But I remember a day a few months before the 100 Days blog began. I was living in Colorado, pretty damn close to 370 if not already there. One of the basketball coaches at the junior college tried to motivate me to lose weight. So he took me up into the gym that was built into their arena and showed me how to use the elliptical machine. Actually, that was the first time I had ever used an elliptical machine. He made me stay on it for 10 minutes, and I was not happy about that. (Ahh, memories. If I remember correctly, after about three minutes I was gasping for air and felt my throat closing up. I was in pretty bad shape back then. Little did I know that, only a few months later, that machine was going to be the key piece of equipment in helping me become unfat.)

Anyway, as we were ellipticizing, he offered up some weight loss pointers (by the way, he was very thin and very in shape).

Only one sticks out today: “If you have one bad day, that wipes out a week of good days,” he said.

Now, 109 pounds later, I am here to tell you that that statement is total bullshit. But you see, I didn’t know that at the time. And that statement scared the hell out of me. That statement was probably the main reason, outside of my own unwillingness, that his efforts to help me didn’t work. Here was a guy telling me that I had to give up every fatty food I ever loved in order to lose weight.

It just seemed too hard.

But, as I established earlier, that statement was total bullshit. And while I am not saying you can eat like shit every three days and still lose weight, I am saying that if you know yourself well enough, and you understand that you are strong enough to do so, it’s really not the end of the world to order up a pizza on a Sunday afternoon. And you know what? It’s also not the end of the world to make a burger run the following Monday night. But you have to understand what you have lost — two days worth of weight loss — and you have to be willing to embrace the following days as opportunities to advance your goal.

One bad day does not wipe out one good week. In two bad (for me) weeks, I gained two pounds. In one good week, I lost four. Even if you take every single variable into account, those numbers speak for themselves. If the same effort is given to both sides, losing weight might just be easier than gaining weight.