Well, a last-minute trip from Romania to Canada and other unexpected adventures are forcing me into a one-day intermission on the blog.

I’ll be back, from the wilds of my mom’s backyard, on Monday with Project SuperMe Part 16.

“Would you mind watching my bag while I go to the bathroom?” I asked the two women sipping mulled wine and chatting near the bar.

When I had gotten close enough, I saw they were truly attractive. No doubt, they had nearly limitless options in men. Why would they pick me? A moment of self-doubt was trying to make space in my mind.

For most men, myself included at the time, approaching random attractive women with no introduction can put your self worth on the line.

A good friend of mine once told me he was so devastated on being rejected by a random woman that he spent an hour curled up in a fetal position on his bed, struggling to regain the confidence he needed to step out the door again.

The international community of professional pickup artists, in which I would shortly become immersed, has a term for the fear of walking up to and hitting on a random woman – approach anxiety.

With that first, low-risk line about my bag, I had set up my grand plan to meet women in a city where my nearest friend was thousands of kilometers away. Whereas most couples meet through friends, work and other social gatherings, I had no social circle whatsoever.

I went to pee, and gave myself a pep talk in the bathroom.

As I returned from the bathroom, I enacted the second part of my line.

 “Whew!” I said, acting relieved through a half-grin. “My bag’s still here!”

They chuckled at my joke.

It was an almost risk-free opening line, just what I needed with my self-confidence at an all-time low. I wasn’t actually hitting on them – yet.

And then the hook.

“When I was in the bathroom, I was just thinking that you kinda have a bad-girl vibe,” I said, pointing to the one that I found most attractive. “You kind of worry me.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

It was the moment I needed. I grabbed the seat and riffed for a minute on the theme of thieves and me, as a foreigner, being a target, refusing to tell her why she might come across as a bad girl.

In truth, I had no idea what a bad girl vibe was. It was another memorized line, designed to elicit an invite to further conversation.

In combination with a host of advice on voice tone and body language that I was absorbing from the edges of the world of pickup, the lines worked for me. One of the women asked my name – an invite to further conversation. I was in.

I started chatting, following a script I had drafted using pickup advice, hitting certain bullet points meant to subtly impress women.

After half an hour, I had the phone numbers of both these lovely women. I left quickly – before they could have a chance to change their minds and ask for their phone numbers back.

It was, perhaps, a small step. But I proved to myself that I needed no social circle or dating service to meet women in a strange city. It was a turning point in my recovery from divorce.

It was also the first time I had ever read and implemented self-help advice of any kind. It was destined to lead to more – total immersion.

“I Have Feelings Too!”

I started going out five nights a week, practicing meeting random attractive women. In the coming weeks, I would meet women using less and less orthodox lines. I would ask women if I looked gay and then ask them to protect me from all the guys hitting on me.

I would meet them by complaining in mock exasperation that all the women in the club only see me as a giant sausage with legs. “I have feelings too!” I would cry in feigned horror.

On meeting a woman, I would often – even usually – tell her that I was using tricks that I learned on line to seduce her. I would deliver a line, get the reaction I was hoping for, and then tell her that it was a memorized line. The only people who told me they found it disgusting were other guys.

I once met a woman by telling her, in front of her friends, that she looked like a monkey. She, though, did find it objectionable.

As I conquered that approach anxiety, my lines got bolder. From tricks and conversational gambits, I simply started telling women that they were the hottest girl in the club and that I was picking them up.

With the increasing variation in opening lines, also came the increased variation in women themselves. I soon had to develop nicknames for them – the doctor, the stewardess, the baby face – to keep track.

Within two months, when I stopped to count, I realized that I was steadily dating five women at the same time. I also found that, as long as I was honest, I couldn’t go wrong. I told women from the very start that I would never be exclusive with them. I suspect that few, if any of them, believed it. So I had to tell them that on almost every date.

An End to Isolation

I was also surprised to find that I was making as many male friends as female friends. When guys meet, conversation starters are often about work, cars, gadgets or, of course, women. On the last subject, I had something interesting to say.

My social isolation had ended. I had solved the problem of a lack of buddies and girlfriends. I had set out to solve a problem and found a solution. That solution, though, was becoming all-encompassing and moral questions abounded.

Still, I decided to absorb this field of dating into my career. I contacted leading pickup artists for interviews. As a writer willing to venture into this socially tricky field, I found these professional dating instructors eager to talk to me.

Soon, I was on a flight to meet world leaders in the pickup arts in London, a city rapidly becoming the epicenter of the world of dating philosophy and pickup techniques. With my social isolation evaporating and my dating life become more vibrant than I had ever planned on, I was set on kicking it all up a notch.

With my immediate problems solved, my real training in the pickup arts had barely even started. The most intense was yet to come.

(This is Part 15 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

An hour before Valentine’s Day, 2009, I spotted a hot blonde sitting with a friend in a downtown jazz club. I knew I had to meet her. I told my friend to make chit chat with the brunette while I went to chat up the blonde.

