continues to run low.

Just four days away from the end I have chipped away steadily, bit by bit, and I'm awfully close to getting there, but if I am for some reason unable to get through the last pound that stands in my way before this Saturday I'll have to wonder. It will be hard not to think about whether or not I should have had one fewer beer or if I shouldn't have consoled myself after the Blackhawks lost Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final last night by munching on some black pepper kettle chips.

I will have to ask myself two unsettling questions. Did I fail? Was it possible for me not to fail?

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.

Your scale is a drunken mess

Power, liquor, it doesn't really matter what your bathroom scale is drunk on, but you ought to know that it is jumbled indecisive disaster. All of us have that friend who just can't seem to make up their mind when they've had a few. They might want to go to this bar or that club or get that slice of lasagna pizza or those cheese fries, but the point is that they really don't know what they want and even if they do they can't decide how they're supposed to articulate it.

The scale in my bathroom isn't all that different. Now, I know many think this is somewhat indicative of mild obsessive-compulsive disorder, but with my scale working again and my weight-loss plan in full swing I've taken to weighing myself just about every time I enter my bathroom. For most people these probably sounds like a problem. Some weight-loss gurus believe you should only weigh yourself once a week to avoid driving yourself crazy and most say to only do it once a day and at the exact same time, but I have problems with both options. As far as weighing myself once a week, one of my big problems has been being able to keep myself in check by keeping regular track of my body. Once a week, in my mind, leaves too much time to inflict damage with a bucket of fried chicken if I don't know the next day that I'm three pounds heavier. Once a day, however, can be too random because weight fluctuates over the course of a day.

So where does that leave me?

I have decided the only rational conclusion is to weigh myself at every possible opportunity, not because I'm petrified of not knowing if I lost 1.5 pounds of water weight during my jog, but because if I see the scale often enough and see how much the numbers can vary over the course of a day on a regular basis, I will learn that my weight is difficult to pinpoint and is likely just going to fall in a slight range at any given time. And if I do that, I take those three digits on the readout far less seriously.

This leaves one problem, though. What if your scale gives you different numbers within a span of five seconds? What should you make of that?