Success is counted sweetest...

... by those whose goal is to get fat.

Which, recently, has been my goal.

I know that sounds strange. Most people want to get thin, they want to lose weight. And in a certain sense, I do too. Just not right now.

You see, a couple weeks ago, my wife directed my attention to a competition being put on by the wellness department at our school, in which teams of two would compete to lose weight over a 2-month period. Back in January, we did a Whole30 challenge to adhere to a strict Paleo diet for 30 days. Lauren, especially, was shedding the pounds pretty consistently and easily on this diet, even to the point where she felt like she was losing too much, too quickly (the standard for making that judgment: her ability to feed our daughter). She said she figured we could clean up in this competition.

Well, I thought: you could. For my part, I had settled in at a weight in the low 170s and seemed to be more or less stuck there. Which was fine--although at some point in the last year and a half or so I was as lean as the low 160s, 170-something is a very healthy weight for me, and one I can maintain with little effort. So maybe with some serious work I could get back down to that lean weight, but that really wasn't that many pounds to lose, and that might be a lot of work. I would hate to sabotage Lauren's amazing results with mediocre ones because, at heart, I'm a competitive SOB. When I do something, I want to win.

Fortunately, Lauren had brought this to my attention a few weeks before it actually started. I assume you can see where this is going. From 171 or so, in the past three weeks, I'm gained, oh let's see... 13 pounds. Four of them in the last day (thank you Valentine's Day candy).

Don't get me wrong. There's a sense in which this horrifies me. Especially since I still have a couple days to put on some more weight. People like, say, physicians would probably tell me that playing with my weight this way is an absolutely terrible thing to do to myself. To which I say: uh, yeah, probably. But we'll see.

This little experiment in packing on the pounds has been interesting in a couple ways. First, although I do feel a bit bloated and heavy, I don't really feel like I'm 13 pounds fatter than I was. I mean, my pants still fit, and I don't feel like I look much different with my shirt off. So where is that weight sitting? I can only imagine that my blood vessels are now carrying around pure, liquid fat instead of blood. But hey, if it wins us $180, I guess I'm okay with that.