hello i am fat

important questions

2007-05-06T15:57:00.000-07:00

Here is a dilemma, which is kind of hilarious and also sad. After the big closet clean-out, I was able to give most of my clothes to pie, who looks very cute in them. The ones she didn’t take, I could donate, and then people all over San Francisco could look almost but not quite as cute as me or pie.

Now, however, I’ve done the dresser clean out, and I’ve ended up with a nearly empty dresser, and six paper bags full of clothing. What do I do with these? Donate! you cry, and I say yes! That is so brilliant! Except that these bags are 6 paper bags full of pants that are not in the greatest shape, nightgowns, sleepshirts, and underpants. I don’t think there’s a Goodwill in the world that is going to take my underpants.

I could trash the stuff, but it seems like a huge waste and it makes me sad. Are there shelters which take underpants? I imagine there must be, but I also imagine that it’s new underwear that they are wanting, and not so much the kind which has been, you know. Gently used.

Pillows! I could make pillows! Or new skirts. Or a blanket. I had some really cute underpants. Who wouldn’t want an all-cotton quilt featuring adorable stripes, dots, polar bears and little hearts? Communists, that’s who. I think I have just figured out my mother’s day present this year. Losing weight is awesome.

Elastic Waists & Bodies of Work

2007-05-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

We are now live! Conde Nast is pleased to present Elastic Waist. I'll be writing a daily weight blog round up, but the real draw, you'll find, are the daily articles by my favorite Weetabix, and the sexy Lunchbox Guru column which makes you want to be a better person.

My column, Body of Work, is running every weekday morning. Please update your links (there oughtn't be a "typepad" in there) and enjoy, I hope.

In the meantime, I will enjoy my latte. Calciumlicious!

dispatches from the front: part mumble

2007-04-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

Note One: I have officially lost one hundred and four pounds. Or, 104. Or, ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR. That is a lot of goddamn pounds. It is more than half-way. 62 more pounds to go to my doctor's goal for me. Jesus Christ. Holy crap. Whee!

Note Two: Yesterday, stretching before my run, I realized that I could put both palms boom, flat down on the floor. (See above re: crap, holy and whee!)

Note the Third: I dropped by Forth and Towne when I was at (shudder) the mall this past weekend. Their sizes go up to 20, and they had a very lovely dress on their website not so long ago, and I thought I would try it on, maybe pick up something pretty to celebrate having lost ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR (104) pounds. I tried on the dress in a 20. Too big. Down to an 18. Too big. Down, incredulously, to an 16 - wait, no 16? Okay, I'll try the 14, I said, flush with power. Back fat! Yar. (Also: sexy) So I didn't buy it. But to not be in their largest sizes? Oh, that was a revelation. (Ibid.)

sneak peak

2007-04-19T14:52:00.000-07:00

For those of you who say I don't post enough (which is everyone including my mother), what you'll find over here will probably make you happy. New post every weekday morning. (But ssshh. We're not live yet.)

news & notes

2007-04-16T12:09:00.001-07:00

I updated the look of this site (sleek! sexy!) and updated my links (you are so sleek! you are so sexy!) after I realized both were horribly out of date and if I did not fix them, I would have tiny little fits.

I think I did a reasonable job in clearing out the dead links and adding pages I have been reading, but if you think I love you and have forgotten about you, please tell me. If you think I would love you if only I knew you, please say hey, and let's have a beautiful relationship. If you think you've written me an email and I never responded, you are probably right, because I suck at email and humbly apologize.

Also! The always-amazing Big Fat Deal has gotten an even sexier face lift and a brand new URL. Please head over and join the party - there are smart people, saying smart things, and there is nothing better in the world than that.

I'm Gary Gnu, and that's the gnews.

Seat 14C

2007-04-15T18:48:00.000-07:00

I took a vacation, not so long ago. A week with friends, down at Joshua Tree. I was unhappy about the flight, because I am always unhappy about flying, and I hate, so so so so much, asking my seat partner if it is okay if I leave the arm rest up. That is like turning to someone and saying "Hello! Please notice how fat I am! Thanks!" It's a short flight, SF to LA, but I still worry. That is what I do.

I got on the plane, and sat in the seat, and thought, "Hmm." Then, I experimentally lowered the armrest. And I fit. I was still snug in there, my hip touching the arm, but I fit, and was comfortable, and I was so excited that I kept it down, even when it turned out that I had the whole aisle to myself. Awesome.

Awesomer: on the way back, I climbed into my seat (same aisle on the same type of plane), put the armrest down, and found I had space. I was not snug - the seat was all roomy. I almost burst into tears. I hid behind my Entertainment Weekly and giggled wildly.

I love this. It also pisses me off. I am trying to come up with a way to express this that makes sense, and I've spent five minutes backspacing things. The best way to say it is maybe that it pisses me off that I spent so many years uncomfortable, miserable and ashamed, trying to fit into public spaces. It feels like - like I wasn't fit for public consumption, and I was being punished for that. It goes back to the old debate - should we make the world more fat-accessible, or does that encourage people to get fatter? I think I would have just been grateful.

cleaning out the closet

2007-03-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

The thing about having been skinnier than this, but also way fatter than this, is that I am suddenly trapped in a terribly unfashionable in-between state from which there is no escape, because I really don't want to spend money on new clothes. By which I mean "am so poor I cannot afford to spend money on new clothes, especially clothes that will last me a whole month, max, but probably not even that long."

I know, wah, poor me, who it is so hard to be. It remains frustrating. The clothes I have, the smaller clothes – some fit me, but most are still ever-so-slightly too short or too tight or ride up or cling to things that haven't gone away yet (go away, go away, go away). They need about another ten pounds for fitting correctly. The larger-size clothes I have that used to fit me, they are mostly swimming on me, big fashionable sacks, which makes me sad because I'd like to say hello, world! Please enjoy my littler waist! But in these things, not so much.

I have got to go through my closet and separate out the larger sizes from the still-larger sizes from the medium large sizes to the smaller sizes, because while it sounds like a lot of fun to surprise yourself every day when you're getting dressed – to what degree will this totally not fit? let's find out! – it is not, and it is frustrating.

But I have been putting that off. Mostly, I think, because I'm going to miss (some of) my clothes so much. I had some excellent clothes, and I am unearthing things I haven't worn in ages, as I dig through my closet, desperate for something to wear. All of them are too-big things, but I am wearing them anyway, because soon I will not be able to wear them at all without social embarrassment, and I am wearing them happily, even though they look really stupid. On Monday I wore my awesome silk-screened Pirate Love blouse, and on Tuesday, I wore my long pleated denim skirt, and Wednesday was my pink t-shirt with the birds and swirlies.

Today, it is a long satin skirt with sequins sewn on. It was originally ankle-length, but since it no longer sits at my waist, but instead rides down on my hips, it is even longer. And it swishes and is ridiculous and I love it. I loved it less when I was getting on the bus, and I stepped on the skirt. Which meant that I yanked it down, which meant that despite how fast I pulled it back up, all the way to my neck, a good three-quarters of the bus enjoyed a long, leisurely look at my leopard-print underpants (which, incidentally, are also becoming far too large on me. Sexy!).

So maybe this weekend I will do some closet purging and say some sad goodbyes and maybe see if I can break into my neighbor's house and steal some of her pants.

dispatches from the front: part two

2007-03-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

I crossed my legs. I sat on the couch, and swung one leg over the other, and pointed my toe, and there I was, sitting on the couch with my legs crossed like a normal girl. I uncrossed them, and I did it again. And then I did it again. Floop, up and over. And I said to my friends, I said "Oh my god, you guys, I crossed my legs! Do you see? Wait, look, watch!" And they said "Oh, that's very nice," and I don't think they understood, because they have never had a problem such as being unable to cross their legs, but they were very happy for me, if a little confused. Me, I cried a little. Piece by piece, I'm getting my body back.

downward spiral

2007-03-05T18:17:00.000-08:00

The weight is falling off so quickly, now – two pounds, three pounds, five pounds a week, gone (and I want to say gone forever, but there are no guarantees, even now). This is one of the reasons I chose this surgery, one of the secret reasons I am not supposed to talk about. Weight loss surgery is a last-resort, health-focused, flashing red lights and sirens choice to make, and losing the weight so quickly, that’s a side benefit, a bonus that is all about getting you out of the danger zone of diabetes and heart attacks and apnea that chokes you while you sleep, kind of like when my cat, for whom I am considering weight loss surgery, sits on my chest.

But I am not going to lie – on all the weight loss surgery blogs I found, I read all their information carefully and I considered the pros and the cons, and then I looked at those pictures people posted, their monthly weigh-ins and their photo updates, and I could not stop myself from thinking about how, if you put those pictures together, if you flipped through them fast, letting the months fly past under your thumb, you would see a miracle, an enviable, unbearably wonderful miracle. Being fat, and then, suddenly, not being so fat any more, shrinking and shrinking and shrinking down to nothing, down to something so utterly unlike where you started, all spectacularly Alice in Wonderland.

A goddamn miracle! Sign me up. Oh yes, health benefits, those are nice too. Goodbye, cake! Hello, GAP jeans! Wait, don’t take the cake away so quickly. We need to embrace one last rich and fudgelicious time.

It was the part I thought I looked forward to the most, my blink-of-an-eye transition from morbidly obese to girl at whom you won’t look at twice, and it has been one of the biggest shocks of this whole experience, the thing that’s left me vulnerable and scared, even more than my realization that I no longer wanted chocolate cake and who was I, and what the fuck had they done with me?

I am losing weight so quickly, that it is hard to get my bearings. I do not understand my body anymore – it changes its shape under my hands every day, in ways I can’t predict or plan for, and it has me wondering what I am doing to my body, exactly. It has me standing in front of the mirror and looking for signs of change, but more often, for signs that the body I knew is still there, and I am still me.

My body is shrinking, and soon I will be in territory I’ve never been in – I’ve lost weight before, gotten down to the two-teens, but after that, what happens? What will I look like, and how will I feel, and how is my body going to change? I have spent my entire life plump, chubby, overweight, fat, obese – who I am has been shaped by who I have been, and if you catch me off-guard, and ask me point blank, I will tell you: I like the person I am, the reader, the writer, the bad-joke-teller, the oversensitive person I am and would not be if I had not grown up looking the way I did and feeling the way I did. And now I am undoing all that, film spinning in reverse and I am becoming lighter, less substantial and solid, turning into something I am afraid I will not recognize.

dispatch from the front

2007-02-26T12:37:00.000-08:00

Started off in tight size 28W pants. Today: size 20. 20R

Mood: Like, whoa.

More to come.

(p.s. they look so tiny. am i really that tiny?)

on the way

2007-02-16T21:59:00.001-08:00

Some people call them yay moments, or Aha moments, or smilestones, but I will tell you right now, I will kill myself flat dead before I allow any of those words to pass my lips. Except in an ironic manner. I give myself a pass for irony, which is delicious like candy and twice as fun. But not as fun as puns, which are like bon bons or maybe kittens. Which you can eat like bon bons.

Anyway! I did not have a yay moment, or a smilestone – what happened was that I realized that I could do something now that I’ve lost 75 pounds which I haven’t been able to do in a really long time because I was so out of shape and it made me extremely happy.

I’m starting to kind of understand the “smilestone” thing. It’s shorter, anyway.

On my day off, which was today, I decided that I should get out of the house because hiding like a rat in the dark is probably not healthy, and also it was lovely out, with sun and wind, in a way it has not been for awhile, around here.

What I did, despite the bright sun which burns and my natural, inherent lazy nature which will ultimately be my downfall when the revolution comes and my back is up against the wall, was walk on down to the main drag of my neighborhood, with the shops and the things, and I browsed, window-style, up one side and down the other, and into the coffee shop for delicious herbal tea, and then into the bookstore for an hour, up and down the aisle, and then toddling on home, perfectly not-tired, if a little dazzled from all the weather.

This represents, more or less, 10 or 12 blocks, maybe. Some of them slightly uphill, even! They are not long blocks, granted, but considering that it had been hard for me to walk the two blocks to the bus before my surgery, and was still hard after what with being as weak as a bon-bon-sized kitten, this was a revelation to me. I did not stop to rest, or need to take a break. I remember considering waiting for the train to take me the four blocks home from where I was, and then idly dismissing the possibility.

I walked! Easily and happily and without any coercion from Guy, who demands that I not die from some kind of pulmonary embolism, which he insists is still a possibility and which I think is just a scare tactic. I walked, comfortably and happily and recreationally – it is like I’ve got a piece of my life back, a piece of normal life, and I’m on my way back to being normal.

punchlines

2007-02-08T15:06:00.000-08:00

When I first read about it – how losing weight so quickly will make you super crazy ("It's like you have PMS all the time!" they said, all the post-surgery patients who had been going through it for weeks and months and almost a year) it should have been one of those things that gave me pause. Major pause. Hormones, stored in fat, being dumped into your bloodstream by the cartload. And I have never been a girl who deals well with hormones. Super, major, extra pause.

Instead, I was consumed by debating the ethics of weight loss surgery with myself, giving up versus giving in versus giving out versus but it's hard versus but I have to versus what the fuck am I doing versus what the fuck will I do if I don't – the whole messy ordeal. I read everything I could get my hands on, written by post-ops, who could tell me everything that could happen and when and why and how, and some of it seemed very important and some of it, quite frankly, I shrugged off.

I don't even know why I shrugged it off – hubris, I guess. So many people having problems with the disgusting taste of protein shakes, but I would be different, because geeze, people – they're not that bad. Except, as it turns out, they made me want to die rather than drink them, in the early days. Take as much time off as you can? I don't need that much time off! Everything will taste different? Oh, come on! How can my tastes change. Except – well you probably know the punchlines already. You are smart, and very pretty.

And the next punchline, you know that too, for the way that I thought the whole PMS thing couldn't possibly be as bad as they said it was.

Except that it's not, and it is making me mad, because I want to blame everything on it.

It is probably true that I can blame some things on my surgery – I have, since the first day, been startled by a feeling of complete vulnerability. It is hard to be alone, anymore, without feeling like something terrible is going to happen, and there will be nothing to stop it. This I will blame on my surgery – I am an emotional person, but now I am Super Emotional Girl, and I need a cape. On which I will blow my nose as I bawl.

It is hard to be alone, anymore, without feeling intensely, painfully, outrageously alone and lonely. Except I can't bear the thought of seeing anyone, because they don't love me and never did and anyway they shouldn't because I am awful and ridiculous and mostly I don't even understand the things that are coming out of my mouth, either, so I don't expect you to, though it's probably just hormones, making me stupid, and forgetful, and crazy and weird. But maybe I am just stupid and forgetful and crazy and weird. Or maybe the hormones make me think that I am stupid and forgetful and crazy and weird. Or maybe I just really wish I could drink a bottle of wine and have a cake. I don't know.

What makes it worse is that I am avoiding people because I am tired and possibly or not stupid and crazy and forgetful and weird, which puts me out of practice with the social graces. Except, that's funny – I have never been socially graceful, as it turns out. So that's something else I can't blame on my surgery.

But I want to, because that means this is all going to go away, eventually. I bet everything is going to go away, and then everything will be wonderfullest. I will be the happiest and the prettiest and the sun will shine and my skin will clear up and my taxes will be done and I will believe I can fly. I will believe that I can touch the sky. I WILL THINK ABOUT IT EVERY NIGHT AND DAY. I WILL SPREAD MY WINGS AND FLY AWAY. WITH CAKE.

In the meantime, I can wait it out. Without cake.

singing the praises of pants

2007-01-31T11:23:00.000-08:00

I have bought new pants, and they are beautiful pants which I cannot take off, because I don't have any other pants because my laundry cart fell over in my crammed-full closet of crap and is barring the door from opening more than a crack and I can peer in and look at the clothes I have heaped up on the floor in a jumbled, slightly stinking pile but I cannot actually get to any of them to wash or to wear, and it really is very difficult to be me.

But back to the pants. Which I have! My size 20-mumbles, I realized, were not sitting at my waist, but hanging down around my hips, with the crotch bagging around mid-thigh. And while that is a look that attracts sexy persons to me like very peckish bees to extremely delicious honey, the pant legs were dragging along behind me on the floor like I was some kind skater dude, and also I started the bad habit of yanking my pants up, pulling the waist band out like I was some "After" photograph in a weight loss infomercial, and demanding everyone look at me and how cool I am because MY PANTS THEY ARE SO LARGE! QUICK, STICK IN A WATERMELON!

Since I have little to no self-control, it was clear that the pants would have to go. And they did. Right on my floor! After I went to Old Navy, and looked around. I thought, well, pants are an investment. I need them to cover my butt. I can spent thirty dollars on pants. I guess. But it turns out that Old Navy has a sales rack, and on the sales rack, things were on sale, but also, they were on sale again so that means, like, double sale! Tiny amounts of dollars! As if money was falling from the sky and saying here I am, please take me!

There were no pants that were attractive, but there were jeans. And usually, I hate jeans. But I grabbed the darkest washes I could find, in many denominations and styles, and tried them on, and as I suspected, the flare/bootcut kinds made me look short and ridiculous, because I have short and ridiculous legs and where are my feet? Please help.

I thought the straight-leg cut would make me look round and ridiculous, because my short and ridiculous legs are also quite round, like hams, but lo. I am telling you, lo. I looked good. I looked really, really cute. I felt cute. They were comfortable. They were two sizes smaller than my watermelon pants. They cost, when I went to the counter, 8 dollars. If I never get my closet door open, the cost-per-wear of these things will go into negative numbers! My pants are going to owe me so much money.

alive. also, kicking

2007-01-17T16:40:00.000-08:00

It is amazing how the numbers look so different, on the way down instead of heading up into super terrifying morbid obesity land. 257 is a number to rejoice in, not a number that makes me scared and depressed and feeling like I am failing and a failure. 257 used to be 6 pounds over my third highest weight ever, a number I never thought I'd get heavier than. It is also 14 pounds away from second highest weight ever, a number that made me cry a lot.

It is also exactly 60 pounds lighter than my highest weight ever, the number that made me realize my body was broken, and made me consider weight loss surgery, which is the hardest thing I've ever done.

I have lost 60 pounds so far, and it has been a goddamn struggle every single day. I have hurt in a thousand different ways, from gas and dizziness and weakness and cramps and awesome things like problematic bowel movements. Never in my life did I think I would have problematic bowel movements, or that they'd be the things that made me lie on the floor of the bathroom and kind of vaguely want to die. This has been hard.

It has also made me stupid, forgetful, a crybaby, grumpy, angry, peevish, furious and forgetful.

Vitamins suck, protein sucks, protein shakes suck, exercise sucks, water tastes weird, I hate everything and I want to just stop. I want it all to stop.

The struggle took up most of every breathing moment for the first two weeks, and daily, it's become a smaller and smaller part of the day. For almost an hour, I felt good, and then two hours, and three, and four, and now those hours are in a row, and now there are more of them in a row. Daily, I am surprised when I realize I've hit another snag, and I am reminded that this isn't as easy as it looks and I can't become complacent, and ow, it hurts, oh ow, ow ow. But it gets better and I get better, and here I am, two months later, having lost 60 pounds and looking forward to things getting best.

I'm going to write, as I have time, about the past two months, from the bowel prep to the hospital and the surgery itself, to recovery to now. I want to record these things while I still remember, mostly (since I really am getting stupider every day), and because I think it is helpful and important and because I want to relieve every disgusting moment of it in Technicolor detail, of course. But mostly because it is helpful and important.

Thanks, again – I feel like I am always saying thanks – to everyone who checked in on me and wrote emails and commented and thought about me. It is, as always, immensely appreciated.

but most importantly

2006-11-20T12:07:00.000-08:00

I am stupid to not have added a huge thank you to all of you who wrote me such supportive and kind emails and posted such great comments. They were a huge help, before during and after, and thank you so much for thinking of me.

