February 4th. On the train to work. I’ve already been to the gym for a morning workout. If I can keep this up I’ll be very happy. I decided a few days ago that I’m going to lose about 80 pounds in 2010. How exactly I’m going to manage that I’m still figuring out. I suspect it will include around 400-600 miles on the treadmill, amidst dietary and lifestyle changes. One thing that has stopped me before, that has made it hard for me, is that I’m the kind of guy who likes to have a plan. The problem with having a plan, is that I don’t know enough about my body or exercise or food to make a good plan. And since I know I don’t have enough information at my disposal I hesitate to make a plan that I know probably won’t work.

So I’m trying something new. I’m just throwing my physical body and personal discipline at the problem. I’m watching the way my body reacts to exercise, and to eating less, and to eating more carefully. I’m going to use the observations I garner to become an expert on my body and the way it interacts with the world. Along the way I’m also going to lose a lot of weight, tone my muscles, and cultivate a sense of thriving vitality and resilience to the world.

I will not become enslaved to a too rigid diet or artificially imposed habit of exercise or eating. I’ve observed, in other people, that rigidity may cultivate thriving health, but it does not cultivate resilience, and I demand both for myself. Think of it as a garden. the gardener who carefully tends each seed and bulb he lovingly planted, weeding, and feeding, and caring for them in a greenhouse environment produces beautiful thriving specimens of all sorts of plants. But take those plants out of their greenhouse and plant them in natural soil, submit them to the conditions of weather and toxins, and submit them to competition with other plants, and they will often wither and die.

In order to truly thrive, not in a predictable and controlled environment, but in the hairy chaotic reality of my life, I need to cultivate a resilience to the various factors of the world by preparing my body for all manner of upset, including bad schedules, bad food, emotional turbulence, political upset, and personal challenges.

And that’s where I’m at.