Thirty-one pounds, one spreadsheet

Leo Brandt had a spreadsheet for everything, including his failures.

Column A was the date. Column B was his weight. He had kept it, on and off, for eleven years, and if you zoomed out far enough it looked like a mountain range. The same twenty-five pounds, lost and found and lost again. Every peak had a story. The divorce. The tax season that ate a whole spring. The year he stopped weighing himself at all, which showed up as a long blank gap and then a number he didn't like.

He was forty-four, an accountant, and tired of the chart.

The moment he decided was not dramatic. It was a Tuesday in January, and he was tying his shoes on the bottom stair and had to stop halfway through and catch his breath. He sat there with one lace in each hand and did the math he did for clients every day: where this was going if nothing changed. He didn't like the projection.

The doctor first

This time he started with his doctor, because the chart had taught him that doing it alone didn't hold. He got labs. He added new columns: blood pressure, the numbers his doctor cared about, how many steps, how many nights he ate standing up at the counter.

He had read about research compounds for longer than he wanted to admit, and he read them the way he read a client's books. Looking for the thing that didn't reconcile.

What didn't reconcile was the market. Prices that made no sense. Certificates without lot numbers. A vendor that looked perfect until he noticed the same certificate attached to three different products. If he couldn't trust what was in the vial, he couldn't trust anything the spreadsheet told him afterward. Bad inputs, bad outputs. Every accountant knows that.

Reconciling the vial

He built a vetting tab. Independent lab. Lot-specific certificate visible before purchase. Lot number on the vial. Card payment. Support that answered. Domestic shipping with tracking.

One vendor filled every cell green.

When the box came, he did what he would do with any statement: he reconciled it. The lot number on the vial matched the certificate published online. He took a screenshot and pasted it into the spreadsheet, in a new tab he named Source.

The slope

It was slow and it was not a straight line, which Leo appreciated, because straight lines on a chart usually mean someone is lying.

The first month the line barely moved, and old Leo would have quit. He had quit at exactly this point four times before; the spreadsheet showed him where. Instead he added a notes column and wrote down what he did each day, so that when the scale was stubborn he could see the work was still happening even when the number wasn't.

He kept every appointment. He walked after dinner. He learned to cook four things well instead of twenty things badly. The weight column started to slope down, and then flatten, and then slope again. His doctor was pleased with the labs, which Leo found more satisfying than the scale.

By the end of the year it was thirty-one pounds. Lower than any valley in the old mountain range.

New chart

He does not make a speech about it. When coworkers ask, he says he got serious, saw his doctor, and was careful about what he bought and where. All of that is true.

What he doesn't mention is the evening in December when he zoomed out on the spreadsheet and the mountain range was still there, eleven years of it. And at the far right edge, for the first time, the line kept going down past the last valley and didn't come back up.

He looked at it for a long while. Then he did something he had never done in eleven years of tracking.

He made a new chart, started it at that point, and gave it a title.