I calmly walked over and touched her shoulder.

“I hope that’s not a Valentine’s Day special,” I said, half-smiling and motioning to the red drink in front of her. “I can’t stand Valentine’s Day.”

I then launched into a brief, tongue-in-cheek monologue about how women had too many holidays and it was such a drag to be a guy – buying flowers and holding open doors.

“It’s not a Valentine’s Day drink,” were her first-ever words to me. “It’s a Campari Orange.”

Oh well. I had won an introduction and a few minutes to make a good impression anyway.

Like all attractive women, she was used to being hit on – bored by the “Do you come here oftens” and “Where do you works” and “What’s your signs”. But my approach was unique enough to persuade her to talk to me for a bit. What kind of guy is going to try to impress a woman by telling her he hates buying flowers and opening doors?

None of what I said and did, though, was spontaneous. In fact, I had been training for the past year and a half to meet her – well, her and dozens upon dozens of other women.

By Feb. 13, 2009, I was a veteran pickup artist – trained intensively by some of the world’s best dating coaches. Renowned pickup artists who operate under code names such as Mr. M, Jeremy Soul, Keychain, Vercetti and others – world famous within an international community of pickup artists – had taken a personal interest in seeing that I became as successful as possible with women.

These pickup artists charge men $3,000 each for a weekend for intensive, often life-changing lessons on how to meet women in clubs, coffee shops, book stores and on the sidewalks, subways, airplanes and anywhere else in the world that women might be. As a journalist, I had decided to write about them. They were coaching me for free.

And that night just before Valentine’s Day, the training really paid off. Using their tactics, I met the woman I would eventually marry. Ironically, it would forever take me out of the community of pickup artists and eliminate the need I had for all that training in the first place.

The story of how I became a pickup artist under the tutoring of some of the world’s best is closely linked to my decision to start Project SuperMe this February. It’s the story of how I came to believe in self help and how I ended up in a position where I admitted to myself that I needed it.

A Life-Time Low

The story started in November of 2007, just after my divorce from my previous marriage. For 10 years, I had been in a severely mismatched relationship, trying but failing to make it work. By the time of the divorce, I was at the lowest point of my life.

I found myself working alone and living alone – in Romania, a country where I knew nobody except the handful of people associated with my ex-wife. And they were now off limits. Every day, I would go to work and sit alone in my office for 12 hours, return home with a six-pack of beer and two packs of cigarettes and sit there for another several hours, getting drunk alone. It was the most miserable time in my life.

All of my hopes and dreams and exuberance had been killed off. I was now miserably alone, thousands of kilometers from the nearest friend. I had moved to the country, forever ending my globe-trotting days, only so we could be closer to my daughter’s maternal grandparents and the child-raising aid they could offer. I had taken a career demotion to do it and taken leave of all my friends and acquaintances. With one miserable year and a half, I was divorced. Because my ex-wife was given custody of my daughter, I could only have access to her by staying in Romania.

My self confidence was at a record low. Leaning out my window one weekend – which, as usual, I was spending home alone with beer – I watched women passing by. Some of them were attractive and some weren’t. No matter, I thought, I have no means of meeting any of them. I was doomed to be forever alone.

For weeks, I spiraled downwards into the first and only depression of my life. I gave myself over completely to drinking alone and only occasionally could gather enough enthusiasm to play Civilization II. At the time, the video game seemed more productive than staring at the wall while slowly growing numb via beer.

I had a brief respite when my company sent me on assignment to Bosnia for a few days, where I met up with a female colleague who had also recently divorced.

“Why don’t you try online dating?” she suggested, after we commiserated a while.

The idea had never really occurred to me. I thought online dating was only for losers. But hey, I thought to myself. I am a loser!

As if to confirm my thoughts, my divorced friend added: “But make sure and only approach divorced women who are in their late 30s or early 40s and have children.”

So online dating it would be – and targeting bored middle-aged women with children, bad divorce records and a habit of dating online.

Clumsy Casanova

Even at that, I failed. My first attempt was one of the clumsiest in my history. I chose a woman, simply introduced myself in a brief note and sent an online invite for coffee. She ignored it, further confirming my uselessness as I tried to re-immerse myself in the world of dating.

But the online dating plan had, at least, lead me online. In my googling for online dating sites, I stumbled on several obscure sites with advice for lonely men just like me.

The advice they gave was all very counterintuitive. They told the would-be Romeos to tease women, never buy them a drink, don’t send flowers, and act a bit arrogant. In short, to play hard to get with a woman who may not even want you in the first place.

Throughout my life, I thought meeting women meant I had to be the proverbial nice guy. I had to feign interest in topics they liked, treat them like delicate little flowers and show myself to be an intelligent, sensitive 90s man.

I had no idea whether this counter-intuitive approach would work – it sounded mostly like nonsense – but I was desperate enough to give it a try.