Ding!

2006-11-19T18:58:00.000-08:00

So, that happened. How was your week?

Oh, ho ho.

I will go into further detail later, in a post to be entitled "Holy Fuck, Think Twice," just in time for the holidays, I think. But to sum up: this is hard. You may go into this thinking it's hard, but I am tough! I am strong like bull! I am no tiny peanut to be eaten by the elephant of pain! Or maybe some other metaphors that make more sense!

But you don't know, man. You don't know until you do it, and it's hard, and it hurts. Morphine is nice, and liquid vicodin, that's pretty sweet, but there is so much that is painful and strange and off-putting and frustrating about this whole experience.

I woke up hurting, and it got better each and every day. But what isn't changing is how tired I am all the time, how frustrating it is to want to go to the corner store and have to go have a lie down when I get back, to pick something up and then remember I'm not supposed to pick anything up and be reminded by that unpleasant stretching feeling in my belly. Showering is exhausting, sitting up is exhausting and lying down is exhausting and I almost cried, the night I finally managed to arrange the pillows in such a way that would let me finally – finally! – sleep on my side. No, I'm lying. I did cry. That's something I do at the drop of a hat, for no good reason.

There is no way I could have gone through this alone – no fucking way. Guy has been incredible. He has done so much for me, and so sweetly and cheerfully and happily that I could cry. And did. Several times, with a pillow over my head while he laughed at me for being silly.

This has been hard and frustrating and exhausting, and getting my protein shakes in and my water in and my vitamins in has been a chore like you wouldn't believe. Who the fuck would think drinking a protein shake was a hard job? It's a hard job. They are nasty like nasty ass in a nasty juice made from nasty. I'm not getting enough protein and I won't get enough protein for awhile, not until I heal some more and can take in more than I currently can.

Also, everything smells like Hospital. My bed and my clean clothes and my living room and my deodorant, none of which smelled like Hospital before I left. I don't know WHY but it is driving me NUTS.

But also: I am walking. I am doing better every day. I am glad to have done this and am waiting impatiently for the weeks to tick by, for things to get easier and easier until this is an ordinary way that I just am. It's coming closer each day and I am strong like bull and not a tiny peanut at all and I have lost 30 pounds, and I already feel lighter.

I woke up on that hospital bed aching and scared and tired, feeling sick and sad, but mostly thinking I can't wait to get started. That, and more morphine, please. Ding!

5, 4, 3, 2

2006-11-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

So it's actually tomorrow, then, for real and true. I had meant to write things down, before it was 14 hours away, but it turns out that it takes a lot of energy to keep it together and tie up loose ends at work and with freelance stuff. There was also my birthday, and Halloween, and a friend came to visit, and suddenly it was too much and I had a little bit of a breakdown.

That was unpleasant. It started last Sunday, and then through most of Monday. I started wondering what the fuck I was doing, and feeling bad and sad and freaked out about the whole thing – not in the manic okayokayokay I have to do everything right now ohmygodohmygod kind of way, but a seriously terrible feeling of shaking, nauseous anxiety.

I made the mistake of being honest with my primary care physician about it, when I went in for my final check up, that Monday morning, and he sat down and said "Well, then you shouldn't do it. It's elective, isn't it? You should just postpone. Until next year."

And that was kind of shocking. And I thought Oh, he is probably right, because he is a doctor, and I am being stupid for doing this, aren't I. And then I kept thinking about what had me scared, and anxious, and upset, and it was that, exactly. That it was so so ridiculously stupid to put myself through major surgery on an elective basis, isn't it. I mean, who the hell do I think I am, doing this for no reason except I want to? What if something happens to me, and then I am hurting everyone who loves me because I decided that elective surgery was a so-great idea? My life is pretty wonderful, and it isn't that bad, being morbidly obese, and maybe someday I'll lose the weight but if I don't, that's okay, and what the hell am I doing?

It was bad. And then I thought wait – selfish? I think I am being selfish? I don't want to end up like my mother in ten years, diabetic and on a CPAP machine, with degenerative joint disease, and that's selfish? I am a low-risk patient. I am not going to do something major like this and fuck it up. I am not doing this on a whim. What the fuck is wrong with me, thinking it's selfish to do something for my health, physically and emotionally? Wow.

So, I got over it. And in the past week, I've been equal parts crazed and excited and tired (quit caffeine. That sucks) and still nervous. Because, well, I'm not stupid.

Now we're at a hotel in San Jose (because my insurance sucks, and would not let me go to CPMC, which is like, a ten minute cab ride away from my house). I am finishing up my three day bowel prep which is supposed to be easier than the normal one-day flush out your system with lye and a scrubbing brush kind of prep that usually happens, but I am finding it sucks a lot. I have not et for three days, and the laxatives made me wildly yack-up sick yesterday, and that was fun, and now today I just want to sleep a lot. Lack of calories, I'm guessing, will do that to you. I have probably lost like, ten pounds, which means my liver will get all small and cute and make my surgery easier. Go me!

Guy, who has been wonderful, has gone out to take a walk on his own. He is more nervous than I am. He has been incredible. My friends have been incredibly supportive and kind – watching my cat and sending me the best emails ever, and just generally being great. You guys, reading this blog, have also been great – thanks so much for you emails and your good luck and your best wishes. Think of me tomorrow morning, 9:30 PST. I'll see you on the other side.

va-roooom

2006-10-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

Oh, holy shit. Do you know how far away my surgery date is? It is practically tomorrow. It's like, an hour and a half from now. The anesthesiologist is currently standing next to me with rolls of nickels in an athletic sock, just waiting for me to stop typing. It has not happened yet, but it will happen any second. Just seconds away! Right now! It is happening right this second, and it does not tickle, believe you me.

Or it only feels like it is happening right now, which explains the knot in my chest which is nervousness. It is actually a whole month away (fine a month AND TWO DAYS) but it feels like it is rushing headlong at me, horns down and bellowing barooooo and ready to flip me into the air and leave me sprawling. Oh, holy shit.

I am moving into the home stretch with preparing – I've got my paperwork for work, uh, paperworked and dropped off at the doctor's office, and I've ordered vitamins and I've, done, uh, stuff. Things. Very important ones. Some of them, all at once, because I am a multitasker. I am sure I am prepared, or mostly prepared. Kind of. I don't feel prepared. I feel manic and like I need to make a list and yet I've made a list but I can't really read it what with the way my eyes are rolling around inside my head, animated by the pure adrenaline being injected directly into my brain by my magic kidneys.

I'm a little crazy right now. But also – excited. So excited. I am reading forums and livejournal communities and email lists and writing down things of note and things to think about and questions to keep asking and things to remember and it is scary as hell and also really cool and I am starting to really believe that I am smart enough and tough enough to go through this, and keep doing it, and do it right, and come through with flying colors, as the kids say. I will keep multitasking with my fingers crossed, anyway.

before

2006-09-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

We took pictures of me last night, front back and side, the way you are supposed to for your very important Record of Weight Loss, and let me tell you something – there is no fucking way I look like that. No way. That is not how I look inside my head. Oh god, I can't believe that's how I look outside my head. You're beautiful, Guy says, and then I kill him dead because for someone in his condition, it is a cruelty to let him go on.

It is kind of horrible, this mound of flesh I have suddenly become (with a pimply chin. why has my skin gone all to hell(er)?) but I am not entirely in despair, because it will not be for long, it will not be for long, it will not be for very much longer. I am exercising every day – every morning, I do a video called "Walk Away the Pounds!" because I am a dork! And two! And three! And walk! And hate! And walk! And hate! And walk! Into! Your house! And kill! Leslie! Fucking! Sansone! You stupid! Fucking! Whore! And walk! And two! And three!

Also I am doing weight watchers, and I have not had candy in like, three weeks? Four weeks? MANY GODDAMN WEEKS. And I am doing well and proud and getting further away from those photos, but not nearly fast enough to make me happy. I wonder if anything will ever make me happy. We'll see.

In the meantime, I also have to register for the hospital, find a way into San Jose (which is the easy part) and find a way home after surgery (which is the part that will suck), find a hotel room, find time to go to the "pre op class" that the hospital has which I don't understand, fill out the short term disability forms that will let me not lose a million dollars when I'm out of work, confirm with HR, confirm with my boss, stock up on the things I will need after surgery (like Hope and Faith and a gun to shoot myself in the head and also protein drinks and vitamins) and the things I need to take with me into the hospital and call the anesthesiology department about the cost of being knocked out cold, knock on wood, and make an appointment for bloodwork and an appointment to see my regular physician to talk about my bloodwork and an appointment with my surgeon to fill out the last parts of paperwork, including the paper that says yes, I know, my head could explode at any time during this surgery and it totally isn't the doctor's fault, because I shouldn't have had an exploding head in the first place, I am so dumb.

And – is that it? I don't think that's it. That's a lot, and I know there's more, and I am so scared, and so excited, and so terrified and elated and apprehensive about the surgery, and what's going to happen after the surgery, from the small things to the larger, life-changing bits. This shit is scary, and it is huge. Like my before photos.

baby steps

2006-09-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

I quit smoking! It has been five weeks. Every one of which has been deeply unpleasant. When I quit smoking (and I have quit smoking many times), I do not ever get to that magical point where people are all evangelical and the smell of cigarettes is just, phew! and ew! and and oh! how could they ever have lived a life full of such poison, rot and stink?

Me, I love smoking. I fucking love it. I will always love it, and it will always love me back. No matter for how long I quit. That is the kind of relationship me and smoking have. We love, we live, we laugh, we get cancer and die – but we die together! And isn't that the important thing? I love you smoking. Wait for me. Stay alive! I will find you! Though probably not.

Quitting smoking was the first step in the whole pre-screening process of processes that come before the major process, with the cutting and chopping and the anesthesia. The next was finding a doctor who would accept my insurance and in return, be accepted by my insurance, and it turns out he exists. Thank you for existing, mr. doctor man.

I went in with Guy for my evaluation and thingums, and I was surprised at how emotional I got, talking about my history of fatness and how I wasn't stupid and my primary care physician says to me "forget weight loss surgery! Just eat less and move more!" as if I am retarded and slow. Like I'm leaving every appointment all "she said I should eat twinkies and float in a vat of pudding! I love weight loss!" As if I have not been trying that for 20 years, up and down and up and down.

Guy was phenomenal and was very interested in the vitamination process, post-surgery. He is making plans about pill boxes with the days of the week and the times of the day, and he is taking off time from work to be around while I am recovering and he is worried for me and proud of me for being brave and he has loved me both fat and thinner and I can't imagine being any luckier.

At the psychologist appointment, the doctor told me I was a very excellent candidate, and he was kind and also supportive and it did not feel as if I were paying him to feel like that. But he asked questions about my relationships and he said – you know they're going to change, right? You know things are going to be different after you lose this weight? It could be good, or it could be bad, but I want you to prepare for it. Your boyfriend might not like you slender; he might not deal well with the attention you get. You might not deal well with the attention you get. Are you prepared for that? I can't imagine things changing; it seems completely impossible. Of course it is possible. Of course I will try to imagine that these things might happen. Forewarned means armed and dangerous.

Oh, this is so much more complicated than I wanted it to be. That does not surprise me, though. Easy way out, my ass.

And after all that, with the waiting and the quitting and the waiting and the talking and the appointmenting, now I have a date for the surgery. I am going in on Tuesday, November 7th. Election day. I elect to be healthy! Hahahaha! Sorry.

I am kind of freaking out, and I can't tell if it is happy EEEEEE or happy OH MY GOD, but from the churning sensation in my gut and the way I am dancing around my desk anyway, I think it might be a little bit of both. Holy, holy shit. I'm doing this. I can't wait to do this.

things as they happen

2006-09-10T18:09:00.000-07:00

The sad thing about not chronicling all the seconds that pass as they are passing right that second is that you forget what you've done and what led from A straight through B and C and D and so on. And it is annoying how things keep happening and everything changes and the earth keeps all swinging around the sun and shit. Slow down! Go back! I would like five minutes to enjoy my waffle and my television programs, thank you.

So what has happened, on the macro level, is that I have gone from simply deciding to have weight loss surgery to believing in it and looking forward to it (though I remain terrified of it, on a purely logical and rational basis, because ow, major surgery). It is something that I have stopped being embarrassed to talk about, and now admit to freely, to various reactions. Most of them have been positive. My mother, though – still haven't told my mother. My mother drives me nuts enough as it is.

In the meantime, before I tell you all about the excitement, adventure, and really wild things, I also want to say that I am very excited to be a guest poster on one of my more favorite sites, Big Fat Deal, with the lovely Monique.

I get to post about my very personal knee-jerk reactions to stories about obesity in the news, and point out cool things and talk about interesting things, and I am really pleased to be a part of it. We'd love you to come say hi, and talk all smart in that way that you do.

the story so far.

2006-07-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

Hi! It’s been awhile. It’s been a busy couple of months. I was finishing up grad school, and working on a thesis, and neglecting my entire house entirely and then I went around the world in a little tugboat and cured cancer. I wrote a first draft, cut off all my hair, bought a car, cleaned my house, cured more cancer, and am probably going to be scheduled for bariatric surgery sometime in October.

Crazy, crazy couple of months.

In between thinking about grad school stuff and trying to write down things that make me sound smart and maintain a relationship and cure a lot of cancer, all I have been doing is thinking about my health, and my body, and the future of my health and the future of my body if things keep going the way they have been, which is a sad future full of doom and plork.

There is a way to articulate this, this conclusion I have come to, how I made my decision and why, but it is difficult to do, in short sentences and pithy paragraphs. And it is very true that if you think surgery is a ridiculous, stupid, short cut kind of asshole move, then there is not a whole lot I can say to change your mind. Amusingly, that is where I was, the day I started thinking about it, and it’s taken five months of researching, and reading, and thinking, and talking to doctors – my own, and the surgeons who do this kind of thing, to figure out if I really wanted to do this to myself.

It has been difficult and frustrating, and kind of crazy and enlightening and amazing and heartbreaking – talking to people who have gone through surgery, and reading about it, and talking to the doctors who have watched their patients for five or more years and how their lives have changed. Thinking about my own life, and my history of weight loss which is more of a history of weight gain, and writing pages and pages and pages arguing with myself just like a crazy person.

In the end, it turns out that that as much as I want to, I can’t do this alone. I am so tired of working hard and having everything go to shit over and over again. I am tired of feeling bad about myself for failing, and I am tired of failing. And I am so extremely tired of letting that failure feel like it consumes my whole life.

Surgery is not a magic cure – I am going to have the same issues going into the operating room as I do now. They do not, as the patients on one surgery group I read are fond of saying, operate on your head. It’s a weight loss tool, is how they think about it, and I’m still going to have to do all that work – the exercise, the dieting, the watching what I eat for the rest of my life, but the difference is that it will work. It will stick. Stick! Like I threw paint against the wall, instead of magic markers and haddocks.

This is what it boils down to: I would not do it if I didn’t really believe in the work that I’m going to have to do and the non-magicalness of the whole thing - I am pretty good at recognizing when I am bullshitting myself, and I don’t think I’m bullshitting. I am ready to do this, and accept the risks that I know are inherent. For me - it is worth it, I think, to take that risk.

And I think what I’m doing here is justifying myself, which I did not plan to do. This is what I am doing, and those are the reasons I am doing it, and I’m doing it now, while I am still
relatively healthy and young, and still devastatingly attractive.

So I went in several months ago for an initial consultation, while I was still deciding – I figured there would be insurance issues, and I would rather have everything underway while I was deciding and be able to turn down my approval, ultimately, if that is what I chose to do, rather than making up my mind and then having to wait a year. I got denied, and then took awhile to decide whether to appeal, or abandon the whole thing. I went to a patient support meeting, and talked to the people who were post-op, all of whom were ricocheting off the walls, delighted with life and full of energy and glowing and thrilled, and I went home and wrote an appeal letter. And then this afternoon, I got my letter of medical necessity, and I sat down, and made the decision to do this.

There are still hoops – I have to get the doctor I’ve chosen to be accepted as my physician, and I have a battery of tests to go through, and I have to quit smoking (I don’t want to quit smoking). There is my supervisor to sit down with and discuss when is best to be away from work, and for how long she can spare me, and I have been exercising but I want to start weight lifting now to strengthen my body and minimize the muscle loss, I hope, and I want to start cutting back the wine with dinner, because oh, I will miss that, and it is better to tear the band aid off slowly, slowly than all at once, motherfuckingow, and I want to prepare myself mentally like some kind of fancy kung fu master, kapowie kazing, and I want to remember the person I am now, who I like, and make promises to not forget that I became the person I am because I have spent my whole life being overweight and that is something to not ever lose sight of.

I also have to work on not being completely fucking terrified of major surgery, and curing some more cancer.

comedy

2006-05-09T15:22:00.000-07:00

If I am ready to consider something as major as major surgery, then I am ready to lose weight. I did not intend to spend the time between now and my consultation, or between the consultation and possibly-surgery lying around waiting for the trucks filled with butter to come hose me down.

If I do do this, I am going to go into it as ready as possible, start developing an exercise plan which is a good habit, a weight lifting plan so's I got some muscle tone that hopefully will not be washed away in a gush of weight loss, start working on thinking about good choices now, rather than be gobsmacked by the hey, wow, can't eat candy what?

So that I am in a good place, if I do go and do this, and if I don't? I have already started on the road to being healthy again. Like I said, I am pretty sure I'm ready.

Last night, before all the food in the fridge heaved and collapsed into sticky dust, I decided to start by making a good dinner. A chicken stir fry. I spent a long time chopping the vegetables that were not gooey and digging out the pan and de-fatting the chicken breasts and cutting them up and I pulled out the extra virgin olive oil and poured a tablespoon in and turned the knob on the stove, and it went click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click -

Etcetera. No flame. No pilot light. No gas going in, no gas going out, no idea what's going on, except that my stove's broke! PG&E are coming. Evenutally. I ate peanut butter & jelly. Which, you know, is better than General Tso's. But still.

the deal

2006-05-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

I post dramatically about major surgery, and then I go away. That's awesome. I'm sorry.

So this is the deal – I spent the whole day researching and obsessing about it and wondering and worrying and thinking and deciding that this was the greatest idea that any one has ever had in the history of ideas and I might have even spent some time on the Anthropologie website, picking out my new wardrobe and also planning my plastic surgeries and accompanying tattoos to cover the scars. That's how gonzo I was about the whole thing. That is how, sometimes, I get. It is a personality issue, I think.

Then, the next morning, I woke up, and among my top five thoughts (which included "fuck you, dayball," "get off my face, cat," and "hello I love you shower you make nice hot water go down woosh," and "COFFEE RULES") was "Holy shit, major fucking surgery? What the hell was I thinking?"

The whole idea made me feel nauseated and amazed that it would have ever occurred to me as a real thing that I would really do to my actual, real body which is made of organs that are whole and functioning, if a little kind of fat. Wow, I said. I'm stupid! And I picked up the book Volumetrics, which was highly recommended, by a crazy-smart friend of mine who happens to study obesity, as the only scientifically sound diet and nutrition program that she could recommend whole-heartedly.

She has, of course, mentioned it several times over the course of our friendship -- not to me, and not in a pushy kind of hey, have you thought about a diet? way, because that is not how she is like – but it always sounded much too boring to me. Eat healthily, and make choices that keep you more full and satisfied over choices that are filled with empty calories? S-nooooore!

But I decided that the longing for weight-loss surgery was clearly a sign that I needed to do something, and was even ready to do it, so I cancelled my consultation appointment at the surgeon's office, and read the Volumetrics book avidly, made notes and a grocery list, and filled up my fridge with good foods that are good for me and filling and delicious, and they have been sitting in the fridge ever since, because when the fuck did I think I would have time to actually cook? I am in grad school, in my last semester, with two classes and final projects and homeworks and a book to be writing and a job at a desk and a freelance job on the couch, and my food, rotting quietly in the fridge. Fuck.

