Courtesy of TenTonHammer

When you’re working on losing weight, there is only one thing worse than the dreaded weight-loss plateau: actually gaining weight.

Whether you weigh-in on a daily, weekly, or even hourly basis, the only thing you never, ever, ever want to see is for that number to increase.

But it will.

At some point, all your working out and calorie counting just won’t work. You might be at a 7,000 calorie deficit that week, and your body just says…nope. And you’ll actually gain those 2 pounds instead of losing them.

But when that happens to you, don’t freak out. It happens to everybody at some point. And if you’re an MMO gamer, you might already be familiar with what’s going on inside your body.

(And despite fitness and weight loss being entirely different entities, gaining weight is often mentally distressing regardless.)

EverCrack and XP Loss

If you’re an old man gamer like me, you probably trekked across Norrath in the original EverQuest. Whether you did so as a bone chip-collecting Necromancer, a KEI-spamming Enchanter, or a root-kiting Druid, you’ve probably lost a level at some point.

You’d quest all day long, kill as many aqua goblins as you can, and because you’d done so well, you got cocky. You’d pull an extra mob to kill. Then there were respawns all around you. Suddenly, those two aqua goblins turned into six. You got overwhelmed. You died.

And you lost XP. A lot of XP. Enough XP that you actually de-leveled. All that work you put in, all those quests, all those kills…you had to do them all over again. You have to re-earn something you’ve already worked your tail off for.

The Next Step

So what do you do if you’ve been camping those Calorie Goblins and still lose XP? You do the same thing we did back in the day in EverQuest: you get back out there and start gaining that XP back.

Which means in terms of fitness, you keep working out and burning those calories. You keep making sure you eat well. You keep on steadily increasing your activity levels so that you don’t lose even more of what you’ve worked so hard to get.

More than anything, you just can’t get discouraged. You can’t let a minor setback become a major one. Everyone struggles occasionally, and everyone has a bad day or week.

The only thing you can really do about it, though, is get back out there and regain that XP.

The worst thing you can do, though, is become discouraged and stop. Just like you’ll never regain that level in EQ if you never went back to killing goblins, you will never lose those pounds again if you stop working at it.

So do what those MMOs have taught you for years: get back out there, grab another fitness quest, and grind out the rest of those levels.