A week later, I mustered the bare minimum of enthusiasm I needed to leave my apartment on a Friday evening and head, alone, to a bar downtown, armed with memorized chat-up lines, an outline of female psychology and a general sense that I might just be stirring up a whole lot of trouble.

I spotted two attractive young women chatting by themselves and decided that, for the first time ever, I was going to try out a bit of self help advice.

Half expecting a slap in the face, I walked over and set my book bag on a vacant chair beside them …

(This is Part 14 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

On Day 1 of Project SuperMe, I started out with about all of the exercise that my smoky, pudgy, high blood-pressured body could handle.

So my first workout lasted four minutes.

(Albeit a pretty tough four minutes – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AimPOSXe7n4)

In all areas I was working on – health, wealth and relationships – I was trying to follow the principle of improving by 1 percent every day.

I’m obviously not a big advocate of making slow, gradual change. At least not when it comes to myself. I like the big bang. Go for it all right here and right now. That’s why I advocate improving by 1 percent a day.

Improving by 1 percent every day really is rapid, massive change. Do the math and you’ll see that it’s lightning quick.

Nowhere was that principle as measurable as it was with my workouts. By adding a little bit to my workout a day, I became barely recognizable to myself within two months.

I started off barely able to do 20 pushups. By adding at least one a day, I ended Project SuperMe by doing 90 pushups in a row – before plunging into a daily 1.5-hour resistance and cardio routine.

I started adding jogging sessions after my initial four-minute workout, running a little but faster and farther every day. I then added all-out sprinting to the end of my jogs. I bought hand weights and would add two kilos a week to my weight.

Each day, I would lift my knees a bit higher, focus a bit more intensely on what I was doing, and constantly push myself that 1 percent harder.

I’ll keep this post short, as I would rather speak through photos today:

 The first photo, taken by my six-year-old daughter who accidentally cut off my head, is a rare torso shot of me before Project SuperMe.

The second, taken by my wife Roxana, replicates the shot for comparison. This shot was taken this morning so you actually see four months of gains. But the first two were by far the most significant, probably representing 90 percent of the change.

 Besides the principle of improving 1 percent a day in fitness, I should also mention that I decided to ignore all medical advice when I started my workout routine.

I couldn’t stand the idea of stretching, so I did none of it. I didn’t do warm ups and, by the end, I was lifting heavy weight daily, without giving my muscles a chance to recuperate – all while averaging four hours of sleep a night and subsisting on a near-starvation diet.

I have since started stretching and exercising more moderately. Well, I’ve now started P90X, which is a 90-day, seven-day-a-week, hour a day fitness program meant for people who are already in shape.

But it all started with that helter, skelter, homemade exercise routine. It started by just doing what felt right at first, and then adding 1 percent to it every day for two months.

It would probably be criminal for me to recommend that others do what I did. But I’m happy I did it.

Now, I’ll try the photo thing again, with heads:

Me, enjoying myself at my mom’s place back in Canada before Project SuperMe. Smokes and Beer. (Notice my arm over my chest and my raised knee – I often did this for photos, under the mistaken belief it hid the size of my gut.)

Me, enjoying myself in my living room, after Project SuperMe. Push-ups and Sit-ups.

(This is Part 13 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

A month in to my self-styled transformation, I stood in front of the mirror at 3 o’ clock in the morning and made googly-eyed faces worthy of a Maori warrior. I flicked myself in the nose repeatedly with my fist, ululated like an old Arab woman at a wedding and whirled dervishly in the moonlight.

I was scaring away the procrastination devils. To stop goofing off, I had decided to get goofy.

Through most of the previous decade, I had developed surefire methods of putting things off. In order to dupe my productive side, I would embark on never-ending cleaning sprees, complain that the room was too noisy or too quiet, worry about my health so I could take a rest, or simply wait for the muse. Mostly, though, I would procrastinate through over-preparation. Planning to do something seemed infinitely easier than doing something. My mind was always taking the well-worn path of least resistance.

During Project SuperMe, I set out to make some serious progress on writing a book. And I was procrastinating on it. This seemed to be a chink in my armor. To fix it, I tried several methods, mostly involving brute force and willpower.

I was light years ahead of where I was only weeks earlier – procrastinating on the book project for me meant perhaps walking in the park or spending extra time on the internet tinkering with my diet. Before, I would have just popped down to the local pub and got drunk.

But the problem I wanted to tackle was still essentially the same – I couldn’t force myself to do something that I knew I really should do.

For the entire first, beautiful week of Spring, I forbade myself from crossing the threshold of my apartment door. I didn’t even allow myself to take out the garbage. Lack of alternatives – boredom – would force all traces of procrastination out of me, I thought, and lead me to write the book. I thought wrong.

I then tried literally tying myself to my desk, using the cotton belt of my housecoat. This just served to annoy me every time I had to go pee.

I tried making to do lists and congratulating myself as I checked things off. I found, though, that the “to do” list itself was discouraging. I started writing “done” lists of all the things I had managed to do the previous day. It made me feel a little better but it didn’t solve the problem.