It really is a great book. It's sensible and comforting in its sensibleness and sensibility, too. It is smart and correct and if I were a better person, there too would I be, sensibly losing a pound a week and always feeling full and satisfied. Maybe that's what I'll do someday, I thought to myself.

In the meantime, I have been walking when I can, and not eating candy (except when I nervously and in the fashion of PMS inhale three glasses of wine and then eat an entire lump-of-chocolate wedding favor in a couple of bites) and I keep feeling insanely tired and run-down and miserable in my body and it hurts to walk (which kills me, because I've always been a walker) and it hurts to breathe and embarrassing, humiliating things suddenly start to happen, to your body, and there are things that suddenly become embarrassingly and humiliatingly hard, when you are a size. And these are things that make you hate yourself and your body, and be more sad than you are, and people to whom I had mentioned the possibility of surgery asked me how the consultation went and I started thinking about it again.

I did some more research – calm, considered research, not fueled by the insane, exciting idea that I would be "magically" thin and boom, all my problems would be solved. I made out lists of positives and negatives. I read forums about side effects and the way you have to live the rest of your life, after weight-loss surgery, and I made some more long lists, thinking hard about whether I'd be willing to live with those side effects and restrictions.

I spent a lot of time reading weight loss surgery blogs – I read the entire archives of every blog I could find, from the morons who wrote things about surgery being magic, and how they had finally managed to eat a whole pie and yet they still lost three pounds this week!!!!1! and the smart, cute as a goddamn button, sensible and basically awesome people who went into the business knowing what it entailed, and took it seriously, who knew what changes they had to make and why and did their damnedest to live the right way and make some serious adjustments to their habits, eating and moving, physically and psychologically. I learned what you can do and might do and what you should do and could do, and that the surgery isn't magic and it isn't a miracle cure, and that the astonished, proud, amazed looks on these women's faces in their six-months-out photos is just fantastic.

And I learned that I have exhausted all my internal resources – that I know what I need to do to lose weight, that I know it's calories in versus calories out, but that I can't do it. That I would do it if I could. I do not think I am lazy, or stupid, or pathetic, or self-sabotaging. That if it was that easy for me, I would be healthy and slim and a crazy tri athelete. There is something going on with me that I have never, in years of therapy – if it were as easy as getting therapy for my issues, I would be healthy, and slim, and a quadrathelete – figured out what food issues I have got and what to do about them that will work.

And I learned that I would happily, gratefully welcome an outside resource, an additional control. That I think – I am pretty sure – that not only would I be willing to work with my body in order to change it for the better, that I think I could do it, if I had the kind of incentive that is absolutely concrete, the help that this would offer me.

And I found out, after making list after list – and this was news to me – that I would rather spend the rest of my life at a healthy weight, dealing with food in a whole new and difficult way, and dealing with the possible physical side effects, than spend the rest of my life at this weight – because it is pretty clear to me that going on as I am, I will always be fat – dealing with the physical, emotional and psychological side-effects, all of which hurt so very fucking much, and all of which are killing me in their own special ways.

At the end of it, I had pages and pages of lists, and talking-to-myself writing, hours and days and weeks of research, and another appointment for a consultation, and a pretty good idea of what my ultimate decision is going to be.

But – and this is the important part – I haven't, yet, made the decision. I am not going to do that until I go through the ninety year consultation process and talk to people I trust and give myself some real time to sit with this idea, to let it sink in that it is permanent, and would be real. To allow myself some room to be one hundred percent flinchingly honest about my chances. The whole thing is scary and huge and when I said I was pretty sure what my decision was going to be – I lied. I don't know. But I would appreciate some luck, if you've got any to spare.

irreversible steps

2006-03-20T11:34:00.000-08:00

Already, I'm imagining how I am going to be, a year from now, and I haven't even totally decided that that's what I want to do, take such a major, irreversible step, I haven't gone to a consultation appointment -- I haven't even made up my mind if I'm going to that appointment. But I am thinking about how, a year from now, I will fit into Guy's sweatshirts, on a rainy, miserable day like this, without feeling like a crazed sausage, be able to walk up the hill from the bus without wanting to cry, be able to get the tattoo on my shoulder that won't look ridiculous on such a fat arm, be able to --

Fill in the blank here, with your own secret wish. You can fill in the blank with your own vision of how things will be when the weight is finally gone, and for good – you know exactly what it is I'm talking about, those overwhelmingly hopeful feelings you get, when you start again, when you think that this time, you've found a solution, and it is the solution, and you are proud and happy and confident.

I am not so proud and happy and confident, and I haven't even made the decision yet, but I can't stop having the fantasy.

Yesterday, I stumbled on this website, for a type of weight loss surgery I had never heard of. Weight loss surgery, to me, sounds like giving up, and dangerous and frightening, and dumping. It sounded like life-long deprivation and scariness and risks I would never dream of taking.

This surgery, the duodenal switch, is apparently different. I will let you read about the specifics yourself, but the basic breakdown is that it seems to be the most long-term successful of all the types of surgery, with the fewest side effects. I spent all day reading about, hours and hours researching, fascinated, and intrigued, and increasingly interested and at the end of the day, when I closed the browser, I thought holy shit, I want to do this.

Holy shit, what is wrong with me?

It looks like the easy solution I have cried about wanting, the problem-solving magic technique that I have begged for, in the middle of an hours-long session of self-loathing and self-pity and misery, after a day of clothing shopping or another failed day of a diet or one of those awful, startling moments when you catch a glimpse of yourself in a photo or a shop window and realize what it is you really look like, and are reminded why it is you find it so easy to forget, and hard to remember why any one loves you, looking the way you do.

It looks like the easy solution, and so I am deeply suspicious, and fully cognizant of the drawbacks, which sound awful, the fact that it is major surgery and involves intense pain and dead-serious risk and danger and dangerous, painful recovery and money, a whole lot of money, and the fact that I want it and I wish for it with all my heart even while I remain completely, totally unsure, and a little bit ashamed – surgery versus will power and strength, it seems to me.

I am ashamed to be so lacking, to feel like I could use such drastic help. I could use such drastic help. Do I need such drastic help? I don't know.

But I made a consultation appointment - just a consultation - with a surgeon in my city who has a very good reputation, and I will go to the support meeting, and I suppose, by next week, I will know for sure.

And if you have any experience with weight loss surgery, good or bad, will let me know in the comments, please? Thanks.

moving (on over)

2006-02-21T15:02:00.000-08:00

Hallo! I do not know how fat I am! I am sure it is pretty fat, but right now, I do not care. But this is not the ordinary not really caring – this is me pretty much staying on track and getting some exercise and not really thinking, too hard, about food and the business, because I have been moving. It is refreshing to have a stress that is different than the usual kind of stress. It easy to talk yourself out of panic and worry when you remember that you're doing this to yourself, until you get really mad at yourself for doing that to yourself, and what were you thinking and holy crap, why didn't anyone ever punch you in the face, dude, because you are cruising for a bruising, that's right, I said it, and then suddenly you're face down in a pie.

The awesome thing about moving is that there is no pie! And there is no time for eating, and no time for breathing and no time for anything, and you have to steal thirty seconds out of the day in order to feel sorry for yourself. That is my new special fancy Not Fat No More Diet with a TM at the end of it – Move Your Way to Not Fatness(TM)! If you move far away enough, the fat won't find you! Fat has a very poor sense of direction, I swear. My credentials are that I am super awesome. Send checks now!

So the other good thing about moving is that I am out of a Bad Neighborhood (which I had always secretly loved, until the squatters moved in with their crack and their hopped up on goofballsness) and into a Good Neighborhood (with an unfair percentage of restaurants that I'm really, really fond of) , and the Good Neighborhood has got (besides an unfair percentage of restaurants which, I might have mentioned, I'm really, really fond of) this proximal kind of thing to the park going on. The Park, actually. THE PARK.

I have begun to walk through THE PARK to work every morning, in the sunshine and the fresh air, listening to the birds tweet and enjoying the bounty of nature and construction and traffic, and I arrive at my desk flushed and deeply unhappy, and yet pretty damn proud of myself, because I have walked to work, and now I can lie down for the rest of the day and maybe roll around in a little bit in marinara.

I have got great plans in the works about walking to THE PARK every weekend and rolling around in not marinara, but grass and nature and trees, if I can work out a way to do that and not find myself knee deep in dog stuff. I have even decided that I can walk to the beach, and won't that be a party? Though I predict I will start to walk to the beach and then stop at a waffle house instead, because the beach is rather farther from me than THE PARK is.

So I'm doing okay. Except for one really bad and awful day where I turned to Guy and said you know what? I am having a fucking giant cookie and he looked at me and said I will buy you that cookie, I have been stuck like glue to my Opti-Medi-Science-Fast, and while I have not noticed any particular slimmingness going on, I am sure that when I finally unearth the box my scale might possibly be in and then get around to unpacking it and then work up the courage to stand on it, I will be very surprised. I am hoping it will be pleasantly.

wagons

2006-01-23T18:19:00.000-08:00

Here is a secret: if I stop writing here for months at a time, it probably means that I am dead. Either dead, or have fallen off the wagon so spectacularly, and with such an earth-rattling thud, that I wish I were dead, because a life in which eating Twinkies is the only way to cure pain is no life at all.

So I’m not dead. Logic leads you to believe the thing about the earth-rattling and the wishing I were dead, and logic is your friend, my friend. It was – well, I’m not going to say it was stupid to try and go on a diet around Christmas and before big trips in which eating will be a central feature, because it could have worked if I were a different kind of person.

But I am not that person, and it didn’t work, and I sat down and dangled one foot out the back, and then dangled the other foot out, and let my feet sort of drag along the road as the wagon laboriously trudged up mount not fat no more, and then suddenly, the wagon was miles away and then vanished in the distance and there I was, rolling around naked in a puddle of chocolate, and I must have just slipped, woops.

Yeah, woops, my pants don’t fit and I feel like hell! Don’t I feel like a silly asshole!

Logic, our old friend, tells us that I could have gone right back into the diet and the health and the things directly after the holidays with food in were over, but I kept pushing it forward a bit – there was a party coming up, or a lunch, or a dinner, or a thing, and I’ll start right after, and it was a story that is familiar in all kinds of ways, most of them in that place in your stomach where you feel kind of sick and sort of sad, where knots go to die.

My most recent excuse, and the reason I had pasta with mushroom sauce for lunch this afternoon, is that we are going to the Fancy Food Show and how can I be a no-eating Optifast loser when there is free cheese to be had? Free delicious cheese! And, I hear, underpants. Why they’re giving away underpants at a food sho – oh. Wait. Never mind. Ew. I mean, probably not really, but ew anyway. Thanks, brain!

It is funny how the further I push away the starting date, the more I start to slip. At first it was just plain old not doing Optifast, but eating okay. Then it was eating less okay. Then it was eating so un-okay that I was getting sugar rushes at 9:30 in the morning, and that is not bright. And then it was so the most un-okay that I started to get a little horrified at myself.

No one with any respect for themselves should eat the way I’ve been eating.

Excuse me. I need to write that again.

No one, with any respect for themselves, should eat the way I’ve been eating.

It is hilarious to me that I am so astounded by this revelation. It is hilarious that as astounded and touched as I am by this brand-new way of thinking, I know that I am still not going to restart my diet until after the fancy food show. Does cheese have that great a hold on me? It is a mystery.

Well, not really.

The difference may be that while I was half-heartedly thinking I could sort of maybe restart perhaps after the show, could be, with the likelihood of me finding some other reason to push it off one more time at or near about 100 percent, I am pretty sure I will manage to do something bright like actually go through with it this time. Restart, stick to, cut the shit, show some respect like a grownup woman with an irreplaceable body and plenty-replaceable kit kats that do not have to be all eaten at once because they’re not going anywhere, okay?

Okay.

So you know that if I don’t write again for several or nine months, I should be ashamed of myself. Please feel free to be ashamed of me too.

i am made from artificial preservatives and sweetners

2005-11-30T11:37:00.000-08:00

"Splenda" would make a really great name for a dog, wouldn't it? Either a dog, or a first-born. Tumor.

aftermath

2005-11-27T15:48:00.000-08:00

The day before Thanksgiving, I weighed in, and lost a comparatively disappointing three pounds, which adds up to a not very disappointing 19 pounds total all together, which continues to be a big number, especially for three whole weeks, but not feel like a very big number at all.

Then I went to Thanksgiving dinner, and luckily, the turkey turned out poorly, so I was able to avoid putting my head inside it and eating my way out, but the side dishes were tasty, and I ate bits of those, and some cheese and crackers, and drank rather more than I should have (wine is good! champagne, it goes to your head! whiskey, I missed you) and did not feel too full at all, though I did not like having all that alcohol. Well, that's a lie. Of course I loved all that alcohol. I just didn't like that I had drank it, and it had been so easy to hold out my glass again.

But I would walk on the beach, and it would be okay! Strolling totally counteracts the effects of calories on the ass. Except that our cooking adventures sort of went awry, so that we didn't sit down until pretty late, and the walk on the beach didn't so much happen.

After a long day of cooking and drinking and cheese noshing, I didn't actually manage to eat that much dessert, either – not even of my big beautiful chocolate cake which takes several pounds of bittersweet chocolate and a lot of love - and to make up for it, Guy brought me a slice in bed the next morning, along with a cup of coffee with real live sugar in it. Oh, sugar.

So I started the day with cake, and continued it at lunchtime with pizza, and polished it off with a dinner full of Chinese food and a dessert of the leftover chocolate from my cake-baking adventure, and I looked at the detritus and it was not good, and I did not feel so great. Which was a shock! and I was, as you can imagine, totally stunned.

I avoided the scale very hard, but I imagined I could feel my pants constricting, wrapping around my waist and beginning to creep up my torso, where it would take a flying leap and wind itself around my neck and strangle me. And the headline will read "Fat Lady Killed By Stupid Pants."

Stupid pants.

Then I got up the next morning and said okay, fine, and I weighed myself, and my pants lied, because I had only gained two pounds. But – two pounds. Two pounds suck.

And so – here is where the faint strains of triumphant music begin to softly swell – I put pants on and I made a damn shake and I walked down to the pier, where I bought flowers. And that is about a mile and a half, rock on.

And then I went back home, and had a goddamn shake, and went back out and walked most of the way to my eyebrow grooming appointment, and that was close to two miles and then I went home and furiously did not eat any food except science food, and then today I walked to work which is a little under two miles and I have furiously only eaten science food and I will be damned if I have continued to keep these two pounds, or any of the friends of the two pounds who can kiss my fat ass goodbye. Ask me how I feel next week, though, when I go to Chicago for the weekend.

three weeks. counting.

2005-11-22T12:56:00.001-08:00

It's been three weeks, now. I have officially lost 16 pounds, and tomorrow, I find out what my third week total is.

16 pounds seems like kind of a miracle. Most of the time, I don't feel appreciably different, or changed, but then I notice that my jeans are fitting me again, not leaving behind furrows along my waist when I peel them off at the end of the day, or I look in the mirror and see that my neck is less puffy, when a friend tells me that she can tell that my face is thinner.

And when I think about it – 16 pounds is a lot of pounds. That's several babies, or a ham, or several babies sitting on a ham, perched on a bucket of chicken and juggling pool balls. 16 pounds is a significant amount of weight, and something to be proud about – sometimes it is easy to just focus on my little pre-set meals of depressing science, and sometimes it takes a lot of goddamn discipline, to continue to "eat" this way, to smile and lie politely that you are not at all hungry but thank you for offering a taste of your delicious pecan pie.

But most of the time, it is a little depressing that a number of babies worth of weight is such a drop in the bucket for me. 16 pounds on most people is super-significant, and changes the entire shape of their body. On me, it's a little face poofiness and some jeans. Then, I get impatient. Okay, 16 pounds isn't enough. When do I get to 30, and 50, and 75? Why is this taking so fucking long? I thought this was a fucking miracle diet of the future! Where is science when I need it? Damn you, science. I best wake up Giselle tomorrow morning, or you'll be hearing from my lawyer.

So it's going quickly, and it's not going quickly enough, and days when I think that I will lie down and die if I have to eat another goddamn meal out of a little white packet are days that never end, and days in which the months loom up, dark and forbidding and studded with chocolate chips, streams of molten gravy pouring down and pooling into whirlpools of hate that form faces which wail "turn back! turn back! Super size your extra value meal!" and then I cry and cry and cry at the thought, and drink another stupid shake and try not to think about how long I'll be drinking stupid shakes, those are the longest days of all.

This has all made me long like a crazy person for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has never, ironically, been my favorite holiday. It's very nice to get together with people and share a meal and give thanks and put your face in a pie, but turkey and its accompanying gang members have never been my thing, because I do have a little discernment when it comes to food, you know. I'm not a whore. Just maybe a little loose and at the ready when Dr. Drakes and his Army of Cakes comes to town.

Yet waiting for this Thanksgiving is going to kill me. In conjunction with my doctor, we have approved a brief removal of myself from the plan and a moderate consumption of Thanksgiving foods, provided I do smart things like eat moderately and not put my face in a pie. But ha, I have her fooled there – I am making a cake! Which I am totally putting my face into.

No, I know. I don't want to have a gallbladder fit, or a heart attack, or die from chocolate overload, which actually sounds kind of nice, but I have too many Christmas presents yet to make, so no dying for me. I am thinking about it kind of obsessively, what I'm going to do. Trying to go in with a plan and a determination – small tastes of things, small plate, one glass of wine, no, thank you to seconds, a walk on the beach after we eat. Staying in control. God help me.

If it is a thing that you celebrate, Happy Thanksgiving! And if not, have a lovely weekend.

steps two through two thousand

2005-11-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

The picture, that was the first step. And then the doctor called, and the blood work was not great, I continued to feel like very tired hell, and I came to the realization that the reason I have been so uncomfortable wearing high heels, lately (lately!) and my shoes have gotten so strangely tight is not just because my goddamn feet are fat, too (though I bet they are), but I’ve been balancing several hundreds pounds upon them, and that’s too way much weight to put on two small feet. I can’t wear heels because I’m too fat. That’s depressing.

As if the whole thing isn’t depressing. But you know, sometimes it’s the smaller things that catch you up and tip you over and send you sprawling. At which point the ground shakes, because you are so fat. By “you” I mean “me,” of course.

So I talked to the doctor, and she referred me to the liquid diet people, and I have started drinking delicious chocolate shakes and chowing down on munchy delicious granola bars of miracle science.

I figured that any time I talked about it, it would be “I’m miserable!” and “Oh, I am so hungry!” and “Oh, can I please just die, now, because this is fucking unfair.”

But you know, I wouldn’t need to be doing this shit if I hadn’t gotten to this point in the first place, eh? Personal responsibility is very important, you know. And also it sucks.

It hasn’t been that bad though – no, seriously. It hasn’t really made me want to die, even the first three days. I’m not, of course, totally thrilled, and I miss going out for a drink after work, but it has been such an amazing relief to not have to think about food beyond remembering to “eat” every two hours, and to generally keep track of how many little packets I have torn open.

You’d think all I would be able to do is think about food and be depressed, but already, I have energy and I am excited and I am putting all my big fat eggs into one tiny little basket, calculating how much weight I will lose by this date, and this date, and this date and doing little dances of soon to be skinny glee.

I don’t expect it to remain easy. I have to start exercising serious-like after the first week, and start a weight lifting regimen to make sure I minimize muscle loss and metabolism slow-down, and I haven’t been doing it for very long or have had any serious temptation, or been in the midst of ferocious doom PMS or been away from home and my blender, where it is generally easy to keep things under control.

And then, of course, the holidays are coming. They are delicious meaty holidays full of food piles, and drinking delicious things, some (or possibly most) of which are alcoholic. This isn’t going to be a cakewalk, so to speak. It is, in fact, going to suck.

