Friends & coworkers participated in the annual Bosen Vegan Challenge.  According to the rules, participants are only supposed to eat vegan food during the entire week (by ordering take-outs from certain pre-approved vegan restaurants in Orange County).  In addition, calorie-intakes must be strictly calculated and self-reported.   The person with the least calorie-intake at the end of the week would be declared the winner of the competition.  
 
This year, Cong Zhang won the challenge.  For 7 days straight, Cong ate 2 meals everyday, while still able to keep up his strenuous work-out routine.  
 
When congratulated by admiring friends and asked how he was feeling, Cong surprised all by candidly confessing, “I feel absolutely terrible!  I am as light-headed as a ghost!  When I was doing bench press in the gym after work yesterday, I got so weak at one point, that I thought I was going to be crushed to death under the sheer weight of the barbell!   A work-out buddy had to step in to help me lift the thing back up.  I will never try this silly Vegan Challenge ever again!”  
 
With this, Cong and a couple of friends at work jumped into a van, and drove straight to the nearest steak restaurant -- presumably, it would seem, to "celebrate" his triumph at the Vegan Challenge....  
 
Rumors circulated on the following day that Cong and his buddies ate so much red meat the previous night, as to have completely undone all possible health benefits that might have accrued from a week of vegan diet....
 
If you are about to despair of human perfectibility, please do not be.  Albeit at an extraordinary cost to his physical health (by eating a week's worth of red meat at one sitting), Cong's good humor has at least been restored.   He has since laughingly commented on his "victory-to-defeat". 
 
"If it is true that, at Thermopylae, the greater glory belonged to the vanquished," said Cong with a magnanimous smile, "then, in my case, a greater defeat actually belongs to me -- the ostensible winner of the Vegan Challenge."  
 
When asked what he has learned from this experience, Cong thought for a moment before answering, "I have learned something about myself.  And I have learned a new Greek word -- 'Pyrrhic victory'.  It means a victory that is tantamount to a defeat."