I decided after a few weeks of trying that I couldn’t bully or trick myself into stopping procrastination. The solution must lie in good old fashioned willpower. So I willed. And willed. And willed.

I seemed to be better at won’tpower.

I came to the conclusion that I had no willpower. In fact, I’m not even sure what willpower is. I have no willpower but I was exercising daily. I had quit smoking and drinking and was living off fewer than 800 calories a day as I rapidly shrank to my proper weight. Where did that power come from?

It came from a better understanding of myself – quite literally through thinking about myself for hours on end, day after day. By now, my daily studies were taking on the intensity of a graduate degree in me – Adam Mac Brown Studies 501. I was honing a talent in self-analysis. By thinking about myself, my history, habits and motivations, I was able to make rapid progress in other areas.

I learned, for example, that I could easily quit smoking by aiming past the goal of quitting smoking. I didn’t aim to quit smoking but instead aimed to become immaculately healthy and fit. Quitting smoking is a big thing – but I could make it seem small by lumping it in with even bigger things. I have always loved grandiose plans and this was my trump card against cigarettes.

I decided to use my growing knowledge of myself to fight the habit of procrastination.

The mystery surrounding my proclivity for procrastination quickly disappeared.

I reviewed in my head dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of instances in the past when I had procrastinated. The moments were easy to find as, even as I was searching for them, my mind was seeking reasons to procrastinate.

I discovered that, before each case of procrastination, my thought process would reach a fork in the road – the moment just before I either headed off toward the sofa or started writing. It was not a logical thought process that I discovered but more of an emotion.

It’s a moment of indecision prompted by a temptation arising in my head, followed immediately by a feeling of surrender and then a tenuous sense of guilty relief – followed by procrastination. And it was consistent. As far as I could recall, it happened every single time I ever procrastinated.

The moment of indecision was the enemy. It was the portal of entry for the lazy alternative thoughts, like a brief window of opportunity for the sloth within. It could crumble the most solid of foundations and lead me to the television remote control or a six-pack of beer instead of to a well-written book chapter. In the instances when I overcame that moment, mostly just a few seconds in duration, I would get some solid work done.

The moment was not the cause of my procrastination, which might more properly be chalked up to simple human nature. But I knew it held the answer. I had to avoid that fork in the road altogether by taking an entirely different route.

Simply identifying the problem was probably 90 percent of the solution, the climax to my procrastination study.  From there, a solution was only a matter of time.

The rest was, well, kinda fun.

For my earlier studies on quitting smoking and drinking, I had resorted in part to neuro-linguistic programming and my own imagination.

I probably could have resorted to other methods, but I was finding that NLP was hare-brained enough to be enjoyable. So that’s the route I took.

NLP labels the thought process that lead me to procrastination as a “pattern.” Over the years, my mind got into habits of following certain well-worn paths and would consistently follow them until I changed them. Tony Robbins, who bases part of his seminars on NLP, likens it to taking an old vinyl record and scratching your car keys all over it – it will never play the same way again.

So, I found myself willfully reliving those moments over and over again. Each time the moment of indecision would arise in my memory, I would freeze it and intensify it. Then I would take out the car keys.

In my case, this involved the repetition of crazy behavior while repeatedly focusing on the emotions and thoughts related to that devilish moment of indecision.

And that’s why I was sticking my tongue out, hula dancing, ululating, singing badly off key, flicking my nose and busting my best robot moves in the mirror during my early morning self-study sessions for weeks.

It was deceptively simple – to this day, I cannot possibly reach that dangerous moment of indecision without immediately cracking a smile at that image in the mirror.

The moment is now something like: “a feeling of surrender and then a tenuous sense of … total goofiness. Then on to work.”

(This is Part 12 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

When starting that mad sprint from the outskirts of the town of Belacevac to the coal processing factory, I was the only one of the 15 or so men not encumbered by heavy weaponry or a television camera. I was also the slowest.

 As a journalist, I couldn’t be caught on camera dashing with the commandos toward the factory so I was also the last in line, preceded by cameraman Miguel Gil.

In the first 20 seconds of the run, I managed to reach a massive coal shovel, the first in a series of large coal mining and processing tools that were scattered across the field and could serve as shelter. As I huddled, I was already breathing heavy. The extreme stress, sleeplessness, searing summer heat and, above all, my years of sloth, had left me already breathing heavy as I dashed behind the shovel and waited for Miguel, who was just ahead of me, resume his run. I started out slower for the next sprint, calmed by the silence and fearing that, under these extreme circumstances, I might just have some kind of seizure, or panic attack.

Then the first machinegun opened up. A guerrilla somewhere up ahead and to the left screamed.

The Serb forces had spotted us. I switched on my tape recorder, believing the sounds would be my last testament. The first word’s they caught were Miguel’s shouting from ahead to see if I was hit.

“I’m OK,” I shouted back.

And the sprint was on.