Right now I am hoping for my liking of exercise to kick in (I do! I really do like to kick my own ass, when I am not so desperately out of shape that it hurts unbearably) and hoping I lose enough weight, before it gets really hard, to feel inspired. Or maybe I will even surprise myself and discover resources and toughness and do this thing right, and see it to the end.

before and after

2005-11-06T01:15:00.000-08:00

A few weekends ago, I went to that big conference I had so crazily swore I would lose weight in time for – the one at which I would be super hot and super svelte and get to a point with my body that I could minimize the panic and the fear that comes from standing up in front of people and being expected to say smart things. I figured removing the fat would remove at least a little bit of my own self-consciousness, and, quite frankly, give myself one less thing to be criticized for, if that makes any sense.

It was a great plan, and it went okay for awhile, but I don’t know. I can’t reconstruct it for you. I can’t reconstruct it for myself, even. Somehow I ended up gaining another couple handfuls of pounds (somehow. as if I woke up one morning to find them sitting on my chest and sucking my breath, like a cat. a really fat cat.) and I went to the conference fat. Really fat, in fact. Is that irony? It could be irony.

The conference went well, despite not feeling at all confident about how I looked – I was an award winner kind of person, and everyone was extraordinarily kind and I felt kind of good and more and more comfortable, but never entirely, because I never can be, when I am porky.

I seem to have relaxed enough to allow pictures of me to be taken. Smile! they said, and Guy put his arm around me and we smiled for the camera and I smiled at other cameras and I made funny faces, as I tend to do, and I didn’t think about the end results, until I got an email from the really kind photographer, who said “I thought you’d want to see these great photos of you guys!” and I downloaded the photos and I opened them and then I closed them immediately, because it was, frankly, just alarming.

Guy looked adorable, as he frequently does, and we were all cuddly and it was a cute picture. If you cut me right out. Or if you didn’t cut me out, if you could maybe find me a neck, that would be okay, because this vision of me as a perfectly spherical woman wearing a muffler of fat? It’s fucking nightmare fuel.

At first I was kind of really unhappy to have photographic evidence of Me as Neck-Free Whale, but then I become conscious of the possibilities. After I finished crying. Tearfully I snuffled, and blew my nose on a butter wrapper, and realized that now I had the picture I could provide to the editors of Redbook for my spectacular Before and After story! Entitled “Journey Though the Valley of the Pork: One Woman’s Dramatic Weight Loss Odyssey.”

Or, you know, it can be a before picture. It can remind me where I am now, and what I don’t want to be, and what I will never be again. That, too. It is remarkable, sometimes, what it takes to get through to your own head.

happy halloween!

2005-10-31T07:05:00.000-08:00

Q: What's a zombie's favorite kind of ice cream?

A: BRAAAAINS!

Q: Why did the zombie cross the road?

A: BRAAAAAAAAINS!

Q: How many zombies does it take to change a light bulb?

A: BRAAAAAAAINS!

Q: What, to a zombie, is the important distinction between existence and essence?
A: BRAAAAAINNNNS!

Q: What's a zombie's favorite ancient Greek playwright?

A: BRAAAAAAAAAAAINNNS!

A priest, a rabbi and a zombie walk into a bar. The priest orders a gin and tonic. The rabbi orders a rum and coke. The zombie says "BRAAAAAINS!!!"

Lady Astor: If I were your wife, Sir Winston, I'd poison your tea!
Zombie Winston Churchill: BRAAAAIINS!

Knock knock!
Who's there?
BRAAAIIINS!
"Braaaaiiiins" who?
BRAAAAIIINS!
Oh no, a zombie!
BRAAAAINS!
Help! I'm being devoured by a zombie!
BRAAAIINS!

p.s. candy!

thinking about it

2005-10-06T21:52:00.000-07:00

So I am the fattest fatty who ever lived in Fat Town, a very nice place where chicken comes in buckets, and hot, fresh lard spills from the fountain in the middle of town, where all the plorkers come to frolic naked in the breeze, lubing their folds and lolling fleshily in the chocolate flowered lawn. I have medical proof. Of my fatness, not of Fat Town. Archaeologists have not yet uncovered Fat Town.

I went to the doctor, a couple of days ago, because I have been feeling sluggish and miserable and generally wretched. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to explain to the nurse who is making your appointment that you want to see the doctor about being fat – because that is what I was sure my problem was. Is. Hello, I’m fat. Is this true? I am not sure what I wanted from my doctor. Confirmation? The mirror is kind of my confessional, there. The scale, too. But it was starting to scare me, the way I could feel like I wasn’t eating excessively, outrageously, disgustingly, but that I continue to gain weight at a pace I’ve never done before.

I went in to get diagnosed as fat, but I was looking for a cause. My thyroid? Bad juju? Someone with a voodoo doll and a stick of butter? Something was going on, I thought. I kind of hoped. Though I had a feeling that maybe it was me – because isn’t that the way you always feel? Like no matter what, it’s your fault, and it’s going to always be your fault. In a way that is true. Your body is your responsibility. But I couldn’t tell where my responsibility was going awry.

She took blood, and checked my blood pressure and looked concerned. No doctor has ever been before concerned about my blood pressure – I have always been a remarkably healthy fat person. But it’s gone up. And we talked about my fatigue, and she said she didn’t want to make any guesses until she got my bloodwork back, but she laid out some options for me.

She said she could tell I was mentally and physically exhausted, that it was taking a toll on me, and that she had some ideas. We talked about weight watchers and Atkins, and we talked about South Beach. We talked about lap band surgery and bariatric surgery, and medical fasts, and I cried, a little bit, and she was very kind.

I don’t want surgery, but god, the idea of it is kind of a thrill. All your problems gone with a little intestinal twister, or the throttling of your stomach. Boom, thirty pounds gone in a week.

I told her I was tired of food, and we talked about Optifast and she said, maybe, that she could prescribe it for me, maybe it could get covered by insurance. A liquid diet to get me out of the scary sluggish zone, for a couple of months, maybe. Knock me out of this terrible feeling quickly, and get me back to where I feel like I can breathe and move again. It would be a struggle, shifting from the diet and back into food, but the transition, if I was careful, wouldn’t be so bad, if I was lifting weights, in an exercise habit.

I’m thinking about it. God, the idea of leaving this weight behind, and fast, breaking into a run, so to speak, is a tempting one. I am tired of food, and worrying about food, and being scared that everything I put in my mouth is going to doom me in some way.

I am also thinking about the idea of not being able to eat for a month or two, not being able to drink anything but shakes that probably taste like living doom (though the doctor tells me they’re actually quite tasty) and having to go to the doctor every week, spending the money, starving myself a little, being miserable. Finding message boards full of people talking about how they drank all their shakes and only had a little tiny bit of ham and also a pie for dinner, why aren’t they loosing wate????? – the idea is kind of depressing and miserable in a spiritual way.

But then, I’m miserable now. Food doesn’t bring me any kind of joy, any more. Being hungry sounds like a better deal than being fat. I’m thinking about it.

We’ll see what the results of my blood test say. Maybe I am excitingly thyroidic and a pill will solve everything. Maybe I have a rare and elusive fat disease that can be cured by the application of hot compresses and a special herbal tea. Maybe I will wake up one morning and my fat will have leaked out of me via a small puncture wound in my thigh, and it is a little gross to be lying in a bed full of a hundred pounds of grease, but don’t I look fucking hot? Maybe I will wake up and find out I’m a supermodel having a nightmare. In the mean time, I am thinking about it.

metalicious: tastes like twinkies

2005-09-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

I think I've mentioned before that I've written on the internet elsewhere and elsehow, for many years in a row, in some cases, though not very consistently. Which is so totally unlike me, right? Right. I wrote what in the Olden Days we called an Online Journal. Online journals had journalcons and gatherings and meetups, and it was all very exciting, and there was a sense of community and back and forth linkage that was frankly just embarrassing.

But the online journaling community has, in the face of the Blog Revolution (and please believe that I'm very tempted to conflate that into some kind of exciting catchphrase like "Blogovution!" or Revblogution! or something like that, but I wouldn't do that to you, and also it has probably already been done, at least twice) and there isn't so much a community any more and everyone's got blogs anyway, and I went and got one, and another one, and maybe another, and I've got this one too, now, though I still really hate the word blog. BLOG. BLOG. BLOG.

No, I still hate it. Which is very 2004 of me, I know.

So I have been writing away online and to handfuls of people and it has been very nice. It is always very nice when someone wants to read the things you are writing, and I've always been really grateful to the people who say nice things, and I've even met people who are important parts of my life through these things and I have been amazed by the kindness of people and their generosity and hearts and how much some people suck, but how most people rule.

But then I started a non-professional weight loss blog, and I am just floored by the sense of community and rooting-for-ness and kindness and collaborative like-feelingness there is in this whole scene. I am blown away by all the comments to my last entry, the supportive stuff you guys have said and the emails I've gotten and it is just astonishing and pretty fucking amazing and really, really cool. I wanted to say thank you for that. Group cheer! Woo! Fuck yeah.

Now I need a twinkie to dry my happy tears.

Anyway, I also wanted to point out that there were some really interesting and very smart comments on the entry, regarding the amateur/professional blog dichotomy.

Mr. Living La Vida Lo Carb was very kind and clarified that he was not intending to criticize my site, but to point out that this is not a "typical" weight-loss blog, by Sally Squires definition, but I think that is not quite what I was trying to say. This is a typical weight loss blog, in the sense that it is a record of a struggle with weight and weight issues and food and trying to lose it – the weight, not the food, though I suspect that losing the food would go a long way towards losing the weight – and it is a very personal account. I think these personal blogs outnumber the more magazine-like ones, like Skinny Daily Post, which generally hold to a higher, professional – I love that word – standard and generally have a kind of huge audience. I think that makes the more pedestrian, personal ones, which I personally love a great deal, more far more "typical."

But I appreciate Mr. Lo's explanation of his intent, and I see what he's getting at.

Dietgirl has got exactly what I meant, and more:

i dunno about that doctor guy in the article. i think the whole point about diet blogs is reading about other people's experiences, not to find a particular diet to follow. we all know what to do, after all. it's more about looking for someone to relate to.

i think these articles usually miss the point of what it's all about, but then again it's quite hard to capture something as messy and huge and varied as blogging in an article, whether it's mommie blogs or fat blogs or cat blogs.

And you know, I bet the parent blogs get a similar sort of audience and community going on – there is something about having a specific topic, and being passionate about that specific topic that engenders that kind of community spirit, that in-it-togetherness that I was going on about incoherently, above.

CAD Monkey made me cackle when she said "Here's to living la vida sofa!!"
Hee.

And my girl Annalisa articulates it precisely:

It always makes me laugh when people who don't get the blogging community (of which I have been a part since 1997) write articles about it in large publications.

Frankly, I thought her article was pretty lame, and she really missed the point about why people choose to write about their struggle with weight, in such a public way, online.

Dr Hill said, "These blogs are generally about helping people restrict certain foods to lose weight," he said. "I worry that in reading a personal story people will think this strategy works for everyone, and that's rarely the case."

I don't think any of the so-called weight loss blogs I have read attempt to give advice about the subject of losing weight, at least not intentionally. People are documenting their journey, and that's it. It's no different than posting about the same subject matter on a WW forum, or CoolRunning, or whatever. And not every blog has to be written some super interesting, inspiring do-gooder. I mean, c'mon, most of us just write for ourselves, not for others, and we are just average Janes. Again, she misses the point by watering the whole topic down to "there are blogs where people write about losing weight, although some of them don't really lose any. go read them. the end."

…there is a lot of meat to your posts, which run the gamut from giddy to sad. We can all identify with those feelings, and you validate them by being as candid as you are. And I think your readers are smart enough to know that you're not here to write the Diet Gospel of Anne, you know? Regardless, you give us plenty to think about, and the perspective we need to remember that this is an individual journey, with plenty of hills and valleys, and we traverse the dieting landscape on our own paths.

Yes! Exactly! I just pumped my fist. That was totally aerobic.

And Anonymous also made me laugh a lot, a lot:

My guess? The author of the article, along with "LaVida" and "SugarSh**" are threatened by your sardonic take on the whole weight-loss enterprise. That's their livelihood--their not-bread and not-butter, if you will--and they must therefore treat it with the deadly upbeat, great-guns-ablazin', full-steam-ahead seriousness it deserves. Which is why I don't read "professional" blogs.

To sum up: You scare them!! You are famously scary!! You go, scary girl!!

Yah! Yah! Yah! Boo.

K had a really good point:

…that article did indeed contain some weird stuff.

You mean, to have a blog you have to

a) already have an "inspiring" story to tell
b) be sure you have The Ultimate Answer
c) take it all completely seriously?

If so, I'm sorry, I'm in the wrong room. Long live the amateur blogs. (When did amateur become an insult? It used to mean someone who does something for love.)

Exactly.

And I am filled with amateur sincerity and thanks-ness, for all the other awesome comments you guys left. Long live, indeed. Now I will go start a mom blog.

revising upward

2005-09-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

When I was way less heavy than I am now (coming out of my funk: 15 pounds up from the last time I weighed myself, several months before pre-funk, I think? I hope? Where the fuck does it all come from? Free-floating fat needs to get off my ass, and now), I used to think that weighing 120 pounds would be the best weight ever in the history of the world.

I would be hot. Sizzlingly so. You could bake things on me, but not too many things, because my surface area would be so magnificently reduced, you'd be lucky to fit a single sausage link on my finely-toned ass.

This was back when I was under two hundred pounds, and did not have that far to go, to get to 120. Well, it was pretty far, but not that far in the grand scheme of things, I say wearing the 20-20 hindsight glasses that are colored dark with despair. Big, fat despair.

Then, I gained some weight. A lot of weight. I shot up over two hundred pounds. People would look at me, and tell me that there was no way I weighed that much. I carried it so well! I carried it beautifully. I carried it the way some women can carry a giant basket of water on their tiny little heads without spilling a single drop.

And you know, thinking about it, that right there must be where my mild and not at all clinical body dysmorphism comes from – for so much of my life, I have been convinced that while I was fat, nobody could tell, and that is why it was always such a shock and a misery, anytime someone would make a comment about my size. I would actually feel my heart drop, not just from shame (because there is a lot of shame in it) but from horror that I had been recognized, and found out.

Anyway. So over two hundred pounds, I started to think that 140 was a reasonable weight to get down to, even 160. I carry my weight so well that I'd be a glowing goddess. 120 is entirely too skinny. If I weighed 120, I would be a skeleton. I have birthing hips! You need some meat on these kinds of hips!

And then I gained more weight. I did not shoot, or rocket, it just sort of crept out from around corners and leapt onto my ass and hung on with the kind of tenaciousness only fat, or bulldogs, or fat bulldogs can show. And then I started to think that under 200 pounds would be fine. Just under 200. That would be all I would ask for in life. A one in front of the number I weigh. Sarah calls that "onederland," which is both hilarious (because it is so silly) and true (which makes it doubly hilarious).

Now here I am, the heavier than the heaviest ever (I think I prefer "heavy" to "fat." Heavy makes me sound like I am substantial and important. Fat makes me sound – well, you know. Fat. "But wait a second!" you say, and then I punch you. But not really, because I love you.), and getting on the scale this morning, after a week of back on weightwatchers, complete with an extra point because of my extra ass, I realized that all I want is to be back under my previous record for land mass. I want to be the previous heaviest ever again, because this weight I am now, it is unsupportable. It is insupportable. It sucks.

But I lost four pounds this week, and I am just going to keep my head down and try to keep the numbers getting smaller and maybe, soon, in a couple of months, I can start looking at far-flung goals again, and as they go down, I can revise downward, too.

I am become famous

2005-09-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

Sally Squires is a writer, for the Washington Post, about important issues like salt and BMI and her column is called "The Lean Plate Club," but I responded to her email anyway. She wanted to interview me about having a "blog" and what's having a "blog" like and isn't it wacky, this "blog" thing?

So I said sure! Why not? And she called me and I chatted to her about things like community and support and the support of a community and community support, and she sounded very interested in me and all the absolutely fascinating things I had to say, regarding both community and support, and how community, but also support, related to both community and support.

It didn't sound like she had done much reading of my site – she kept mentioning peanut butter cups, which I realized was an entry just one or two below this, so I think she at least skimmed the front page – and she didn't seem to understand the whole "blog" thing, but she seemed very friendly, and amiable, and amenable to the idea, until she asked me how much weight I had lost.

Uh, I said. Er.

And then, she didn't sound too thrilled, because I am not so much a shining example of Weight Loss Success Through That New-Fangled "Blog" Thing, and I get the sense that that was, in part, her "angle," if you will. I think journalists need "angles." The way I need peanut butter cups. Ba dump bump! Cha! I think she also was working the "exciting tips and nutritional ideas from blogs" angle as well, but again – where the hell do I come in, there? My nutritional tips run along the "maybe I shouldn't have eaten those peanut butter cups" line, you know?

I don't know how she found me, and I really couldn't tell you why she still used me in the article. "Blogs are great for losing weight! Except for this chick, who's still really fat!" It doesn't seem to, you know, quite go with her whole theme. I'd have maybe cut out those paragraphs, stuck with the supporting evidence, but what do I know? I am just a "blog" person. In an article in which I didn't belong. Hello, every body!

So there was that, and it was funny, and many people came to see me (hello, everybody!) and then it was reprinted in the LA Times, and more people came to see me (hey! how's it going?) and then it was apparently syndicated in the Calcutta Telegraph (hiya!), as I received an email from Mr. Kumar, whose opinion is that I come across as "Obese & Sad," but still a very nice person, which is so totally the name of my next website, or possibly even the tagline of this one.

And there are also posts floating around from "real" bloggers -- professional bloggers, even [who knew that self-publishing on the internet (where everything you read is totally the truth) was something you could be a professional at? golly! I wonder how much that pays?] who are just as horrified as me that this blog appeared in an article about diet blogs. That's not a real diet blog! That's a horrible and sad excuse for a website! they say. And grind my bones to make their bread. Except they can't eat bread, I think. With the la vida, and all.

Well, they weren't that mean, perhaps, but it was still startling to see myself and my dumb little website called out quite so firmly and dismissively.

But also kind of goofily and missing the pointily - because, you know, I never claimed to be doing anything inspiring, or to be writing a diet blog or a weight loss journal, and I never claimed to be a professional blogger (whatever, really, the fuck that is) – this is a personal site. There's this thing, over in the sidebar? Yeah, that's where I mention something about this just being a personal site, and how this isn't really a site about losing weight. I am not a professional. Don't try this at home. Closed course.

Anyway, my very experience with The Media and also Professional Blogs (ha!) has been itty bitty and tiny, and weird and hilarious, and hello, everybody.

Also, hello, all you people who have been reading all the time through. I think I'm back. Thanks for the kind comments, and for waiting on me.

the technical term

2005-08-01T17:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I am okay, and then sometimes I am crazy. It used to be yoked to the seasons, the up and down of my brain. That's what I thought, anyway. But now that I live somewhere without seasons, I am pretty sure I am just unluckily nuts. Or, to use the technical term: bugfucked.

It's a step up (or down, if you've got to be all technical about it, geeze) from my usual laziness and slothliness when things get tough. For when things get tough, what better thing to do than double-fisted cram? Well, plenty of better things. That's true.

This low-down feeling isn't so much a choice because I’m refusing to make a choice about my habits, it's the kind of thing where it's all I can do to haul myself out of bed in the morning. Fun times. Fun.

So not thinking a lot about websites and health and society's fucked-up notions of beauty vis a vis the controversy surrounding Dove campaign ads and all the other interesting and good things I should be thinking about.

It's been mostly breathe in, breathe out. Well, that went okay. Let's try it again. Slowly, slowly.

