For those of you new to the blog, this is my monthly report on my attempt to use shame, peer pressure, and financial disincentives to get into shape.

August was a strange month. For starters, at the beginning of the month I went on a week-long vacation with family, during which I ate, drank, and generally made merry without exercising at all. This was offset by the fact that I’ve been exercising way more frequently than actually required, to the point that I’m now a week ahead of schedule. Also, my two year-old daughter broke my scale early in the month, so I’ve gone for most of the month without any feedback (I finally got a new one a couple days ago). And lastly, I threw my back out mid-month, and had to skip some sit-ups.

As I said, a bit of a weird month. I did have one failure, in which I ended up browsing the web until the wee hours one night. Friggin’ Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Oh well, my loss was the ACLU’s gain.

In any case, I feel like I’ve turned a corner. It turns out that almost doubling the frequency of your workout routine is sufficient to get you through a plateau. Why didn’t I think of that before? Oh yeah:

Anyway, it was a nice surprise to unpack the new scale, set it up, and discover that I was down several more pounds, to my lowest weight in years. Not quite shorts-wearing territory (and to be clear, the spare tire shows no signs of disappearing), but getting closer.

So the question is, what next? What extra push should I be giving myself? One of the discoveries of this (so far) eight month process is that adding “just one more thing” is way easier than trying to do everything all at once. I’ve started having little chocolate squares at home, so that’s probably a good thing to nip in the bud. Other than that, I’ve honestly cut just about everything out. Meals at restaurants are still mostly unrestricted, but that’s fine – it’s a loophole, but an intentional one. The main goal of the rules is to prevent me from engaging in high calorie behavior because I’m bored, or because there’s a bag of Choco-Fudgies lying around, not to prevent me from enjoying food when I choose to.

So, other than cutting out the chocolates at home, no new rules this month. Things are going well – no need to mess with it.

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