Kalashnikov assault rifles and machine-guns started rattling steadily from the forest-covered hill about half a kilometer to my left. I crawled half-under some mining tool hot from the sun and waited for Miguel’s shout to tell me to resume the run. At this point, running back to the shelter of the town seemed just as dangerous as continuing on to the factory.

If the shout came, I didn’t hear it. By the time I popped my head up again, bullets were kicking up dust and gravel ahead of me and Miguel was already running to the next piece of cover.

I popped up, chest heaving, sweat breaking, and vision growing a blurry red, and sprinted. The bullets now were exploding in bursts of gravel around my feet as I ran. I felt my knees start to give way while bullets were flying inches around them. I envisioned my feet flying above the ground – a trick I had learned days earlier when we had found out we were standing what was probably a minefield and I had to walk out.

Still, stress coursed through me like a poison. I felt that my very blood was toxic.

As the factory came in closer view, I now realized that the guerrillas and Miguel had already reached the building. I still had a quarter of the run to make and I was the only man left on the field. Men were lining me up in their scopes, watching me run, and trying to kill me.

Me! Only me.

Even as I sped as fast as my polluted body allowed, the moments seemed to slow down.

I felt naked. Stark naked. This was the feeling. Filled with poison and completely vulnerable and helpless. This was the feeling that would take more than a decade to shake.

As I reached the edge of the long factory building, the firing became more accurate, shattering window after window as my head dashed past them.

I dived into the first doorway I could find as a guerrilla popped his head and arms out, offering ineffective return fire that exploded loudly in my head. I sank to my knees behind him as bullets continued to smash through the windows and ricochet off of the walls inside.

Then I collapsed on my back on the sooty, oily floor, clutching my chest. Within moments of being fired at, I was lying on the floor, desperately trying to pretend that I was back on the beaches in the heat of Rio de Janeiro.

I struggled to shut out all the noise – the explosions of return fire, the mortar shells that were now starting to hit outside the building and, most of all, Miguel’s shouted words.

“You almost got us killed!”

I respected Miguel more than any other war correspondent I had ever met. In fact, most war correspondents felt the same way about it. In this world, he was a legend – the elite.

Out on the battlefield, my slowness – my total inadequacy – had forced him to wait, to hesitate, to fear for my safety, even as he had to contend with the driving bullets himself. And the guerrillas, unwilling to allow a journalist to be killed under their watch, had waited with him – until the poison in my unhealthy, slow body pushed me forward and back into their view.

I never asked if any of the guerrillas escorting us were killed. I still don’t know.

And then I gave up trying to convince even myself of my bravery anymore. I scanned the building for a hiding spot, convinced the Serbs were going to overwhelm the building and kill us all. I crawled around on the floor, trying to find an area in the building that might offer a signal to my mobile phone.

I intended to call CNN, tell them I wanted to transmit live from the Battle of Belacevac, and then beg on live international television for mercy from the Serb forces. I regularly commented for CNN and had the number in my speed dial. Thankfully, we were miles from any transmission point and my phone remained dead. A tearful international call for personal mercy – while so many around me were bravely fighting and filming – would not be the way I envisioned ending my career as a war correspondent. I had cracked.

After hours of huddling in that factory and dreading a return sprint, I was saved by a technicality. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the Serb forces had surged through the guerrilla defenses and stormed the portion of Belacevac town farthest from us. The troops lined up on the hills shooting at us left to reinforce that attack. The shooting stopped and the guerrillas sent a car speeding over that field to supply the factory outpost with more ammunition. We hitched a ride back. I was slumped on the floor of the rear seat until we reached our Land Rover.

As we sped off back into the maze of tracks through those mountains, I opened the bottle of Chivas Regal whisky that we had reserved for bribing police. And I drank deeply. The first drop in a river of whisky to come.

I convinced myself that I was drinking in celebration and the joy of being alive. In part, I was. But a part of me had vanished under scrutiny. It would stay on the field for 14 years.

In March of this year, on Day 24 of Project SuperMe, I was about two weeks into my daily jogs in the park when I sprinted again – for the first time since that day in Belacevac.

My transformation had been rapidly gathering pace and I already knew I was full swing into a major life change – a personal transformation like none I have ever felt. The seed of thought that came to me on Feb. 19 in the maternity ward while awaiting my wife’ operation had taken root and was germinating.

Other joggers watched as I sped past them, the dirt path giving way to my flying feet. My chest was expanding freely, my blood cured of poison, as I dashed in the sunlight. Each stride bounced me into the air, freeing me from the years of feeling like a decaying vessel. Sweat beads tickled and endorphins lifted me. The run brought me back to a time of childhood dream and exuberance. I felt ready for anything.

I was only 24 days into my intensive self-study and exploding in optimism. But I knew that, at least, I had outrun that demon. I finished that sprint I started in Belacevac – and with my self-respect very much in tact.

Others have not had the chance.

Abi Berisha, the guerrilla commander who had shot at us and then cried in apology, was killed months later in a firefight on the border of Kosovo and Albania.