I'm not sure that this site is going to be updated at all for awhile, but you never know. There are tiny miracles all around us. Like, for instance, lavender chocolate truffles, and puppies, and bacon.

Hang on to the bacon, people. Hang on.

MOONFLOW

2005-07-12T14:19:00.000-07:00

or, "fall down, get up. a love story."

This Week of Weightloss (because now my life is divided artificially into Weeks in which I am working towards weighing less on one specific day – don’t think I don’t know how fucking weird that is) I had a day where I found myself, at two in the afternoon, having eaten something along the order of 18 points worth of Reeses miniature peanut butter cups. You know, those mouthfuls of chocolate that disappear so quickly that you have to pop another in your face almost immediately after sucking on the first? Those.

And I looked at the pile of wrappers that had accumulated in the trash and in the other trash can and in my pocket, as I went back and forth between the kitchen and the living room and the kitchen and back to the living room again, and I thought huh. Wonder what’s up with that? And I had another point or two worth of chocolate.

At the end of the day, I realized that I had spent more or less my entire day’s worth of points on peanut butter cups. I thought about how I felt about that. I didn’t feel so good about that. I didn’t feel so good, in fact. Man can not live on Diet Pepsi and peanut butter cups alone, no matter how hard she tries, or wants to. It turns out man needs things like protein, and maybe less sugar. Which is just crazy, if you ask me.

It had been months and months and months – it had been longer ago than I remember – since I had done anything like eat nothing but cake all day, or a box of cookies over the course of an afternoon, or a ham in the bathtub. Even before I was doing the weight watchers thing, it was a matter of a series of bad choices than a single unattractive long-range binge.

But here I was with a nearly empty bag of cups and the kind of feeling of shame that only can creep up on you when you are blasted with the kind of unpleasantly crisp and clear sense of self-awareness that carries around an 8 x 10 glossy that shows you exactly what it is you look like right that second.

I went to bed with half-promises in my head about doing better and having kashi for breakfast and Being the Best Me That I Can Be and when I woke up the next morning, I found out that there was a reason that I had been mindless mainlining chocolate, and that was because I am become a beautiful woman experiencing her natural moonflow time.

I hate my period. But at least I found a reason for the peanut butter cups.

At least that’s what I told myself. The link between chocolate and menstruation is a long-documented one, and sources can be found everywhere from stand up comedy routines to informal testimonies to Cathy cartoons that fill you with a sense of outwardly-directly loathing when you catch yourself reading them, to just general knowledge, you know? That’s what happens! When you are a woman! And because I am a woman, I finished off the bag, and I looked at it, and I gave up.

Because I had already damaged my body and my chances by loading up with so much crap and I had my period and I was crampy and gross and messy and bloated and unhappy and everything sucked and fucking hell, I deserved to eat whatever I wanted because I just do, okay, because life is hard and I wanted more peanut butter cups which are delicious and make things less hard because they just do, okay?

And thus, this hasn’t been such a great week, with the whole “on plan” thing. I didn’t have to do that. I know there are cravings associated with PMS and I am willing to assuage those cravings. I know there are mood things associated, and changes in my body that are less than pleasant, but why did I have to allow that to take me over completely? There was no reason to do that. And the usual release I experience when I relax and stop watching what I eat, when I let myself have anything I have a fancy for – that’s been tempered by a whole lot of upset and uncomfortableness. It’s like I’m trapped inside my body, banging my fists on a locked door and crying nooooooo!, all dramatic-like, and being ignored as terrible things go on without my consent or help.

Ridiculous.

So I’m not going to weigh in this week, because honestly, I know what I did and I know the results of what I did, and I don’t feel the need to confront them, head-on, like. And I’m going to go back to doing what worked and made me feel good, and I’m going to go back to doing my stupid exercise videos and I’m going to get back to where I was before and maybe not bring any more bags of peanut butter cups into the house. That might work okay, too.

fractions don't count

2005-07-05T13:52:00.000-07:00

Despite being ever so good and pure all week, and the one perfect day of the weekend where I achieved a very excellent 18-point total (all whiskey), I have this morning found that I gained point six of a pound. It must have been all the bratwurst. Which is very salty. And whiskey is salty too. As is chocolate cake and bagels and greasy piles of eggs and crème brulees. Not exercising? Similarly salty. So this point six -- which doesn't count at all anyway, being a fraction of a pound -- is merely water weight.

Remember this very important weight loss tip from me to you: fractions of pounds only count when you are calculating your total weight loss. Otherwise, they are dumb and probably imaginary.

But really, I am grateful that I only gained a smidge – I knew I was not making the best Food Decisions (see the greasy pile of eggs, above) but tried to keep it balanced by eating a light dinner and thinking fluffy and agile thoughts. That is my other weight loss tip from me to you: fluffy and agile thoughts! Also, liposuction.

There was a part of me that was convinced that I had gained far more than that, with the Food Choices being not so great, and the lack of exercise, but also, I lost that weird buoyant mojo that had me prancing around and feeling good about myself. That brief and shining couple of days, where I could look at my ass in the mirror and think that I looked pretty okay – that has vanished, somehow, and I am feeling lumpier every day. I was thinking that maybe it was imaginary, what with being on a diet, but I knew I was fooling myself, what with not exactly being on a diet quite as much as I pretended I was on a diet. Hooray for holiday weekends!

So, to sum up: feeling lumpy, gained a little, will lose it all and more next week (I've got plans, and some of them involve lawn bowling -- which we all know is extremely aerobic), but that doesn't stop me from wanting to go home and lie down face-first in the pillows and feel extremely sorry for myself.

Maybe I'm just still hungover from Saturday. Which requires more peanut butter cups. Chomp.

dress for success

2005-07-01T12:23:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, the day I go get weighed and clap for everyone and gather into groups to share (though I frequently try to leave before we get to the sharing part of the festivities, because I do not so much play well with others), about an hour before I had to leave to make it to the meeting, I looked down at my lap and realized I was wearing jeans.

Jeans! I don't usually wear jeans. These are my new Hooray Jeans in which I look kind of sweet, and it was all well and good that I was dressed comfortably and attractively and did not actively hate my reflection every time I chanced upon it, but there was a problem. Jeans are heavy. Heavy fabric. Heavy fabric adds imaginary pounds! Imaginary pounds show up on the scale exactly just like regular non-imaginary ones, and once joined, the regular pounds and the imaginary pounds, they would make a number that I really didn't fucking want to see after a week of turning down cookies.

That's right, I turned down cookies. It sucked.

Anyway. So I considered my options. I could not go at all. But that would be wrong. Okay, I could go pantsless. But that would be wrong, too, in a much different way. I could take off my undergarments, thereby lessening the overall bulk and perhaps mitigating the effect of the jeans.

Or I could change into the dress I had in the bag at my feet. The very clingy, very low-cut, somewhat short black one that I had worn one night when I went out with Guy, which I ended up leaving laying on his floor, which he thoughtfully (along with the fishnets) had washed and folded and given back to me to take home, urging me to consider possibly maybe wearing the outfit again soon. Because, you know, it's nice to get dressed up!

So I had a totally inappropriate dress which weighed, by virtue, funnily enough, of its severe inappropriateness for Tuesday at noon at work, much less than the jeans and blouse I was wearing. But there was a ten minute walk over to the building where the meeting is, and it was kind of cold out, and I didn't want to go parading across campus in hooker-wear and a pair of sneakers, because that? Is just a little bit sad. Also, I'd look like a faculty member on a Walk of Shame from a kid's dorm room. Which now that I think about it, is kind of awesome.

A plan! An excellent plan would be to carry the dress with me to the weigh-in! And then I could change in the building there, pop onto the scale, and change back out, and no one would even notice my brief appearance as a Las Vegas lounge act! I was a genius!

And I didn't feel at all like a freak, wearing an evening gown in front of a room full of nice middle-aged nuns. Or when I came back to the meeting, having changed back into my jeans, and another member asked me, very puzzled, "Did you – change?"

The Plan worked, however, and I posted a charming 1.4 pound loss, bringing me to a total of 5 point, uh, something. It is funny how those points of pounds are so important to me, and yet, I keep forgetting what they are exactly.

There was a brief moment of disappointment when I realized that I had been expecting – after having a really brilliant week of Excellent Choices and Good Decision-Making – to have lost at least three pounds, and to have dropped below the Scary No-Good number that gives me fucking hives. Instead, I came neatly to rest right on top of that number, round and perfect and full of ugly.

Next week, though, I will lose, and even if it is a point one of a pound, I will be below that number, and that is something to huzzah about. If I make it through the fourth of july weekend.

p.s.

2005-06-28T16:07:00.000-07:00

also helpful? seriously cute new shoes. (with stars on the bottom!)

retail therapy

2005-06-28T11:39:00.000-07:00

You know that moment when you're standing in your closet and you're about to burst into tears and burn the thing down and then set fire to your own self because every item of clothing you own is too small or too short or too old or too stained or too ugly or makes you look fat/lumpy/fat and lumpy/fat, lumpy and ugly?

That's a bad moment. That's a really bad moment, and it's bound to break you down and send you spiraling into the kind of wave of depression that involves pizza and self-hatred and locking yourself in the house and never not ever leaving and wishing to fuck that you could just wear a sheet to work. Or maybe that last part is just me.

Maybe you don't. Maybe it is all me. I hope for your sake it is all me, because they are really terrible moments, and I've had so many of those moments these past few months – one of those moments is what really slapped me upside the head and made me realized that I had to do something about the weight I've gained.

But now that I'm doing something, it doesn't seem fair to keep having those moments. Sure, sure, I've only lost four point whatever pounds so far. But shouldn't it have revolutionized my entire life? Shouldn't it have revolutionized my entire wardrobe? Shouldn't my fucking pants just fucking fit already?

No? Okay then.

So I had another one of those moments this past weekend when I was supposed to go hang out with friends of Guy's who haven't seen me in awhile and one of the wives of these people is totally gorgeous and skinny and fabulous and the kindest, sweetest person you've ever met and who does not give a shit what you look like or what you're wearing, but that of course does not stop you from thinking about exactly what you look like, and exactly what the fuck you're going to wear.

So that was catalyst one.

The second catalyst was stumbling home that night and switching on the television and sort of numbly watching an episode of What Not To Wear, in which they were re-fashioning some chick who wanted to lose a lot of weight and she said she was dressing poorly because she was waiting until she lost the weight she wanted to lose and one of the yappy people – Stacey or Clinton, I don't remember which – said, very portentously, "Dress the body you have! Don't wait to look good! Feel good about yourself NOW! Yap yap yap!" And I will not lie to you - I turned it off and went to sleep.

But the next morning! I thought about it and it resonated with me, and I thought, fucking hell. I can't do this any more – squeezing into things and feeling ugly and uncomfortable and stupid. I can't sit around waiting to feel good, because that's just going to drive me to drink. More.

So I looked up the address of a fat girl store I've heard good things about - Torrid - and I trained it on over there and I tried things on and I got jeans, for fuck's sake. I haven't worn jeans in forever. And I got cute tops. And a jacket. And a pair of pants. I ignored the stupid sizes and pretended they didn't mean a goddamn thing and just considered how they felt, and considered how they looked, and by god - now I have things to wear that I look good in, that make me feel good about myself. Feel good! About myself!

That hasn't happened in a really long fucking time.

And I know, as I stick with the program and keep exercising (I've been doing videos at home. I pull down all the shades. My neighbors thank me.) that I will lose weight and then some more weight and these clothes will become too big on me and useless and I will pack them away or give them to goodwill and you can tell me that I've wasted my money, on stuff I will wear, hopefully, for only a short while. But you know, I would have gladly paid a lot more for this amazing new feeling, this feeling I haven't had in years, of liking what I see in the mirror. I highly recommend it. Because it's kind of cool.

fucking ow

2005-06-24T13:05:00.000-07:00

So, that was embarrassing. And I guess I should have known better. I re-read the description on the gym's site that said things about "high octane" and "intense" and "this will kill you," but I ignored them. Ha ha, I said. If it gets too rough, I will just march in place step two three four.

Step two three four.

I talked to my friend H. before I headed over to the gym. I told her I was nervous about the class. She said "Don't be! You'll be great! And you know, you can leave if you have to." I said "ha ha. The warm up will probably kill me! I'll leave fifteen minutes after the class starts!"

Step, two, three four. I made it through about seven minutes before I left.

Just in case the class would be packed, and all excited about going, I got there fifteen minutes early and felt good in my nice workout pants and my cute robot shirt. I walked around the room, and I imagined punching things and I felt good. And then the little tiny undergrads started sylphing through the door in pairs, wearing their sports bras and yoga shorts and I wanted to die a little bit, but I didn't. I stood in the corner and looked off into the air and tried to pretend I was thinking deep thoughts that didn't involve cake.

And then the instructor came in and she was a good quarter of my size, and she started shrieking and the music came on it and it was deep knee bends and jumping jacks and more deep knee bends and dropping from a bend into ten push ups and then back up to jumping jacks and jab jab jab and kick kick kick and I tried so hard to keep up and not look at myself in the mirror and do the best I could but I started to pant and then I started to wheeze and then I started to not be able to breathe at all and everything hurt and I tried to lift my knee to kick and then realized I couldn't and I was falling out of step with everyone and I stopped and I looked at myself in the mirror and I turned and walked out while everyone was doing lunges and I pretended I didn't care that they were watching me go and I tried to not think about what it was they could have been thinking as the fat girl clears out seven minutes into class.

I thought I was fine. It's kind of funny, how I didn't last. Boy, was that class crazy! And where was the kickboxing, I ask you? That sure wasn't kickboxing! Ha, ha. Ha. And then I got home and Guy came over and asked me how the class went and I burst into tears.

You know, I know I'm fat. That right now, I weigh more than I ever have. And I don't formally exercise. But jesus, I did not know I was so desperately out of shape. I walk. I'm not immobile. I am fairly agile, I take the stairs, I am a wildcat in bed. I would have thought that this class would have hurt, but I didn't realize it would have torn me down so completely, and left me feeling so humiliated and pathetic – not just because it was so difficult, but because it was this spectacular failure to do something normal girls could do.

And because it was such a public spectacular failure. When I don't fit into my clothes at home, or I try something on in a department store, or I eat something I shouldn't, it is a private and personal disappointment, screw-up, defeat. Whether it is true or not – those deep-bending, push upping girls might have been so deeply immersed in their sweating they never noticed me in the back row, when I was there or when I was going – it felt like I was opening myself up to every kind of public humiliation you spend your whole life trying to hide from, when you're fat, in all kinds of ingenious ways that become second nature.

That took some getting over – it's been a long time since I took a risk like letting myself look like a giant fat asshole in an exercise class. And after I calmed down and the first blush of shame faded, I started to feel less pathetic, wretched and horrible, and a little more proud of myself. I went to this class that I knew was going to be hard and full of skinny girls, and I did my best. I pushed to failure, and I failed, and that's the end of it. I did good (and three days later, it still fucking hurts. I almost cried going down the stairs this morning).

And while I have vengefully crossed out all the cardio kickboxing classes on the gym schedule I have printed out (along with all of the instructor's other classes, in a fit of impotent rage and snittiness), I have not crumpled the thing up into a ball and chucked it. I am going to try water aerobics (shallow, easy pace), and maybe beginning yoga, and maybe tai-chi, and when I have lost some more weight and feel more confident, when I am stronger and fitter – I sure as fuck won't go back to the cardio kick class.

still not fifty three pounds, or king.

2005-06-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

Work is so easy. Eating at work, I mean. Because I can't sit at my desk and eat a ham, and since I work at a public service desk, I can't disappear into the break room and eat a Christmas turkey every ten minutes, and the food on campus sucks and the vending machine is almost always broken, if I simply remember to plan ahead, with my baggies of cereal and the lean cuisines and the yogurts and the fruit, I am golden all day. A beautiful golden god.

Home is less easy, even though I have learned the most important lesson about stocking your house with groceries, which is Do Not Leave a Bucket of Fried Chicken Or A Cake In Your House lesson. If you have the stuff within reach, look there you go! Reaching for it! It seems a very simple lesson to learn, but it took me a very long time to learn it. Because I am not so smart.

Since I am not so smart but lazy, it is easy to fool myself into not eating the not-so-great stuff after hours, but not as easy to eat good stuff, because, see above, re: laziness. I can stuff my fridge with all the arugula it can hold, but that sure as fuck doesn't mean I'm going to actually do anything with the arugula, unless it involves climbing over the arugula to get to the take out menus, or tossing the arugula in order to fit the leftover Chinese food in the fridge.

But I can usually get around that by making myself a peanut butter sandwich for dinner and then pretending that the kitchen doesn't exist any more, which exercises my brain, which burns calories, which makes me lose fifty three pounds a week. I am telling you, I am a diet genius and should really write some kind of self help book.

Which is all well and good on days I come home after work. On days I go out after work, I try to remember to save some points, and Make Smart Choices and Not Screw Up By Ordering A Pie, and sometimes it works (a coffee after dinner sometimes undercuts the urge to order All the Dessert in the World) and sometimes it really, really doesn't work (a coffee is a lovely accompaniment to Chocolate Lava Love Cake of Ultimate Doom) and sometimes it works okay (biscotti is nice).

In a perfect world, I would be, too. Perfect, I mean. But I have been trying to remember that the best I can do is do the best that I can, and I have been trying to not yack up immediately after thinking that. Because it is true. And belongs on an embroidered pillow.

I've been trying to remember to plan ahead as much as possible, make choices that are as good as possible, and think really hard about exercising (see above, re: burning calories with your mind and losing fifty three pounds).

It's working okay. I lost .8, and that is almost a pound, which is not too shabby in a week with little exercise and a lot of going out.

This week I have decided to be more forceful in my planning ahead when I go out, with looking up menus and saving points and asking for things on the side to not be brought out with my food and avoiding empty calories during the day. I'm going to poke around the exercise classes presented at my gym and check them out, squelching my embarrassment and trying to not die. Even though I'm totally going to die. But at least I will go out kickboxing.

not exactly 53 pounds

2005-06-14T14:50:00.000-07:00

Here at the end of week one, I am not sad at all that I did not, in fact, lose 54 imaginary pounds, because instead I lost 3.4 real live ones. That is a victory, and to celebrate, I am drinking skim milk. With an oreo garnish. Because victory, man!

The one thing that got me through Weight Watchers the last time was what we officially labeled Cheat Night – though Cheat Night might not be, psychologically speaking, the best thing to call it. But that's the name that stuck, and that's what it will always be.

Cheat Night ruled. Cheat Night was the Night to End all Nights. The very next Cheat Night was something we were planning for, even while we were in the midst of the current Cheat Night, my friend Al and I.

McDonalds saved our sanity, and Ben & Jerry's saved our metabolism, and when we Cheat Nighted, we lost weight regularly and like clockwork. Well, he lost way more weight than I did, because he sucks and he cheated with liposuction and illegal pills and some other thing having to do with having a man's metabolism or whatever, but it worked.

You are severely cutting down your calories all week – allowing one day a week to go up out of your stinking Calorie Budget and splurge (what an awful word "splurge" is, aesthetically and in every way. Jeeze.), you keep your body from going into starvation mode. That is Science.

Well, that is Something I Made Up, really, but it seems logical, and makes sense, and this oreo in my mouth, as I type? It's making me happy. It was like a gift in the middle of general grimness, a way to relax after a week of excessive fright – everything you put in your mouth scares you, when you're on a diet, or a meal plan, or trying to lose weight. You're always wondering if this is going to be the thing that fucks you up, sends you weight rocketing, ruins everything. Cheat Night is a night to stop considering that, and to enjoy food.

So this week is going to be one night of indulgence, and the rest of the week Planning. I've Lean Cuisines in the freezer at work, and a sack full of yogurts. I've got skim milk in the fridge, and baggies of Kashi lined up to drop in my bag in the morning, next to the banana. All I've got to do is figure out some kind of satisfying mid-afternoon snack that won't have me considering licking the vending machine window and gazing tearfully at the snickers bars, and I will be so good to go, you don't even know, man.

