Ftrain, by Paul Ford

With some wasabi powder on the peas. I could eat peas all day.

I have ordered a scale. It is a tall upright scale like you'd find at the doctor's. It goes up to a certain amount, then over that certain amount.

Scales are extremely useful tools because they translate your worth as a human being into a simple number. If you were feeling confident or useful to society, the scale will either affirm that, or inform you of something different. My scale, which I will name WASPGEL (Wrath Avarice Sloth Pride Gluttony Envy Lust) will tell me exactly what I am, at least while I'm at sea level.

There is no other way to know if this is working.

I would guess that my calorie count is close enough--I am being vigilant, so ±10%, or ±15%. But exercise is a different matter; the calculators I've used all produce different results.

It should be possible to compare the number on the scale, month to month, with the caloric input, and determine how much I burn each day. I also bought a body-fat estimator so that I can discount for muscle weight. Imperfect science for an imperfect man.

I have a vision of shedding great swaths of flesh at once. I take a week off and exercise so steadily, with such extraordinary vigor, that I burn fifty pounds. I run five marathons. I swim the channel and back. No one has ever seen anything like this. As a reward I do not have to keep up with the meditations; I do not have to peel myself away, one onion-layer after another. Rather I tesseract to lesshood.

Instead I am forced to contemplate time as I chew. I have always had a terrible understanding of passing time; months folding atop each other, whole years slipping by without being able to tell the difference between them. In this experiment I am constantly aware of time, of the path of food through the body. If I do fifty crunches it is nothing, but fifty a day is 1,500 per month. If I turn to you a year from now and say: I did 18,250 crunches--well, you'd have to admire my ability to multiply, if nothing else. I say all this because it feels long ago, the life of bagels, and yet it is one bagel away.