Miguel, the cameraman, was ambushed two years later by fighters of the Revolutionary Front while covering the war in Sierra Leone, West Africa. He was in a vehicle with Kurt Schork, probably the war correspondent who I respected most, after Miguel. Both were killed.

In fact, everybody I mentioned in the last three posts about the Battle of Belacevac is dead. Except me. I’m very much alive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Gil_Moreno_de_Mora

(This is Part 11 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

The bullets jolted my Land Rover in staccato. As I watched out of my windshield, hands held high in surrender, I felt the bullets strike the car in an upward burst – the bumper, the engine block, the windshield, the spare tire on top. Each hit rocked me individually but they all came together so fast it seemed as if the guerrilla firing at me was shaking me awake.

I glanced toward my cameraman, Miguel. He had lived and worked almost non-stop for the past eight years in war zones – Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan. Surely he would have an idea of what to do.

Miguel was frozen, hands up. I mimicked him. And waited.

After a few tense seconds, the guerilla exploded in motion again, pulling the rocket propelled grenade launcher off of his back and taking aim. This meant I had seconds to live. It would turn the Land Rover to fiery scrap. I glanced toward the back, hoping to make a dash for the rear door to escape before the grenade hit.

But it didn’t hit. When I looked ahead again, outside the windshield, the guerrillas were motioning us out of the vehicle. We walked out, hands trembling in the air. But they were no longer aiming at us.

By the time we covered the few meters between us and the guerrillas, the commander, who had been shooting at us, had dropped his rifle. He was cradling his face in his hands. He was in shock. As he readied to fire the rocket, he had spotted the TV markings on our car and realized he had mistaken journalists in a Land Rover for Serb paramilitary forces in a scout vehicle.

Journalists, at that early stage of the war in Kosovo, were treated as heroes among the ethnic Albanian population that these Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas were fighting to defend. Whenever I went to corner stores, they would give me the requested goods and then refuse to take my money. People would applaud me in the streets, offer me meals.

When we reached the band of guerrillas, the commander was in tears. The others, weapons down, were apologizing profusely. Both Miguel and I stepped up to the man who had just tried to kill us – and simultaneously patted him on the back reassuringly.

“We’re OK,” we said, motioning with our hands to show him that our bodies were in one piece. Only slowly did he come around.

As it turned out, we didn’t need to mime our condition – he spoke perfect English. The man was Abi Beleim Berisha, a clean cut, English-speaking, former French Legionnaire in his late 20s who returned to his birthplace of Kosovo for the war. He was also commanding the defense of the coal mining town of Belacevac.

We had been shot at by the very man we had come hoping to meet!

Abi, still overwhelmed by feelings of guilt, promised us full cooperation in our coverage of the Battle of Belacevac and guided us into the town center, where he had set up a makeshift command post and lookout station in a two-storey building.

He showed us, rather than told us, of our newfound situation. He lent us a pair of binoculars to scout the hillsides that hemmed in the town on three sides. In the first one, we could see Serb tanks covered in leaves and camouflage netting. As we stood still, watching, the tanks would lunge forward out of hiding and back into obscurity with the force of their shells. Each menacing appearance would soon be followed by an explosion as close as a few hundred meters from us. They were shelling the trenches that the guerrillas had dug around the town.  On the other two hillsides that bordered the valley town, snipers hid in wait.

He was telling us that, except for the dirt road we had come in on, we were completely surrounded. Even that road, he said, could give way to Serb forces any moment. None of the men around us knew if they would make it out alive.

Abi took my notepad and pen and etched out a note that would seal my fate for the remainder of my days in Kosovo. Using his command name of Rrufeja, or Lightning, he wrote a note granting Miguel and I access, camera and all, to all battle stations in the areas he was helping defend. No other journalist had anything like it. It was a unique privilege.

As I waited for something to happen, I continued writing the dispatch to send to The Associated Press regional headquarters in Vienna before the battery died on my satellite phone.

On Kosovo’s front lines, experienced fighters, some of them veterans of earlier Yugoslav wars who profess pinpoint accuracy with rocket-propelled grenades, have reinforced the ethnic Albanian farmers who carry homemade shotguns and bolt-action rifles.

“We have no big military equipment,” said Berisha, carrying a Kalashnikov rifle and two rocket-propelled grenades. “But we have to win the war.”

The force uses its knowledge of a maze of mountain trails in western Kosovo to travel from battle to battle within hours. Farmers and villagers risk sniper fire to run dry biscuits and water to entrenched guerrillas defending their regions. And a newly imposed military discipline attempts to organize a force that operates largely without radio communication.

“I am so sorry I shot at you,” Berisha said, trembling and sweating profusely after firing half a dozen Kalashnikov rounds at a journalist’s car he mistook for a Serb attack vehicle.