And I also really need to think about exercising. I've got a lot of goofy videos that should not particularly kill me, and there is where I've got to start, if I ever want to kick my own ass again and enjoy it. I am really looking forward to killing myself softly – Guy reminded me last night of how much I was loving going to the gym and tearing up the elliptical, and how much happier I was, in general. And by god, he's right. I miss that feeling. That is what I'm working towards.

That, and Cheat Nights.

week one: the retrospective (i.e., yay sausage!)

2005-06-13T16:57:00.000-07:00

So the meal plan thing has been working out really well. Kashi and soy milk and Lean Cuisines and occasional splurges, within my calorie budget, filled with exciting satisfyingness and it's all been terribly reasonable and filled with moderation and except for the moments in which I thought that I was going to burst into tears for being the kind of person who has a "calorie budget," everything went swimmingly swimming all week.

And then there was this weekend, which was an orgy of pie and sausage. But not all at once. Two separate occasions, two separate downfalls.

But who knew that pie and sausage would be my downfalls? Well, anyone who knows me, and has seen me in the room with a pie and or a sausage, I suppose. But I like to dream that these were flukes, my encounters with pie (filled with fruit, delicious) and sausage (covered with sauerkraut, delicious) that lead me into temptation and forty point days, after a long and sexy string of exactly-on-target days.

But you know, I wrote down all my points and I checked off all my bonus points and I sighed and I recognized that I had accountability in these situations and when next I encounter pie (delicious) and sausage (delicious) or even possibly sausage pie (indescribably delicious, in my head) I will have a Plan of Action and Points-a-Plenty and I can have my pie and count it too and be well within my calorie budget, the thought of which makes me want to burst into tears.

Succeeding, though. That makes me feel okay. And I think this week I've more or less succeeded at getting some stuff under control, and remembering why I want to do this: vanity. I mean health. Fitness! And a nice, fit ass.

Tomorrow I weigh in, and I look forward to having lost fifty three pounds.

on life comma worth having

2005-06-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

I have given up candy, and also I have given up smoking, and now I think I'm about to give up living.

something even more bizarre and inexplicable

2005-06-07T16:17:00.000-07:00

Hi! Hello. There have been things. Things that are Things, even. There's been my mother staying with me for an exhausting amount of time, and school work and work-work and my brain not working and all sorts of manner of stuff happening. You know. The usual.

As is usual, I stopped thinking about my fucking pants and eating good things and moving, and concentrated more on keeping on keeping on, and sometimes, hanging on by the skin of my teeth, and sometimes pure and simple survival. Which is, occasionally, less pure and not quite as simple as you'd think it was.

Also, I ate dark chocolate peanut m&ms, but just once.

My mental and emotional state is never quite as stable as I would optimally like it to be, but sometimes I go swerving down into the dark and ugly and I would laugh at my self for being so pathetic if you know, I wasn't so mired in very tragic despair. Tragic.

Things in general, however, have been bettering up in a lot of ways for the past couple of weeks. I have been working on school projects with great gusto and enthusiasm which is unusual for me, and I've gotten some Feedback that has kicked my ass with its awesomeness. I got a raise at work. Guy has been uniformly wonderful across the board and back again, as per usual. And my mom went home.

And recently I have discovered the winning of an award which is pretty cool and involves an all-expenses paid trip to put me on panels and have me leading workshop discussions and speaking in front of large groups of people, all of whom are going to be thinking "boy, she's fat."

So that's shaken me out of my physical lethargy (along with the tiny meltdown I had last weekend over the wearing of a dress to a party which made me look like a big paisley meatball – the dress, I mean, not the party. The party did not make me look anything but slightly tipsy) and I went to a weight watchers meeting this afternoon to discover that I am Captain Weighs A Lot. A Lotta Lot. Five pounds heavier than my heaviest weight ever! Woo! I rule.

So it starts again. This time, I have a goal. I wish to lose some pounds before the conference in October. Let's call that five months. Let the amount of weight I would like to lose equal 30. Let's pretend that's reasonable, for now. And let me not give up this time, please.

Ahoy.

keep on keeping on

2005-05-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

It amazes me, the way once you decide to do something, magically you can do it. You can decide to hit the check out now! button on zappos dot com and find yourself with a brand new pair of very shiny boots the next day.

Or decide to cram an entire chocolate chip cookie into your face and find yourself feeling slightly sick and filled with undirected hate (except you know exactly where that hate is directed, and ooh it burns) or bitter resignation.

Or you can pour yourself a bowl of Kashi Go Lean and slice a banana and pour some vanilla soy milk over the whole deal, and declare it Good and Filling. And then you've found yourself on a road that is Good and Filling, and you weigh yourself three times a day because Kashi Go Lean can't lie. I have Gone Lean. Where's the Leaness, people?

You can also find yourself losing patience, but then decide that maybe what you've really lost is your mind.

So I've been at it for two days, and I feel different and good, but what difference does two days make, really, in the grand scheme of things. Enough of a difference, for now, I think. But I keep waiting for someone to notice the glow of righteousness and goodness that surrounds me. I want someone to come bounding up to me, telling me "I just had to shake your hand, because I noticed that you are just super awesome!" I want to be sainted. Maybe not.

I have not yet done an appreciable amount of formal exercise, though every time I walk anywhere or take the stairs, I am very proud of myself. As if I have been previously roaming the world in a fatty cart instead of, you know, walking or taking the stairs every day. But it's the consciousness of it, that I think is important. Being aware that movement and moving is something I need to keep doing -- and being aware that it's something I have to keep pushing it.

One thing I will say about these past few months of backsliding, is that I never abandoned the habit I picked up, back when I was good at this weight loss thing (having an anxiety disorder is super-helpful in that regard) of taking the bus that left me a fifteen minute uphill walk to work. Even though the downhill walk on my way home could hardly be called a chore, I am still proud of every goddamn morning and every goddamn evening spent waddling that stupid hill. Maybe someday I'll jog it! That was a funny joke I made up.

Anyway, I think I can keep on with the keeping on. And maybe settle down with the weighing in. And maybe have a bowl of Kashi for dinner.

setbacks

2005-05-09T13:02:00.000-07:00

I knew it before I got on the scale – I felt it in my clothes, and in my body, and I had been avoiding stepping up for exactly that reason – I was not interested in the concrete evidence. It's the same reason that sometimes, it takes me right up to the due date to pay a bill – I know what's in my checking account, to the penny, but sometimes, I just don't want to look at that balance, and watch myself deduct from that balance, because the numbers, they're not the prettiest numbers you're ever going to see. Working in academia, it doesn't pay the Big Dollars. Eating Snickers, though – it makes for the big ass.

And I knew that, and so the number I saw, when I jumped up there, naked, first thing in the morning, was not entirely a surprise, but it still wasn't, as you can imagine, pleasant. It was actually deeply, deeply unpleasant. So was kicking the scale with a bare foot. Because ow.

Ow all around, really.

But it's finally real. All this diet planning, exercise thinking about, grocery shopping stuff was playacting, because I really didn't know what kind of shape I was in, and I really hadn't realized how bad it had gotten. It wasn't real, that sense that I have to buckle down.

I'm buckling down, now. I hope this is the last time I get to say that. I hope that future setbacks – because there's always a future setback – will be temporary, minor, easily recoverable from. I hope that I don't ever have to see that number, ever again.

picture this -

2005-04-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

(italy, 1937)

Here's a picture, post-outline, pre-color, all lovely.

It makes me intensively, extensively happy. But I am disappointed that I stopped before even the shading, and a little mad at myself. He asked me, "do you want to take a break?" and I said "yes oh yes please thanks! uh huh." And I felt like my crew of tattoo-cheerer-ons had been arranged around the tattoo studio, watching me sit and occasionally wince, for entirely too long. Stretches of time that end way out beyond the borders of Friendship and deep in the desert of "do I know you?"

Tattoo-getting may be rife with soul-searing pain and blood and etcetera, but it is remarkably uninteresting in execution.

So since I chickened out, tuckered out, courteously bowed out of further tattooation, I now have to wait 10 days to three weeks (three weeks!) before I can get it finished up. I enjoy looking at it now, because it is lovely, but I am impatient to see it complete.

And it will be good to have a real reason to be accidentally waving my forearm around in peoples' faces, and acting all surprised and pleased when they notice my fancy new ink.

ratta tat tat

2005-04-24T16:36:00.000-07:00

And then, I got a tattoo. On the inside of my forearm. Lovely and emblematic and also badass, for I am a badass. Especially when I eat Oreos, hooray.

I examined it critically, post-outline, turning my arm this way and that, lifting it, shifting around, enjoying it aesthetically and also viscerally (because ow). And then I turned to Guy and said, perfectly seriously, "Hey - does this make my arm look fat?"

And he said, "That's got to be the weirdest iteration of that question ever in the history of that question."

"But does it?"

"No. No, it does not, and hush."

My tattoo is pretty, and so's my forearm. Hooray!

naked

2005-04-22T14:42:00.001-07:00

I cut my hair, and now the back of my neck is naked. The back of my neck has not been naked in three years. Maybe more than that. My hair just kept growing, as hair does, and I kept letting it grow, down past my shoulder blades and longer, and then all I did with it was dye it various shades of red and keep it in a ponytail.

Ponytails are exciting! No they're not.

Which is why I cut bangs. I look, as I have previously noted, like an asshole in bangs. Especially swoopy porn star bangs. Which I hacked short in a fit of oh my god I have swoopy porn star bangs.

That didn't work out so well. And neither did my attempt at Betty Paging it up. Oh, my.

But now, they are professionally short, and so is the rest of my hair, and the identity I had all wrapped up in having long wavy sex-hair, spilling over my shoulders all dramatic-like and making me feel pretty despite however else the rest of me looked, that is gone, and the best I think I am mustering is somewhere around cute.

Round-cheeked, knobby-chinned, art-student-glasses cute, and I am still trying to get used to it, to figure out how to bring myself, all the parts of me, disparate, clanging, discordant, together.

hey, this sounds familiar

2005-04-21T12:44:00.000-07:00

It is remarkable, the way not losing weight, and ignoring all things health-related, makes you not want to write in your weight loss blog. Just crazy!

I joined eDiets, I printed out the meal plan, I printed out the grocery list, I started doing things that weren't shopping, or eating fruit cocktail from a can, or going to the gym. Funny how that happened.

I walk, and I don't weigh myself, and I say certainly we can share the molten fudge enrobed chocolate wet dream cake for dessert, dear! I ask for skim milk in my coffee, though. I've got that going for me.

But I am not thinking about my body, in terms of what I need to do to get in shape. It's been a long time since I've thought about my body. And trying to do it now – it's a tremendous amount of effort, and all my effort, of late, has been focused in other directions – school, writing, my relationship. Definitely not laundry. Sometimes TiVo. Stupid TiVo.

I am not sure where to go from here. There are the easy answers, and then there is the easy thing to do.

you ain't got no alibi

2005-04-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

I got sick again. Yes, again. With the grossness and the dying. And then I got busy. And I was busy and sick at the same time. And sick of being busy, and busy being sick. And so on. It is as interesting to write about as I am sure it is interesting for you to be reading.

Dietetically speaking, all that went in my face for two weeks was orange juice and bits of toast soaked in tea. And then when I emerged from my quarantine, I found that there was nothing left in the house but bits of hard cheese, a freezer-burnt popsicle, and the fixings for peanut butter and jelly (miraculously, I always seem to have pb&j fixings. It is a Gift), and so I lived off of those for a few weeks.

And now I am weak as a kitten with the muscle tone of a pudding cup, but I have stayed within the same three pound range, and I am going to go ahead and call that a victory, cheering faintly. Hurrah.

Cough.

So once again, frustratingly, never-endingly, I have to Get Back On Track and Get to Getting and Keep on Chunging and You Know, Stuff. Because I am tired of the Stupid Pants and I am tired of being tired and I am tired of being tired of being tired and Where Will It End? Woe! Etcetera.

So I joined eDiets today (thank you for the suggestion, Kelly) which is just my style, what with the Exciting Structure and the Meal Plans and the Shopping Lists. But which also features fucking cottage fucking cheese, for fuck's sake (p.s. fuck). And I don't know what exactly they want me to be eating with that cottage cheese, but I don't look forward to asking for it at the grocery store:

Hi, I'm twelve! (Cough.)

But anyway, thanks for all the huzzah! comments in my last entry, which were very, very appreciated, and here's to full speed ahead and all that good stuff. And someday, burning the stupid pants.

stupid pants

2005-03-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

Everything hurts. I'm not exactly sure why everything hurts, and I fear it is because I am old, because I haven't really done much except walk. I have aged to the point where walking breaks me. That is a little depressing.

To be fair, I've walked a lot more often, and up hills, and faster and longer than I have in a long time, as part of my Everyday Active Plan, which is a plan I just made up in my head. But that's what I've been doing – making a conscious effort to not just stand and wait for the bus, to take a line that leaves me further from where I'm going or at the bottom of a big hill, to not ask passerby to carry me up the big hill, or burst into tears when faced with one.

It's been a pretty good way of doing things, especially since I'm temporarily breaking up with the gym. This is a smart thing. Because the gym has been impossibly, horribly unpleasant. I have tried every cardio machine in the place and on all of them, the twenty minutes I tell myself I can get through is killing me. Just killing me. This is tragic and stupid and ashameful and it is more than I can do to make myself go and so I don't go and that is a bad thing. Bad thing! Bad!

So I am concentrating on being Captain Everyday Cardio, and I'm eating rightly, and I have made a deal with myself that I will walk to and/or from work (which is about two miles each way) several or three times a week and that will, for now, be the exercise I do until I am in a shape where the gym is not a horrible torture place. It makes me laugh and also cry small tears that I need to get in shape in order to go to the gym.

This Alternate Fitness Plan is, however so far working. If my scale is to be believed, I have lost a further four pounds, making me losing of twelve pounds in total, and filled with all kinds of glee. My pants still fit stupid, though. Stupid pants.

progress report

2005-03-17T12:07:00.000-08:00

It’s been a week and a half on the Sad and Lonely meal plan, and I am happy to cautiously, delicately, quietly say in a voice just above a whisper that I think it is working, and then duck beneath a table waiting for the Fat Bomb to drop.

I stopped following the meal plan to the letter the day they wanted me to put more goddamn cottage cheese on something else – I think it was a plate of cottage cheese – and I started to get all analytical about it. I said “well, they are encouraging the consumption of good milk proteins. Ben and Jerry’s for breakfast it is!”

It isn’t. But it’s yogurt or whole wheat toast or egg whites, and fruits for desserts, and staying away from sugars, and allowing good fats, and eating when I’m hungry, and using the Sad and Lonely plan for jumping off points that Guy mostly has been the one jumping off of. There was this tortilla thing they wanted me to do with cheese and, uh, stuff? And he, using all the proscribed ingredients, made it indescribably delicious.

“Diet food rules!” I shouted. He eyed me doubtfully and took another bite of his chorizo quesadilla, and as the juice ran down his chin, I killed him with my fork and ate his heart. Dipped in guacamole.

The first week, I lost eight pounds and that’s all water weight, for shizzle and other things like that. But I am happy and eating okay and exercising, even, despite the stupid faux elliptical thing I climbed on this morning almost fucking taking a leg off, and I’m looking forward to seeing how things go this week, and then eating someone’s heart to celebrate.

and lo

2005-03-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

I pulled on a pair of pants - my sexy, sexy fat pants - that have been snug, that have been the impetus for all this wacky dieti- er, healthy eating, I've been doing. And I haven't noticed a change, one way or the other, in the way they've been snug around the tops of my thighs in a Fat Girl fashion. Until this morning.

I pulled them up, and I buttoned them, and I struggled to zip them. Struggled. I looked down in bewildered disbelief. I grabbed ahold of the tag, and sucked in, and yanked, and looked down at the bulge of my stomach and I said "why! Why the fuck do you not fit, when I've spent almost two weeks dietin- er, eating healthy, you motherfuckers? WHY?"

And then, I burst into tears.

And lo, the answer had descended upon me in the ethereal form of a big throbbing zit.

I hate it when my period surprises me.

one can of tuna in water, drained

2005-03-08T18:24:00.000-08:00

So I printed out the meal plan, the one with 1200 calories in, and with 2% cottage cheese on top of everything –- I’m not kidding. Everything. -- and four ounces of various types of meat.

Then, I went grocery shopping. And I stocked up on tuna and various types of meat and more cottage cheese than a girl should really own, and I lugged it all home and stuck it all in my fridge and stood back and I said there! I have a fridge full of healthy food! And then I ate some ice cream.

Then, the next day, I woke up, and I prepared one packet of oatmeal and a half of a cup of 2% milk and a banana and I ate it all slowly and I sat and looked at my plate and said “That’s it?” And I was sad and lonely.

But lunch! Lunch was coming! And at lunch, I would have lettuce and tomatoes and other vegetables and a cucumber (except that my fridge froze my cucumber into a weirdly mushy mass of slush, and that was really interesting) and a can of tuna, all topped off with cottage cheese. I shook it all together (except the cottage cheese) and I sat down and I ate it slowly and I said “Wow. That was kind of disgusting.” And I was sad and lonely.

Dinner was a whole-wheat tortilla with low-fat cheese on, and then microwaved because that's the kind of gourmet I am, and also because I could not bring myself to assemble the fauxrito with spinach and lettuce the nice people at Good Housekeeping wanted me to assemble. And my cheesy tortilla, that was pretty tasty. But underneath, I remained sad and lonely.

Today, today was another sad and lonely day, from the two frozen waffles with fruit spread to the cabbage salad topped with (you guessed it!) cottage cheese, it has been nothing but sadness and loneliness.

I know that the Sad and Lonely diet is kind of ridiculous and overprescribed and undercalorated. But I needed guidelines. Soon enough I'll graduate to big girl eating (that was an unfortunate pun. huh.)

But right this second, right now? I was not going to get back on track without reading a sheet of paper that said “today, you will eat the following [sad and lonely] things.”

I have not been ridiculous about it – if I need more food, I have been eating it. But that has meant, these past two days of sadness and loneliness, eating an apple between meals, or snacking on some pretzels before I go to the gym.

Because I totally went to the gym today! And it was all I could do to spend twenty minutes on the elliptical before bolting at the shower, and I did not even care that the locker room was filled with girls equipped with piercing shrieks. But I swore I wouldn’t do any less than twenty, and I fulfilled my Solemn Promise, and that feels okay. I’ll get back to where I was soon enough. With cottage cheese and four ounces of salmon by my side.

raaaar!

2005-03-03T15:53:00.000-08:00

So Guy's moved about a block and a half from his old place. His roommate and his roommate's boyfriend, they went and bought a (big)(beautiful)(gorgeous) house (with a library! They have a library! And? And! A blue jay! And a lemon tree. Not that I'm bitter) and Guy decided that The Time Had Come for Him To Have a Room of His Own, Except By "Room" I Mean "Apartment," But Had I Said "Apartment," You Would Have Missed Out on the Funny Virginia Woolf Allusion.

He moved on top of a hill. No, I'm sorry – a Hill. No, wait - A HILL. This is a city of Hills, and this is a Hill that stacks up to all of the other Hills. This is a Hell of a Hill. It's a Hella Hill. It's Hill Hell.

The first time I came to visit, I got off the bus and walked to the bottom of his street and stood looking up the sheer cliff face and I said "Oh, honey. It was very nice to have known you," and then I took a taxi home.

That is not actually the actual truth, as such. What I really did was bitch, and moan, and bitch and bitch and moan and trudge all the way up to the top of the hill, and then down a few more blocks, and then up the stairs into the lobby and up the lobby stairs and then up the stairs in the lobby to the landing and up the stairs to the first floor and then, I died.

