David McElroy

When I got disgusted with myself last month about the way I had been eating, I felt that way because I’d gained weight since January. I was also concerned about the health aspects of my diet, but that was ultimately secondary to my fears of looking like a beached whale.

About five weeks later, I’ve gone through a change in my thinking. I’m not sure what finally clicked, but I suddenly reached a point at which it was more about the devastating effects of sugar on my body’s organs than it was about an embarrassed ego.

I can’t tell you why my point of view changed, but it’s what I’ve been needing for a long time. We’ll talk about this in six months or a year, though, to see whether it continues.

I’ve dropped about 25 points since that night, but that seems relatively unimportant compared to the other changes I know this is bringing to my body — and I now understand that if I take care of keeping my body healthy, the excess weight will continue to disappear.

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Penn Jillette never expected to be a star. He also had no interest in doing magic. In the late ‘70s, he and Teller were two-thirds of an act called the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society. As part of that group — and then later as Penn & Teller — they played carnivals and renaissance festivals.

In a recent interview, Jillette says Teller brought the idea of doing magic to the duo and they started incorporating it into their show. But they were still essentially a carnival act trying to figure out what they were — what sort of art they were making and who their audience might be. They had been making a living — barely — for most of a decade and were still trying to figure out what they were.

They got the idea to take their show to theaters, so they committed to a full year of theater shows to see whether they could make it in that world. But as they started performing to small crowds, Jillette panicked. He said they were selling 10 or 15 tickets in a theater that seated 90 people — so he started trying to line up carnival gigs again.

Then something happened — and I can’t stop thinking about how this lesson might apply to me.

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