Okay, if you’ve read this blog, then you know the first part of the story. On April 1st, 2007 I weighed 299 pounds and decided it would be a good idea to lose some weight. Most people come to this decision long before they’re 100 pounds overweight, but I like to cogitate on things longer than most people (and apparently masticate on things longer than most people too).

The thing was, losing weight itself wasn’t a super-attractive endeavor for me. I had a lot going on in my life and losing weight for the sake of vanity, or even health wasn’t all that interesting to me. I wanted to do something that would be fun in and of itself and that hadn’t really been tried before. So, as you know, I decided to try and lose weight on a fad-diet-diet. If one fad diet was good, a dozen must be great. And it worked! Over the course of 200 days I lost over 50 pounds. But as time wore on I wanted to try different things. And there was a seed of what was to come in this post here.

You see, I was wrestling with an idea. An idea so startlingly stupid it made the fad-diet-diet not sound so dumb. The process of losing weight had always been primarily about self-experimentation for me. Not about looking good, or feeling good, or sticking it to my ex-girlfriend, or fitting into plane seats, or being there for my daughter’s wedding. Or whatever the reasons are most people have. I’m not even married and don’t have a daughter, so I am sure as hell not going to let some non-existent, bride-to-be daughter dictate if I’m going to some peach cobbler or not . But self experimentation, on the other hand, is something that I find exciting. I enjoy things like learning to hold my breath for three minutes or messing with my sleep cycle or seeing if I can stand in one place for 24 straight hours. I don’t know what it is I like about that, but I always have.

And it was in October of 2007 that the self-experimentation reflex really started twitching for me in regards to the fad-diet-diet. I had proven, I thought, that one could lose weight on this type of diet. But I was missing something that every good experiment needs: a control. A control is used in  scientific experiments as a standard of comparison. When 20/20 wants to see how much fecal matter collects on a toothbrush in an average bathroom, they keep a control toothbrush in the kitchen so they have something to compare it against.

And for weeks and weeks this idea of a “control” in the weigh loss experiment was really gnawing at me and it became something I felt I needed to do. It was a compulsion, really. And gradually more and more of my mind began to think it was a good thing to do. It’s like breaking up with someone or quitting a job or moving to a new city where you think you’ll find opportunities in a field you love. It starts as just a germ of an idea but it grows and grows to the point where you just have to do it. And it’s not a matter of doing it because you know it’s going to work, you need to do it because if you don’t you’ll always think, “I wonder what would have happened if I had [fill in the blank].”

This is just the way life works. If you move to LA to find work as an actor and you don’t have any success, well, that’s a lot easier to deal with looking back on your life than if you had never moved to LA and given it a shot in the first place.

So I was convinced I had to try a “control” for the weight-loss experiment.

But in order to do that I would have to do something that was foolish at best and dangerous at worst.

I would have to gain the weight back.

(Coming Soon — Connecting the Dots – Part II : The Control)