The Human Extraction

OK, so last night there was gnocchi for dinner, and cornflakes for 'dessert', and occasional mouthfuls of the ridiculously good fudge d's taken to making. It was as if, dumbass-like, I'd said 'Sod it!' to the notion that today was Tuesday, with its appointment with the Nazi Scales, and decided to sail right off that cliff-edge of idiocy once more with feeling.

This morning though - 17st 3.5. Down 2.5 pounds on last week.

That'll be the walking, then.

Haven't, by any means, walked every day over the last week. Walked about three, maybe four days out of seven. But still, clearly, that unexpected addition of movement gave the system a tiny shock and let me claw back some progress towards the 17 stone border. So yay. As the song says though, more, more, more is what's needed. More sense, more walking, more biking, less late-night lunacy. It's not as if this fundamental equation is particularly hard to grasp. It's the human factor that in Disappearing, as in most things, is the doorway for error.

So I guess what I'm saying is I need to be less human.
It's arguable, actually, that that was part of what led me to be able to Disappear the first time - being less human. Shutting down the intrinsic emotional responses to pleasure-stimuli, by looking ahead to longer-term strategic goals. Or at the very least re-training myself as to what should trigger those emotional responses.

Hmm...something in that. Be less human. Be more robot. Be the Disappearing Man.

Hehe, yes, I know it starts to sound like a trailer for a new Netflix sci-fi drama, but if you're going to get anywhere in this game, you do sort of have to believe your own hype, see yourself in some starring role, otherwise it just becomes a parade of daily self-abnegation and self-denial, more or less because you hated how you were yesterday.

And yes, incidentally, you get more boring - or at least, I do. If I go full-on Disappearing Man, I become the most boring human being to talk to, because my internal clockwork is always somewhere else, running not entirely silently behind my eyes - intake, calorie value, exercise, calorie burn, balance, day by day, week by week and so on until an objective is achieved.

But there's another factor to the being less human, something that's fundamentally changed in my life since the first time I did this. The first time, I was heading towards my fortieth birthday. This year, I'll be 48. There's a degree to which you have to be able to see the point of the end goal, and at 40, that feels rather different to how it feels at 48. Disappearing did good things for my body - allowed me to radically reduce my medication-burden, allowed me to be more active without thinking about it or bitching about it, and so on. All that felt positive at 40. If I allow my human nature to hold sway, all that feels like a shrug at 48. Vanity - woo! Who cares, really? The irony of course is that vanity's a human element, so shutting that down in pursuit of the longer-term goal leaves you with less, at 48 (or rather, leaves me, at 48 with less) reason to give a Disappearing Fuck about the end result. The only time I've ever really been physically vain was during and at the end of that first Disappearing. It was the only time in my life I ever thought I had any kind of right to be vain. I'm not sure at 48 anybody benefits from the vain version of me, which means I'm left with the end-result of the Disappearing being little more than an increased ability to do the things I do because I want to Disappear...which makes the process rather blurred and unfocused.

Ach, so much for long-term strategic thinking. This is the kind of circular thinking that makes me dizzy when I let myself dwell on it. Enough - in the short-term, I'm down 2.5 pounds this week. Whoop-de-doo. Same again next week would put me within sniffing distance of the 17 stone borderline. That's my next objective, so let's focus on that for now, rather than on the diminishing returns of the Disappearing Man.