For me, the biggest challenge of any diet is always the first weekend. If I can make it through the first weekend, I’m golden, pretty much guaranteed to hit my goals. But if I screw up, I might as well toss out everything I’ve done over the previous week.

Pretty much every successful diet, like Atkins and South Beach, include a two-week induction phase. Two weeks is about how long it takes for your body to adapt to a new diet, and to start burning fat as its preferred fuel source. You can be a little less careful after you’ve made that switch, but for the first two weeks, your diet has to be like a laser beam.

But the weekend is hard. I have a lot of free time, at least compared to the rest of the week, and I tend to eat when I’m bored. I see my friends, and pretty much everything we do involves food of some kind. The weekend is when I relax and reward myself. It’s just habit.

But you can’t do that, not on the first weekend. You have to decide ahead of time that you’re not going to do that. And then you have to follow through.

So, even though I went to the movies, I didn’t get any nachos. I turned down an invite to dinner, because I doubted that they wanted to watch me drink protein shakes, and when we got together later in the evening, I politely declined their offer of nachos and salsa. Even though I would murder your mother for something crunchy and salty right now.

That’s the key to making a change, I think. Learn what you need to do, decide that you’re going to do it, see yourself doing it, and don’t even give yourself the option of not following through.

It’s hard to do; lord knows I’ve screwed up plenty of times in the past. But when I’m on, I’m on, and right now, I’m on. I wish I knew how to make that mental jump reliably, because it would make me more successful, and because I’d be a millionaire if I could put it in a bottle and sell it.

Exercise-wise, I spent an hour on the recumbent bike, and donated even more of my money to Barnes & Noble, adding to the library I’m keeping on my nook. And then I did five chin-ups, because I can.

Actually, I still remember the first time I did a chin-up. I was never able to, in high school. I was always the fat kid. Strong, yes, but not strong enough to haul myself off the ground. Now I can knock out fifty reps in a session. But the first time… I still have the training journal from that session, can still read where I scrawled “I did a pull up!” on the page. That was proof to me that something was changing. That I was changing.

That I could change.

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