Day 4, The most cursed of days!

Oh yes. Yes it is.

I've never been able to really explain it but for every diet, exercise plan, project, job, etc. the fourth day of any of those things has always been the most difficult monster day to fight my way through. I have a feeling that it's caused by your body waking up out of the dazed stupor of the first three days of any of those things and saying, "Whoa buddy! What the heck are you doing? Look, I'll forgive you for the past few days, I know you like trying new stuff, but now it's time to stop messing about and get back to business. Now where's that bag of tortilla chips?"

It's very annoying.

I can remember four times in my life where I've tried to get down to a slimmer, muscular figure and every time the fourth day had been my undoing. Although, more accurately, the first two times I just got bored with what I was doing and fell back into old habits. First was following the daily serving sizes on the food labels. Didn't work for me. Second, the Special K diet which was about the closest that I'll ever come to eating cardboard two times a day for a week. Those two seemed to make sense at the time and they did work slightly but at the time I didn't have the drive to see them through to the end (whatever the end was).

The third and fourth times were decidedly more stupid. Third was Christian Bale's diet for "The Machinist" which, depending on where you look, consisted of an apple with cups of coffee throughout the day. As you can see things were getting much more desperate. The last one I tried before the PCP--which was over a year ago so you can see what kind of an effect it had on me--was the fasting diet. I tried to convince myself that only doing it for seven days would be healthier than some Gandhi-esque three week thing but you can see that I wasn't thinking it through clearly. I got through those seven days of constant torture and never tried another crazy fly by night diet again.

For each of those four bouts of delusion (I say "delusion" because I was thinking that they would all magically turn me into something like my hero, Stephen Chow) the fourth day was the most unbearable. That fourth day was when giving up on those things seemed like the best thing I could do for myself which, considering what I was doing, probably would have been a good idea. Ah, the rash thinking of a young teenager, there's really nothing like it.

But things are feeling different with the PCP. For all of its difficulties it's been fairly easy so far and I'm sure it will stay that way as long as I'm always aware of what I'm doing and putting into my body. I'm sure I'm right on target with saying that the hardest part of the PCP, or any diet plan, is the breaking of old habits but with the diet plan Patrick and Chen have us on where we're forced to really think about what we're eating and what we're doing things seem to be just downright peachy.

And I'm learning that no matter how difficult something might be if you stick with it you will be a stronger and better person because of it.

Of course, I can't forget about all of the outside support from you readers and commenters because, well, you guys rock!

This fourth day doesn't seem so bad now.