Which would be fine, all the dying every time I come to visit him. I will get used to the sobbing and the dying and I will look at it as a Challenge which I will Masterfully Overcome as I begin to become Fit and Healthy and someday you will see me chung up that hill, just like a little fat train.

What was less fine was doing all that with everything he owns in boxes. The boy owns a lot of stuff. A lot of heavy stuff. He collects boulders, and bowling balls, and blocks of gold is what he does. And I moved it all and went raaaargh! And was powerful and tough.

Then, I moved another friend and her new live-in lover to their beautiful little one-bedroom Love Nest, which also involved a lot of heavy shit. What the fuck is up with people owning heavy shit? Wasn't there a run on inflatable furniture a few years back? My god. But I helped move bookcases and beds and tables and more tables and chairs and boxes, and I went "raaaaar!" and I was very powerful and tough.

And there is a final person to move, this afternoon, and this is a sad move instead of a happy move and I wish I could do something more than lift things for her (and you know, I bet they're heavy things). But lifting things is something I can do, and then go "raaaar!" and then be all powerful and tough.

But I am very, very, very, very tired. That sentence would be totally one hundred percent a reflection of me if it had a paragraph more full of "very." It is nice to see that I am capable of being raaaaar! and strong and accomplishing stuff. It makes me feel a little less hopeless, a little more hope-full, and also really fucking tired.

But I think tonight, after the move, all I will be capable of is going to be watching Invader Zim on DVD (aw, I want to watch the scary monkey show!). Hooray!

okay, then

2005-03-01T13:08:00.000-08:00

I have not been posting because it's hard to type when you've got a Christmas turkey nestled under your chin and a pint of ice cream in each hand.

Well, not really. But I continue to be out of control and hating it. I eat whatever (and whatever sure ain't low-fat, high-fiber and rich in nutrients) and I forgot what the inside of the gym looks like and I am a tired old person who feels tired and old and I don't have time to make changes, I just don't. Please pass the bacon.

I've been thinking about it, though. It's hard to not think about it when all your clothes fit poorly and there are lumps where there never have been lumps before and you have before you at all times that image you accidentally caught in a plate glass window when you were chunging down the street all slouchy and butt sticky-outty and rumpled with your shirt riding up and you know that's for certain what you look like, not the image in the mirror where you are standing up straight and tugging down your blouse and squinting a little bit and thinking you look actually kind of respectable.

It's all very depressing, and really, you don't want to hear about it.

(X Y and Z are bad. So change X Y and Z, you say! But I caaaaaaaan't, I whine.)

Things have been crazy, and I can't, I whine. I have friends and loved ones with major life changes, three of which include major apartment moves. I moved three people! Furniture is heavy and makes me tired. And I have papers to write and work to be at for extra hours, now that we've lost a staff member, and assistants to train and an apartment to keep from being condemned and laundry and sleeping and you know all that eating right and exercise stuff? We're not thinking about that so much. The "we" in the previous sentence is not so much royal as enormously fat.

I can't. Not just in the "I don't have time" sense and "here are my excuses" sense and the "but oh, don't you feel sorry for poor me, delicate flower that I AM" sense, but in the "I just. Can't. Think about it right now" sense. I can't. It makes me sorry and sad and angry and upset, but I can't. At night, when everything is over, it is all I can do to crawl into bed with Guy and an order of sesame chicken and watch Iron Chef until we both fall asleep with our mouths open and our teeths unbrushed.

In the meantime, however, however, I have been thinking about goals, in mad dashes from work to bus to moving van to third floor walk up to truck to bus to school to work to etcetera. I printed out a silly meal plan from Good Housekeeping, I made a grocery list, and put together a cart full of stuff to order online as soon as I figure out when I'll be home to accept delivery. And I've come up with a list of rewards, as some of you guys helpfully suggested, for following my stupid meal plan week by week. Little things like an eyebrow wax the first week, a manicure the second, a pedicure the third, a haircut the fourth.

I think I'm going to need diamond-plated rewards for getting to the gym, though. And I think I'm going to make that goal slightly littler. Can you get to the gym two times this week? I'll give you an album from iTunes if you do. How's that? That sounds kind of okay.

Well, okay then.

So when I'm ready to do this, when things quiet down and I can focus again and breathe in deep and out slowly and say okay, then. It's time to start. Everything will be in place, and I will begin. Until then, though? I don't know.

plork

2005-02-22T20:53:00.000-08:00

It’s not been a great week. Except that it’s been a pretty good week. I’ve been productive with writing, I’ve been going out, I’ve been feeling good, this kind of happy! Happy! I think I’ll go for a walk! kind of not-dead yet mood, and things have been generally all-around okay, except that I don’t fit into any of my Fat Clothes, the big-girl clothes which should have been stuffed into the back of a closet somewhere and never needed not ever again, and my eating has been out of control.

I eat before I go out to eat, and I eat again when I come home from eating, and it is mindless and weird. I keep telling myself I will get a handle on this weirdness, this bad and ungood pattern which isn’t even a pattern, just a huge undifferentiated violent splotch of lousiness.

It’s been easy to not think about. Easy to not consider what I’ve been putting in my mouth and to not think about how long it’s been since me and the gym have been close and personal bosom buddies full of love and admiration. It’s really easy to have Oreos for dinner.

I like Oreos for dinner.

And that’s the problem. If it weren’t for the way I stand in my closet for fifteen minutes every morning, sort of staring blankly at my clothes, thinking “too small, too small, too short, too short and small, too short, small and stained, too short and stained, too short, too small and with a rip” and, you know, etcetera, I would never think again about fitness or healthiness or my body. I would float along on this undifferentiated sea of plorkiness, bob bob bobbing because you know how fat floats. I am the floatiest in the whole, wide world. Bob.

Today I went to the gym, mostly because I wanted to take a shower, to tell you the truth. But the price of a shower was sweating. So I went in, and I sat on the recumbent bike because I couldn’t make myself go on the elliptical, and then twenty minutes of peddling made me very tired.

At the end of every minute, I had to trick myself into another minute, and then another and another and that is the only way I made it through that twenty minutes. Because I am dumb enough to believe myself when I say “after this minute, you can totally stop. No, really! I swear!” and I go “okay! Yay! Ohdy ohdy oh!” peddlepeddlepeddle along until finally I can no longer take the lies, the terrible, terrible lies full of hate.

But it’s a start. And even if my relationship with the gym is born in lies and nurtured with the milk of deceit and weaned with the formula of deception, I will make it work. Even if that means going grocery shopping. I hate grocery shopping almost as much as I hate cooking.

Today I poked around the internet and found meal plans that might give me the structure I so desperately crave. Tomorrow I will print them out. The day after that, I will beat my head against the desk until I bleed from my ears and I sever my tongue with my own back teeth, because I am so goddamn tired of baby steps, always baby steps. Where is my fucking rocket car? What happened to all this living in the future shit we’ve been doing?

And one of these days, I will make a goal. Just one little concrete goal.

goalie

2005-02-16T17:02:00.000-08:00

My cold is almost an ex-cold, and yet I have still not managed to make it back to the gym. Where is my vim? Where is my vigor? Where is my whenceforth and heretofore? Also, I just ate a snickers bar. Can a ham be far behind?

I feel like a ham. A big greasy deep-fried one.

It is astonishing to me, how easy it is to fall out of good habits – one small step to the side, one brief break, and there is suddenly so much to catch up on, it is frightening, and it seems hard, just impossibly so.

I tell myself I am working my way back slowly – I bought a pair of workout pants to replace the scary faded capris I've been wearing – the ones that are super, super sexy with the scrunched-down knee socks and sneakers. I finally brought my extra brush in, to tuck into my gym bag, because the post-shower wild and crazy look was not winning me many admirers at work. And I remembered to put my flip flops back in with my gear, because I do not want to grow interesting and varied funguses in the course of showering.

Baby steps. Little tiny ones. With all the requisite splatting and thumping and wailing.

What I need to do is make goals. Here is me making goals. As soon as I figure out what they are, I'll get back to you.

(I think my first goal should be "snickers have vitamins." Wait. That's not really a goal, is it. This is going to be harder than I thought.)

we ate and ate and ate and our hearts were happy

2005-02-15T16:21:00.000-08:00

What is more romantic than meat on a stick? Nothing. Nothing in the world is more romantic than meat on a stick, unless it is the sick feeling you wake up with the next morning, because of all the sticks full of meat you stuck in your face.

Ow.

So yesterday was Valentine's Day. And I liked it. I have always liked Valentine's Day, single and coupled, and single but sort of coupled and coupled but sort of single and pretty much in every permutation of relationshipness that there is. Because it is about love, and love is grand. I enjoy the lingerie parts of Valentine's Day, and also I call my mom and generally try to spread the joy like cream-cheese frosting with little sparkly bits on top.

My favorite part of Valentine's Day, though, is how food is love, and I love food and so does Guy (Captain Fancy Cook himself, natch) and so we decided that fondue was the only way to go. Because who doesn't love fondue? Communists, that's who.

I looked hot. I wore a dress, and, get this – slacks under the dress. And I looked hot. Not lumpy or weird or freaky. But stylin'. Without the g, so you know that it's serious. And we cooed and were lovey-dovey and were very, very funny (we are very very funny) and we ate fondue.

Fondue is funny. Fondue is food on sticks with a lot of dipping and poking and assembling and fiddling and the laughing at the dipping and poking and assembling and fiddling and the cheese that flew everywhere and the vegetable broth that splattered and the beautiful, beautiful dark chocolate that I almost just leaned over and just put my face in it. I would have been happy to spend all of Valentine's Day with my face buried in a pot of dark chocolate fondue.

The other thing about fondue is that is it expensive. It is a lot of money. It is all the money. It is a heart-stopping amount of money for food that comes in pots that you have to cook your goddamn self. We do the work and they reap the profit? That seems like cold, hard business sense right there. And I suspect that their profit margins are enormous, because you don't use half your dipping potatoes and mushrooms (though you definitely use all the bread) and so on because you are too busy making for damn sure that each bite you put in your mouth is loaded up with all the cheese a single tiny potato (or mushroom, or bread) can hold, so they take your potatoes and your mushrooms and your wide and varied assortment of sauces and garnishes back to the kitchen, and they repurpose. That means "serves your cooties to the next table."

The last thing about fondue is that it is a lot of fucking food. You do not think that it's a lot of food, because you are eating it from sticks and sticks do not hold a lot at one time, but when you've et and et and et and et some tiny filets of beef and chunks of chicken and prawns and you feel slightly sick, as if there is a towering stack in your stomach pushing up against your esophagus and shuddering with every breath you take and then you look at that platter and realize you have to keep eating until you are dead if you want to finish your platter of meat for which you have pledged the equivalent of city college tuition for an underprivileged youngster, you suddenly find yourself thinking wow. that is a lot of fucking food.

I am cheap and trashy, because I asked for it to go. Sandwiches!

We were creakingly, achingly full by the second course, but there was that chocolate fondue thing and we ate all of the chocolate fondue and sort of cried gently in our napkins and hated ourselves until the server came by with the big sexy check.

And then we stumbled home via taxi and crawled into bed and choked back the bile a little bit when we switched on the television and a lovingly filmed steak blossomed into full color on the screen and quickly switched over to the Cartoon Network, because nothing says romance like falling asleep to Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Except meat on a stick.

pb&gah

2005-02-11T14:40:00.000-08:00

I have spent the past month – has it been a month that I've been ostensibly been on a diet? – eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I enjoy peanut butter, and I am a fan of jam, and together, they make beautiful love on top of squooshy and deliciously carby honey wheat bread, but after you've had one for breakfast and then – ehhhh, I don't know what else to make and I don't have time so I'll make one for lunch, and then you get home and you are tired and just want to crawl into bed with a book and a cat on your head, and you think – ehhhh, I don't have time for water to boil, I'll just make a sandwich, with hey! Peanut butter and raspberry preserves! Woo! I'll mix it up like a crazy person! Well, you get tired. Very, very tired.

Peanut butter, I am breaking up with you. But I can't! But I have to. But oh god, I can't! You are easy, and you are delicious, and I am wretchedly, wretchedly lazy.

I think I'm broken.

There is something soothing about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for every meal. Not just the homey simplicity of it, the callback to childhood and a more innocent time and milk mustaches and cartoons. Not that I've ever stopped watching cartoons.

It is also the fact that it takes approximately thirty seconds and not a whole lot of skill to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the ingredients, they are cheap and plentiful on the ground, so to speak, and I know the caloric points kind of count of each and every piece of that little portable meal which I have created, with no estimating or guesstimating or eyeballing.

It is five points, filling, sweet and a little bit salty, crunchy, perfect, delicious, and I think I am going to kill myself if I make another one.

But I am scared to move away from the safe world of peanut butter and jelly. On any of the weight watchers plans, on any of the diet plans, you can eat anything. At any time! Kind of. The world is your oyster! Within reason. But even though there are strictures and guidelines, it's too much. Too much freedom! Dizzy, dizzy, delirious freedom.

If I were a very rich person who was also nauseatingly spoiled, by god I would have a personal chef, and the chef would tell me what to eat and I would be happy. I would not stress and panic and worry and things would be easy and birds would sing and the hallelujah chorus would break into beatboxing joy.

Not being rich or spoiled, I frantically search for guidelines, boundaries, a tiny little box in which to lock myself. I tried to look up the Discovery challenge, uh, challenge, in hopes that there was a meal plan, but they only shouted at me with exclamation points. I've looked up diet sites, but they've only popped up at me and offered to count my calories. What calories! I shrieked. What calories should I be putting in my mouth! I sobbed.

I heard about Oprah's boot camp and thought that that sounded promising! Very promising! Oprah, she would tell me what to do. Her giant head is very comforting. But all it says on her site is some nonsense about no bread and blah blah protein and blah blah I KNOW BY GOD. Please, please just give me a meal plan?

I spent the week looking for the paper copy of the magazine, in hope, in hope, in hope, but no luck. No hope, either.

This morning, for breakfast, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I will get my act together. I just – I have to work through this feeling of paralysis, this sense that there's too much information, too much coming at me and too little time to process, and what if I don't process it right?

It is depressing that I do not trust myself – but you know, trusting that what I wanted to put in my face was fine, just fine! That's what got me to a place where I am not fine, just not so fine at all. I have everything to relearn, which I am doing slowly, but it's going to take a long time before I trust my instincts again, before I can do this on my own.

Hold me, Oprah.

with the ow and the sobbing

2005-02-09T13:41:00.000-08:00

Only this morning did I muster the energy to scoop up the wads of tissues that lie scattered around the apartment like dandelions on a beautiful grassy field, and other metaphors that make you forget that these are nasty, snotty tissues I'm talking about, here.

Only this morning was I able to stand up in the shower and lean my head against the wall and moan piteously, rather than sit on the floor of the tub with my head on my knees and the shower beating against my neck while I moaned piteously.

Only last night was I able to sleep more than an hour at a time, and I didn't have any of those awful "oh my god, I'm suffocating!" dreams that I have whenever I score myself a rotten head cold.

However, my nose is still chapped and painful and red, my tongue is dry because of all the awesome mouthbreathing I've been doing, my ears still feel as if they are stuffed with wadded up balls of sticky cheese (or beautiful fat and fluffy bunnies, if you'd prefer a metaphor that doesn't make you think about sinuses and mucus), and I want to just die already and obviously, I still haven't gotten over feeling sorry for myself.

And what the fuck is up with all this sneezing?

So obviously I haven't been to the gym in a week or so. And that's okay, because it's not like I've been eating or anything. But I cannot get over how awful I feel – not just this hideous head cold which is worse than any head cold I've ever or anyone ever else in the whole history of head colds has ever had and I am not exaggerating because I feel sorry for myself because I totally don't – but how sluggish I feel, and sploogy and splorky and gross.

That could be because it appears that all of my living cells have been replaced with little balls of cold goo, but I think it's also because my metabolism has slowed down so much it is going backwards, and everything I put in my body is staying there and can I take a nap, now? Just a little one? I'll just rest my eyes and – okay, fine.

I am actually looking forward to eating food that isn't like, toast (with butter! For lubrication) or soup, or toast with a side of soup, or toast soup, and I am looking forward to being back in the gym. Sort of. Because I have a feeling that a week away means my level of fitness is not going to be a pretty sight.

In the meantime, I will just lie here until the crows come and peck out the jelly of my eyeballs, thanks.

true love

2005-02-03T16:05:00.000-08:00

My iPod. My iPod! It arrived. It's SHINY.

shinyshinyshinyshinyshinySHINY. SHINY!

I think I love it. Maybe just a little bit.

Because I am not weird and obsessed, I am not going to name it. And I am not going to sleep with it. I will not tuck it into a little knitted cozy, and keep it by my side and love it and squeeze it and call it George. Because I already swore I wouldn't name it.

But man, it's been really, really hard to not lick it.

rewards

2005-02-02T15:31:00.000-08:00

I bought myself an iPod because I am so wiggety-wack. Unless "wiggedy wack" is a bad thing. Which it might be. In that case, I am not wiggety wack. I just rule.

Right. So I bought myself an iPod to say to myself "Self. You rule. With your gym-going. And here is the way I say thank you and keep up the good work!" The iPod will help me keep going, see, because if I have Energizing Music to listen to, I will Go! Go! Go!

Go!

That's pretty clever of me, don't you think? I think so.

I ordered it a long while ago (only because I felt it would be a valuable tool in my continuing fitness success)(Shiny shiny shiny!) and then I started checking my order status – well, pretty much immediately, eight or eleven times a day. And then only eight times a day, and then only a couple of times a day, and then only every other day, and then I forgot about it.

Hahaha! No I didn't.

But I've had this little iPod-shaped hole in my heart for, man, almost a month, now? As I've been waiting and waiting and waiting. And waiting. And then, I got an email. And the email said "your order has shipped!"

And so I've spent the entire day refreshing the UPS tracking site. That little iPod shaped hole in my heart has started throbbing and tingling and aching as my little iPod gets closer and closer and I think, in the middle of all my refreshing, I forgot to go to the gym today. Whoops.

oh, hell

2005-02-02T09:13:00.000-08:00

I kept waiting for someone to come barrelling into the bathroom, shrieking "STOP!" I kept waiting for someone to tell me "you know, this is a really, really bad idea." I kept waiting to believe the little voice in my head that was cowering in the corner with its hands over its eyes going "Oh man. Oh, man, I can't look."

But that never happened. And so I cut my own bangs. They were in my eyes! They were floppy, and stupid, and driving me nuts! What was I supposed to do, spend seventy five dollars on a bang trim? Okay, fine. Maybe. But there I was. Snip. Snipsnip. Snipsnipsnipsnip.

Oh, shit.

You'd think I'd listen to the second group of voices that said "okay, like, maybe you should leave well enough alone?"

"Choppy" is in, right?

cracker jacks are a very good snack

2005-02-01T16:35:00.000-08:00

but where the hell are the peanuts?

This is bullshit, man. Fsh.

p.s. send ham.

embarrassed

2005-02-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

On my first week of the Diet Thing, I lost 3.6 pounds. This is a great thing! A thing of which I am proud. I worked hard, and I ate goodlike, and I earned every one of those pounds and fractions of pounds, huzzah.

And I called up my best friend on my cell phone, on my way back from the meeting, and I found myself whispering about it.

"Hey!" I said. "Hey! Guess what? I lost three point six pounds." My jaw was all clenched, and I think I was trying to not move my lips in case there were lip readers near by.

"What?" he said, crunching something that was probably not carrot sticks. I sighed.

"I SAID I lost three point six pounds!"

"You did what to the pound?" Crunch.

"I am doing the thing, right, that I told you about?"

"What thing?"

"The thing. You know! Where I am being, uh, less."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

I was calling someone with my great news, my excellent news, my news of which I should be proud, and I could not just come out and say it, in public, because I was embarrassed. Embarrassed. I was afraid someone would overhear, and look me up and down, and say to themselves "good luck, fat chick."

