I grew up spending very little time in video arcades, but playing all the hot games of the day at home on a parade of Atari computers. One of the different things about that experience was being able to restart at will. Tried something risky on your first life and failed? Hit START and start over. It's an advantage in playing for high scores. It's a disadvantage in learning how to take an effort seriously up front. Life doesn't let you get away with hitting the START button too many times. But maybe once is OK.

When I started writing down my progress, I promised that I'd log my setbacks. I knew they'd come. I haven't made a lot of entries recently, so here we go.

Had a pretty significant setback recently, culminating in a frenzy of numerous bad things eaten yesterday. I eventually decided to make an attempt to get it over with at once, and ate ... well, rather a lot of sweets. Some of them probably shouldn't have been in the house at all, but some I had bought recently specifically to have semi-acceptable options as an alternative to going completely in the wrong direction. Nothing semi-acceptable about the quantity I went through — enough that it would have been a standout day in past years, although not a record setter. I ended up at 198.0 this morning.

This was after a month-long plateau, subsequent to a promising start to the OWL phase of Atkins. I had been hanging around the 193 mark in general, but not getting anywhere. It looked like I could not eat anything more than I did in Induction and be able to maintain, or at least continue losing, weight. I can handle a restrictive diet if I have numerical progress. I think I can handle a lack of progress if I have an interesting diet. But I stopped so early, I couldn't take it.

So, that's all in the past and I'm hitting the START button on 16 March at 198.0.

• Primary goal: live by induction rules through 31 March.
• Primary goal: be at/below the 8 March measurements in waist and thigh on 5 April.
• Secondary goal: be at/below 193.0 on 31 March.

There might not be an update on this before April. We'll see. In more positive news, I'm consistently doing rung 19 of the Hacker's Diet exercise ladder. Pushups are the holdup from going further.

I got measurements last Thursday. Bottom line, not far off the January numbers. I didn't do any in February. [Updated Monday 3/19 to add the actual data:]

• Neck: 17"
• Chest: 39½"
• Bicep: 12½"
• Stomach: 36¾"
• Waist: 36¼"
• Hips: 38½"
• Thigh: 17-23"

(Image cropped from Digibarn Atari 400 page under CC BY-NC 3.0 terms.)