The battery on my satellite phone died, leaving me no access to the outside world. Abi told us he was sending 10 men to the outskirts of the town to a coal processing factory that the guerrillas had abandoned in fighting the night before. If the factory was occupied by Serb forces, the band would fight to regain it. And I was invited to tag along. The battle for the Belacevac coal mine was capturing the world’s attention and no journalist was in a better position to cover it than I was.

To get to the coal processing factory, though, we were told we had to sprint across an open field of about 500 meters – potentially in view of Serb snipers and artillery on the hillsides.

Sprinting, even back then in 1997, was something I just didn’t do. Even at 29 years of age, I had a decade-long smoking habit and appalling eating habits had already left me overweight.

I had, though, a fierce belief in my own bravery. I had already lived through several car bombings in Peru, been mugged by knife-wielding drug addicts in Colombia, and fought off two separate mugging attempts in Brazil. I had even just survived being shot at by the very man who was helping me. Guts, along with a lust for adventure, had become a part of my self-identity.

The sprint was about to change that and, 14 years later, sprinting in the park on day 24 of my two-month self transformation I have dubbed Project SuperMe, that day would become important again.

(This is Part 10 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

By the third week of my self-guided two-month transformation, I was picking up the pace of change. Figuratively and literally.

My focus on improvement had started out with what I later came to view as baby steps. From cutting out junk food in an effort to slim down, I had graduated to fasting and losing a kilo or two every week. In three weeks, my clothing was already loose.

At the start, I had been chiding myself about being too affected by negative criticism. Only three weeks in, I felt a gathering pride that seemed to make me all but impervious to insult. I had also gone from concentrating on self-improvement four hours a day or so to focusing intensely with virtually every word and action, 18 hours a day, until I felt I was lucid dreaming. It seemed that I was looking at myself in entirely new mirrors.

In the first two weeks, I had to constantly prod myself to accomplish my to-do lists and conquer the procrastination habit that had mired both my personal and professional life for a decade. Each time I caught myself thinking that I could do an action later, I would force myself to do it now – until I would regularly start waking in the middle of the night with a nagging feeling of leaving something unfinished. I would go to the computer and inevitably find the e-mail I should have written earlier, or the list I should have made sometime that day – and then snap myself out of sleep to do it then and there.

I was exaggerating almost up to the point of counter-productivity. The severe calorie deficit, the broken sleep, the constant churning in my mind, the steady state of excitement, the 18-hour days and the physical exercise on an ever-empty stomach could very well make me ill. I knew that. At this early stage in my transformation, one slip up – a desperate trip to the pub, a day of wallowing – could lead to smashing failure. And the higher the goals I set, the further I had to fall. But the success I was feeling propelled me to pick up the pace even more.

I would often smile spontaneously at myself at various points throughout the day. My mind would stop for a moment even as my body carried on. I would take a precious moment, admire myself as if from afar, and cheer myself on further.

It was in one of these moments that I rediscovered the joy of running. Sprinting at full speed for the first time during Project SuperMe was one of the most exhilarating things I had done in years. Every full-legged stride brought me further back toward the jubilance and energy of childhood.

I leaned my body into the curves as I sped down the lakeside path by my house. I leapt over puddles and ducked under low-hanging branches. The momentum gathered to the point where I barely felt my feet touch the ground. I felt high.

My first sprint – on Day 24 of my self-studies – was meant as part of the program to get back into decent physical shape. I had already been jogging for a couple of weeks but I decided in a moment of self-cheering to start finishing off all my jogs with a lung-busting sprint – not stopping until I was nearly ready to vomit. I had been a fat, breathless slob for way too long.

As I finished that first mad, merry dash and slowed to a brisk, breathless walk, I asked myself when was the last time I had run so fast for so long. It must have been years, I thought. And then I regretted my query. I remembered. The last time was altogether different – I was being shot at.

The last time I had run like that had been in July of 1997 – the Battle of Belacevac, Kosovo. For years, I would feel a buzz of tension and shakes when thinking about the sleepless, food-less two-day period I spent on the losing side of that pitched battle.

I was a war correspondent in Kosovo for The Associated Press and the Serb forces were assaulting the coal mine of Belacevac, which was held by the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army at the time. They had taken it from the Serbs weeks earlier. Belacevac was an important source of fuel for the entire region and we all knew that the assault had to come. And the Serbs were far more powerful than the scattered guerrilla force. It was destined to be a bloody battle.

I was in my hotel in the provincial capital, Pristina, when Miguel Gil woke me to tell me the long-awaited battle had started. Miguel was the cameraman – our reports were also regularly on CNN and other TV news media – and he was one of the most experienced and well-reputed war correspondents in the world.

Knowing that the battle would eventually come, he had spent the last couple of weeks scouting out hidden mountain routes so that, when the time came, we could skirt the roadblocks and paramilitary barriers and get straight into the heart of the fighting. We were off before dawn, with no time to buy fresh supplies. We only carried a bottle of Chivas Regal whisky in case we needed to bribe police or other officials.

