Inspirations for this experiment

A friend of mine called me the other day and asked, "why exactly are you doing this?"

As I mentioned on Facebook, one of the inspirations for this blog was the movie "Julie & Julia", where a fledgling writer and wanna-be chef re-creates each recipe from a Julia Childs cookbook in a year.

Another thing that got me thinking was the nature of addiction, and procrastination. I've quit cigarettes a million times, cold turkey, getting the crankiness, muscle aches, all kinds of stuff. Then I read "Easyway to Quit Smoking" by Allen Carr, and accidentally quit before I finished the book. No withdrawal, no aches, no nothing. Carr maintains, and I agree, that there is no such thing as nicotine addiction, really. You don't get the cold sweats and start vomiting, like with heroin, and any physical symptoms are purely psychosomatic. Carr knows what he's talking about--he smoked for 30 years, and now runs a chain of quit-smoking clinics in Europe with a 99% success rate. Carr maintains that the addiction is all in your head, and that the worst part of breaking the addiction is debating with yourself--"I can quit tomorrow, cigarettes are not that expensive, etc."

Is procrastination an addiction, or should it be dealt with in the same way? Think of all the things we tell ourselves. "I can do it tomorrow," "I need x to do y", and so on. What addiction and procrastination have in common is that we'd like to put off unpleasant things in order to do more fun (or normalized) things. For me, sucking smoke into my lungs is normal. For most people, it's abhorrent.

So my thought for the blog was this: What if we just drop the ego, skip the mental debate, and just do what's good for us? What's hard about that, and why do we never do it? Those damned little voices in our head, promising us salvation, but leading us deeper into the mire--those are what's hard.

Still drinking the water. I was 148 lbs. yesterday.

How healthy I feel (1 being superman and 10 being a zombie): 6

How happy I am (same scale): 6

I'll add another regimen in the next few days. I'm thinking.... flossing.