18K from 6:10 to 9:48 p.m.

Three hours and thirty-eight minutes to do 18K tonight. That's 4.95 kph—my fastest speed yet for the Bundang run. I did the walk today from my place out to Jeongja Station, which is backwards from what I'd been doing the past month (training out to Jeongja, then walking home). I started early—at a bit after 6 p.m. I felt a mite stupid carrying my poncho in a cargo pocket, but it had been threatening rain all day, so I thought better safe than sorry. I'm refilling on water right now, but when I piss it all out and weigh myself in the morning, I'll be curious to see whether I'd lost anything during Week 4. I think my stubborn body is becoming metabolically adapted to radically reduced food intake, so it no longer wants to let go of any weight. At the same time, however, I continue to ratchet up the stair work, and I'll soon be adding more bodyweight calisthenics to my workout routine, which means I ought to be burning a greater number of calories every week. Tomorrow morning, we'll see what's come of my efforts. I admit I'm morbidly curious as to what my recent misbehavior has cost me.

On the strength-training front, I'm finally graduating to knee pushups and Australian pullups this coming week, so pray for me. The guy whose YouTube channel I subscribe to, Hampton of Hybrid Calisthenics, is the one whose program I've been following. So far, it's been going well as I build toward doing legitimate pushups and situps, but I'm falling behind on the core work. I'm supposed to be at full leg raises by now, but I'm still at knee raises on my bed. I can do 3 sets of 30 of those, and it's no longer quite so hard, so maybe this week, I'll level up. Remember that my goal is two-minute planks on all sides (front, left, right, and back planks) by the end of December.

So that's where things stand, and that was my Saturday. Earlier in the day, I finally went and got new contact lenses, so I should be good for a year. Fasting today has been a pain, but it's a necessary evil, given the depredations of this past Friday, when I ate way more than I should've on the Newcastle Diet. As I said, I'm probably just going to write Week 4 off, but that's why I added Weeks 9 and 10 to the schedule—for just this sort of contingency. Will I be down to a BMI of 24 by Week 10? Follow along, and we'll find out together.