A couple of hours later, we found ourselves winding down a rutted mountain road in our armor-plated Land Rover, unable to see more than 30 or 40 meters ahead due to the twists in the path and the trees. The chest-thump of artillery was coming hard from perhaps a kilometer in front of us. We knew we were getting close.

As we rounded a corner, we saw several men in camouflage spring out of the trees on either side of the road. We halted abruptly and raised our hands in the air. They could easily see us – they were less than 10 meters away.

Then the first guerrilla aimed his assault rifle at us. And opened fire.

(This is Part 9 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

“Hey man. You still on that crazy no-eating diet?”

I had to laugh at the text message from my close friend Colin. He just unknowingly gave my home-tailored diet a name.

In drips and drabs, I had told him about the diet that I planned to use to shed 17 kilos during my two months of intensive self study and improvement that I’ve come to call Project SuperMe. At the start, I pieced together a complicated, intricately measured regime using tips and tricks and advice.

The plan was a hybrid of the many diets I had tried in years of failed attempts to slim down, plus some fancy new tricks.

At the time I started Project SuperMe, I had been for several months on something called The Caveman Diet. It attempts to recreate as closely as possible the diets of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors. In evolutionary terms, agriculture is a brand new invention. For most of our time on this planet, humans have not eaten grains or dairy. So The Caveman Diet prohibits all grains, dairy, refined foods and sugar. On that diet, you eat your meat and veggies – and pretty much nothing else.

Of course, I had added my own rule to The Caveman Diet - I could drink all the beer I wanted. I call it the Piss Tank Caveman Diet.

The Piss Tank Caveman Diet doesn’t work.

Shortly before I started Project SuperMe, I had developed a serious case of calorie poisoining. I weighed 91.1 kilos – precisely 200 pounds. I needed to shed 17.1 kilos to reach my ideal weight.

So, according to the rules of Project SuperMe, I had two months to become smarter, fitter, happier, wealthier, more confident, more organized – and 20 percent smaller.

To start with, I shed the Piss Tank modifications to the Caveman Diet. When I quit drinking beer on Day 1 of Project SuperMe, I dropped hundreds of calories a day from my intake, giving me a good start. And it still left me with a pretty comfortable diet of unlimited vegetables, seeds, nuts, fish and meat. Sugar and grains were definitely out and it wasn’t a problem.

For more of a head start, I turned to a book that had recently piqued my interest, called The 4-Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. The tips I took from Ferriss were mainly small but clever tweaks.

According to research he described, a dash of cinnamon in your coffee helps moderate blood sugar spikes and prevents your body from storing part of your meal consumption as fat. So cinnamon was dashed in every cup of coffee. In fact, I started powdering the coffee pot with it.

He had also recommended lemon juice as it seems to have the same effect on blood sugar. Spinach and eggs within half an hour of waking were meant to provide a protein boost in the morning that would fire up my metabolism to burn more calories through the day. He also recommended exposure to cold, including baths in ice, to burn calories as the body fights to keep itself warm.

So, at the start of Project SuperMe, I created the Freak Out The Neighbors Diet.

My routine included a half liter of tooth-aching ice-water and a green tea extract pill just after waking. Then, a bowl of 250 grams of refrigerated spinach drenched in two fluid ounces of cold freshly squeezed lemon juice and two chilled boiled eggs. I then went out into the howling Romanian winter in my t-shirt and shorts to clean snow off of the car.

When finished, I would come back inside to my only concession to warmth – a cup of hot coffee. And a dash of cinnamon.  Followed by a cold shower. And so on throughout the day.

Three things happened in two weeks on the Freak Out The Neighbors Diet.

1 – My blood sugar dropped from a normal 99 milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood to 74 – just above the healthy minimum. (I know this because our diabetic cat Pufu shared his blood sugar monitoring kit with me.)

2 – I started sneezing a lot.

3 – I lost almost five kilos.

The Freak Out The Neighbors Diet was working!

I feared, though, that much of the loss was simply due to quitting drinking beer and the pace would not be sustained. Weight loss is fastest in the first couple of weeks of the diet. In fact, I lost almost half of that weight in the first three days.

I started to consider the common advice of eating smaller, more frequent meals to help accelerate my weight loss.

While playing with meal size, I had the stroke of brilliance that led me to throw out all conventional wisdom, disregard medical advice and ignore tips and tricks completely.

Screw smaller meals!

In fact, screw all meals!

By week three, I had designed and implemented The Crazy No Eating Diet.

I cut my intake to between 300 and 800 calories a day while fasting entirely at least one day a week, and sometimes two. This was less than half of the intake needed to sustain the bodily functions of a two-year-old girl. Amid all the diet fads and tricks, I was overlooking good ol’ eating less. You don’t lose weight by eating. You lose weight by not eating.

And so my fight for weight loss started in earnest. I pledged to stick to The Crazy No Eating Diet in a six-week battle against constant, sharpening hunger. It would also further challenge other aspects of Project SuperMe by making it harder to concentrate or exercise.

But at least I was warm.

(This is Part 8 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)