This is something that I've been struggling with, in its permutations, forever. I almost never come out and admit (and look at me say "admit!" all unconsciously like that) that I am on a diet, that I am going to the gym and trying to be a Healthier Me. As if it's a ridiculous thing for someone who is overweight to bother, as if I have become the living embodiment (ha ha! that was a pun! Sigh) or the poster child for pipe dreams. As if it is a sad thing for someone who is overweight to try to do something about it.

I think about it every time I am at the gym, pounding the Precor (does anyone think this is funny?), and every time I am in line at the grocery store, with my pile of vegetables and weight watchers delicious ice cream dessert treats (does anyone think this is sad?) and every time I walk into a clothing store (does anyone wonder why I bother?).

God, I do it when I meet someone new, when I'm afraid that whomever it is is worried that the fat chick will take a shine to them – I make a point to bring up Guy. To say, metaphorically, I am not interested in you, do not worry!

Jesus.

And I'm not really sure what I can do about it. I'm not sure there's a whole lot to be done – it's hard, living inside a body you are not friends with, and fucked up, living inside a body image that is so fraught with unpleasant associations you've made up yourself, and the unpleasant prejudices that sure, exist – you see them everywhere – but you can't help assigning them, willy-nilly to everyone you meet, unfairly and not.

I am new to this weight loss blog thing – I did not realize it was a cottage industry until I started my own, started reading just a fraction of the ones that are already out there, started getting your really wonderful comments which man, are so appreciated – this is a community kind of thing and it amazes me as I sort of situate myself in it and get settled in. Everyone is brave and strong talking about their bodies and their struggles and their successes and posting pictures and stats and I admire that and I can't do it.

I cannot tell you I started off weighing this, and now I weigh this. I can't post a picture of me looking a way I wish I never did. I can't be honest about it, even here in the anonymity of my website. Does that ever go away? I hope it goes away. I hate that it probably won't go away until I lose weight – that I can't be comfortable here, where I am, how I am.

calculations

2005-01-28T10:38:00.000-08:00

Moist and delicious homemade carrot cake. Mounds of rich and creamery cream-cheese frosting. A delicate sprinkling of chopped walnuts.

Two, two and a half points, right?

moving

2005-01-25T15:25:00.000-08:00

I used to live down the street from a corner store. I was on one corner, and the store, it was on the other corner. Which is why we called it the corner store, I imagine.

We used to do our grocery shopping at the corner store, me and my roommate, because we were very lazy people who disliked hiking a mile and a half all the way to the honest-to-goodness grocery store, trudging through the aisles, and then staggering back under the weight of all our beer (and maybe a couple of boxes of mac and cheese) back home. That was a waste of energy and resources!

Many small one-block trips were far more economical (if slightly less efficient) than one massive rush there and back, and we were content to never actually have any real food in the house, because the cells of college students are designed to operate on florescent lighting, Doritos, second hand smoke and Budweiser. All of which can be obtained at your handy, and also dandy, corner store.

So we were lazy and we were college students, and those things are frequently things that go hand in hand, but it was okay, because I was young, resilient, and could eat quarter pounders wrapped in gorditas, and be plenty plenty healthy. I assumed. I eschewed green things and walking because those were things that took effort and effort sucked.

I thought effort sucked so much, that I would whine when it was time to go stock up on cheetos and weird green Spanish candy.

"I don't want to go!" I would say. "It is too far."

"It's a block," my roommate would say, reasonably.

"It's a very far block."

"It's a block. It's a two minute walk."

"Two minutes is long! One block is far! Let's take the bus."

"IT'S A BLOCK. WE ARE NOT TAKING THE BUS A BLOCK."

And I would be very, very sad. Because I wanted to take the bus a block. Or better yet, teleport. If only I could have teleported. Instead, I shuffled. In a very, very sad way.

I am happy to report that on my birthday, my roommate took me downstairs, handed me a token, and we took the bus to the corner store that day. It was forty-five minutes round trip. It was also one of the best goddamn moments of my life.

So you see, I kind of hate exercise, is my point. I hate exercise and effort. Less so than when I was a deadbeat college student, admittedly. I have never again taken the bus a block. I have even, on occasion, taken the stairs instead of the elevator and other exciting "work exercise into your daily life!" tips you get from women's lifestyle magazines. I am not a slug.

But I still kind of hate exercise.

Which is why I would like to know who am I, and what have I done with the real me, because this weird stepford person that has inhabited my butt has been working it off like a sunovabitch, and she is liking it.

She is liking the sweat and the pain and the feeling of absolute exhilaration and the way she feels wrung out and thrilled and proud and like a bad ass – no, not a bad ass, a BAD ASS after every workout, how she loves to wipe the sweat from her forehead and grin at herself in the mirror and just love the fuck out of her body because of what it can do, how it can carry her, how she can push it and it can push back and back and this is the kind of thing a body is made for, and she is grateful that this is the kind of thing she can do.

Though she still really fucking hates showering at the gym.

now you're cooking with gas

2005-01-22T15:24:00.000-08:00

Guy Incognito, my boyfriend kind of person and all-around swell fellow, tells me I can cook.

"You can cook," he says.

No, I can't, I tell him.

"I totally can't," I say.

I can follow a recipe in a competent way that does not result in blood poisoning for blocks around, but he is the cook in the family. He can look at my pantry with its crumpled plastic bag with three beans in, a hunk of four-day-old cheese, and a handful of oatmeal and create a gourmet meal that is nutritious, delicious, and makes me want to jump him.

He spends twenty minutes in the kitchen and then swoops into the living room to set a fancy plate in front of me, and I say "Gosh, I could have sworn I didn't have sirloin tips in the house. Pass me the caviar-enrobed foie gras?"

He's kind of a miracle worker.

Me, though. I am faced with the flotsam and jetsam of my pantry, the end result of a shopping trip that had me flying down the aisles, scooping up things that sounded like they'd be the key ingredient in some exciting dish which I would create out of thin air, but in the cold harsh reality of my kitchen, make no sense.

I look in the cabinet, hungry, growly, and bereft, and I am forced to say to myself, excuse me, self? Self? Hello, self! Hi. Yes. Here is a question for you, and I think it is a very good question. What on earth possessed you to buy canned asparagus? Because asparagus, in a can? That's kind of nasty. And excuse me, but when have you ever eaten a cannelli bean? And you know, I'm pretty sure you have never in your life employed cornstarch, and when have you ever been moved to add water chestnuts to a dish? That's right – never. And you know wha- ooh, pickles!

Crunch.

What I'm trying to say, here, is that I am not so much an iron chef. But I can order in Thai like a motherfucker.

What appeals to me about the Core plan is that it feels kind of like Weight Watchers for grownups. There's no counting on your fingers and spending a whole day eating hot chocolate mix right out of the packet and spoonfuls of frosting and because you came in under points, you still had an awesomely awesome day, oh no.

Which is actually kind of awesome, now that I think about it.

On Core you are eating Wholesome, Unprocessed Whole Foods and Grains, Lean Proteins, and Good Fats (can you tell I read the little book? I read the hell out of that little book). Which of course is so nutritious, and so good for you! Hooray!

The problem is that Wholesome, Unprocessed Whole Foods rarely come in handy plastic trays, wrapped in burritos that are frozen, or on the menu of your local chain fast food restaurant, or on a Thai menu from which I can order the fuck out of. Core means planning and shopping and cooking. And planning means angst and shopping means irritation and cooking means crying – but just a little! tiny, tiny tears – in my house.

So Core was starting to look, for awhile, like maybe heating up a can of beans and poking a fork into it. This one's for the gipper! (where gipper = a happy and healthy me – (happy x self pity)).

Except, you know, I am not doing this in a glorious quest for a brand new body which I will never have and some kind of imaginary unlimited superhotness which will make all the problems in my life go poof! And happiness come strolling down my walkway, whistling a cheerful tune, oh no.

Okay, fine, that's part of it. I am allowed my fantasies, okay?

I am doing this really and true because I want health. I quit smoking (even though I looked really kind of sexy when I smoked) for health, and I am going to the gym five days a week and kicking my goddamn ass for health, and I am going to plan and shop and cook, by god, for my health. And also imaginary unlimited superhotness. And oh yeah, health.

love

2005-01-21T17:06:00.000-08:00

Examining myself in the mirror, as we get ready to go to a party:

Me: My god. This shirt makes my rack look huge!

Him (happily): I KNOW!

coring

2005-01-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

Today I celebrated my return to the weight watchers program -- selecting to follow the Core program in which you avoid processed foods and sugars and most starches and instead, like a baby bunny, focus on whole foods like big orange carrots and bloody (lean! lean!) steaks -- by counting Points.

My point (ah ha ha ha!) is that I did not so much do the Core plan when I realized that at the core of doing the Core plan hardcore is planning. Seriously. You can't be grabbing yourself a muffin (sugar! processed!) or pouring yourself a bowl of cereal (starch!) or a breakfast bar (pure processed sugar and starch!) for breakfast on the "go" -- you need to be cooking yourself wholesome things like big messes of eggs, or polenta, or a potato. Or, uh, something.

Part of the planning may involve reading the little book they give you.

I've done the points thing, before (where, for the unitiated in the arterial blood of small underweight religious lambs at midnight that occurs after you sign your weight watchers member form and then "accidentally" prick your finger and bleed all over the contract whoops, was that a jagged piece of glass we handed you with your pen, ma'am and or sir?), foods are assigned points values and you can eat a certain number of points in one day, in any combination of foods you want (but, they hope, most of those foods are not buckets of chicken and ice cream cones with fudge on) and I'm good at it. I even have points values memorized for Foods I Enjoy and Turn To in the Dark of the Night.

Do you know you can spend the whole day eating potato chips and still lose weight? It's because you lose all your hair, I think.

So I did studiously and with great care note everything I put in my mouth, just exactly when I put it in. I noted two (2) slices of whole wheat bread (2 pts) and one (1) tablespoon of peanut butter (2 pts) and two (2) more slices of bread (2 pts) and one (1) more tablespoon of peanut butter (2 pts) and heck, why not one (1) tablespoon of strawberry jam (1 pt) and how about some coffee (0 pts) with a splash of skim milk (1 pt) and ALL THE SUGAR IN THE okay one (1) tablespoon AND CAN I PLEASE STOP SEEING NUMBERS EVERYWHERE I LOOK PLEASE OH MY GOD.

Points is easy! Except I hate math.

Next week, I will go on Core. Core does not have math. Core has, like, polenta. And, uh, bulgur. And I think pie (1 slice, 9 pts) is a fruit and fruits, like, don't even count! Core rules.

not watching

2005-01-18T15:28:00.000-08:00

What I did was go to weight watchers at work!(tm) and what I did there was get on the scale. And then sit for the 45 minute meeting with the horrible shrieky woman who laughs at her own jokes, a high and shrill noise that rises and rises and then drops off suddenly, and then there's this sigh, this little satisfied sigh as if there just isn't anything better in the world than one of her jokes, mmmahhhyes.

For the forty five minutes, though, I was not really thinking about her and how much I hate her or how weird it is to be sitting at a table full of fat people, all of us fat and all of us furtively hoping we are not the fattest in the room, and how unpleasant it was to not be eating a ham, thirteen snickers bars and your mother for breakfast any more and daydream about the cute clothes I was going to be wearing when, next week, I arrive back at the scale having lost all of my weight in one magic swoop.

What I was thinking about is how I had gained exactly 20 pounds since September. Twenty! 20! XX. A lot of weight, in a little time. What the hell is wrong with me? And don't you bring up the ham, which is only a funny thing I made up anyway (the 13 snickers bars, though - so true).

This is bad. Though you have to wonder how much I would have gained if I hadn't been going to the gym every workday. My god. My god. Oh, the plorkosity.

Tomorrow I will be totally Core. Tonight, it's pork lo mein for dinner.

then the future came and took my dreams away

2005-01-13T19:16:00.000-08:00

Back when my ex was way fat, and trying to get buff for all sorts of complicated reasons, he decided the way to do it, without expending any effort at all, was via The Atkins Plan. Because on the Atkins Plan, you could eat bacon, and butter, and bacon fried in butter, and bacon fried in butter with pats of butter on top, and steak and butter-fried steak, and you know, so on. Also, so forth.

And he lost weight. I am not entirely sure how he lost weight, because he was eating entire packages of bacon, and deep-fried butter on sticks, and his eschewing of vegetables as prescribed by crazy not-right-thinking Dr. “Crazy not-right-thinking” Atkins was a thing of beauty to behold in its stringent adhered-ness.

I can see the benefit of being careful with carbs – you know, refined sugar and white bread and things that are probably not so great for you. But the strict crazy not-right-thinking kind of Atkins that my ex was following was just – well, you know. See above, re: crazy and not-right thinking.

But again – he lost weight. And I thought, oh my god. I want to eat bacon and lose weight. Because bacon! Bacon, for Christ sake. Any diet that includes bacon is the kind of diet that I’m going to jump both-footed into.

We didn’t do it in any sane and rational way, either. We could have stuck with skim milk and lean protein, but no – no, we started eating eggs scrambled with pure creamery cream and fried in butter and eating steak and sausage and all sorts of noxious things, which was kind of awesome for awhile. Because have I mentioned the bacon? And oh my god – the cheese. The beautiful, beautiful cheese. And you know how fat tastes good. Goddamn, does it taste good.

I theorized that the point of the full-fledged Atkins (theorized, because I wasn’t actually going to sit down and read the book, which was painfully written and poorly printed) was that fat is satisfying and you would not eat as much full-fat stuff as you would its poor low-fat cousin.

That theory was blown all to hell by the way he ate. And it was blown all to hell by the way I enjoyed omelets with way more eggs than I am willing to admit in a public space and handfuls of cheeses.

But somehow, after a month, I had dropped twelve pounds, except I was feeling gross. Really gross. Kind of oily, and like I was going “squish squish squish” as I walked. Squish. I felt greasy, and I knew if the house didn’t stop stinking like grease, I was going to burn it down (“Whoops! Must have been a grease fire! Hahahaha! Sorry.”).

There is some point in Atkins where you stop being so strict about vegetables, but I stopped before that point. He, however, kept on going. As far as I know, he is now skinny and dead of a heart attack. Or not. I’m not really sure.

But I do know, that I was sitting in the House of Prime Rib with my visiting relatives, one of whom does not eat anything but mashed potatoes from a box, spaghetti with “tomato sauce, not ‘marinara or whatever’” and steak, and looking at the House of Prime Rib menu and realizing there was nothing - no, really, nothing, I’m serious – on the menu that in any way conformed to any rational weight watchers kind of plan, this menu with only steak fried in butter and creamed spinach, I took small and possibly ironic comfort in the fact that if I were on Atkins, I would be so goddamn on plan I should get some kind of goddamn medal.

diet tip

2005-01-12T15:48:00.000-08:00

Here is a Diet Tip from me to you:

Manage your money very, very poorly. So poorly, you cannot go grocery shopping, and you are forced to subsist on beans and brown rice and the smell of pizza parlors when you walk by.

Subsisting on beans and rice and the smell of pizza parlors equals weight loss success! In kind of an unpleasant way. And if you define "success" as "the result of deprivation, and feeling kind of stupid because you managed your money very, very poorly."

When I get paid on Saturday, I am buying a ham.

shift, tectonic

2005-01-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

My body has changed – not just the way your body tends to change when you gain weight and head so far away from fitness that it is just a tiny little blob on the horizon. No, the shape of my body has changed, the feel of it, the topography. It’s changed in a way that I sense will be permanent, no matter how much weight I ever lose, and I’ve started to mourn that.

I am never going to look like an After picture on one of those late night bowflex infomercials. I am never going to have the perfect body I never had to begin with, even back before I was overweight. I am never going to feel comfortable naked, or in my own skin – I will always be far too aware of my flaws (and I am always far too aware of all my flaws, almost every moment). And that makes me just unbelievably sad. So I’ve started a savings account – tummy tuck, ahoy!

That was a joke. What I’ve actually done is try to shrug it off, as much as I can, and concentrate not just on the I Will Be So Very Hot aspects of getting the goddamned weight off, but on the heart-healthy, energy-gifting, supercharged I Am A Badass kinds of aspects, which were always a part of my wanting to get out of the plus-sized zone. I swear. Though I admit that wanting to look good? That’s always been the top of the list. I am a little bit ashamed of that. Someday, when I grow up, I will not be so shallow. But I’ll also be skinny, so it works out pretty okay.

But the going to the gym I’ve been doing has already started to shift me that way – I’ve started thinking less about how I look in my goofy gym clothes and whether my stomach sticks out and if I look like the cliché of the huffy puffy fat girl on the precor while I do my workouts, and I am so much more conscious of how goddamn good I feel while I push through the hard parts of the workout, how awesome it is to kick my own ass up and down and sideways and emerge kind of scathed, but feeling exhilarated. I had no idea it was possible to feel tired yet exhilarated after a workout. But check me the fuck out.

In a haze of exhilaration, I seriously considered, this weekend (my weekend being Sunday and Monday, and the days I usually take off from the gym) checking out that serenity yoga class and a body-sculpting class, but a cuddly boyfriend dropping by the first night and a little bit of laziness took care of the second; however, I did manage to eat a lot of junk, with the idea that I am going to go back to weight watchers tomorrow, when the weight watchers at work program restarts, with all manner of fat people from all over campus joining forces to not be fat no more, go us.

I have the booklet and the slider and all the various accoutrements (I always have to say that the faux-French way, because it makes me laugh. Ah coo tra mohn, oui oui) that you get when you join yourself up, but I am thinking that maybe spending cash and maybe sitting in a room with a bunch of people who have Awesome Lo-Points Ideas for Nutritious and Delicious Lunches!!!! will be in some way inspiring. Annoying, but inspiring.

Here is where all the talk of accountability and responsibility goes, irritating me, because aren’t I old enough to be accountable to myself and responsible for my own well-being? You’d think so. You’d be totally wrong, but you’d think so.

My body’s changed significantly, but the way I feel about it has changed, too. Going back to weight watchers, what I’m thinking about, I just realized, is not “going on a diet will make me skinny!” but “doing weight watchers will help me figure out what food is good for me! And what food will help me work out!” And that is such an amazing shift in my thinking, I cannot even tell you. Accountability to myself and responsibility for my health might even be on the horizon. Huzzah.

serenity

2005-01-09T17:09:00.000-08:00

Today was one of those days where I felt strangely accomplished and efficient, a really good kind of day, even though I really didn't do very much at all – but everything I did do was something I had planned to do, and it's always nice to slice things right off your list, zwick zwick zwick, all efficiently, even if those things are stuff like "drop off package at Post Office" (there's one open on Sunday here! That is a thing that is kind of beautiful) and "wander around flea market" and "try a Chantico(TM) from Starbucks.

Oh, Chantico(TM). It's like drinking god, if god came in a tiny little paper cup, and made you both want a glass of water to clear out the phlegm (because god, is it thick and pasty) and also feel a little dirty. You know, I don't usually associate god with phlegm, and so I might have to reconsider my on-the-fly analogy, here. Chocolate phleghm is less appetizing than you might imagine.

It apparently has every calorie ever, and most of the fat, however, crammed into a six ounce cup, which just doesn't seem right. Though I've spent most of the day hiking around Bernal Heights and through the Mission (with brief stops to fondle things that are pretty and not in my price range, but with plenty of deep sighs which I understand are good for you, cardiovascularly), telling myself the whole way that all the walking was clearly working off those 21 grams of fat, I can't help but think that the Chantico(TM) is currently lodged firmly in my ass and will remain there for all time

Also, my heart's still screaming.

In about an hour, I've got to make a decision about heading back out into the weather to take a Serenity Yoga class. By weather I thankfully do not mean the rain that's been plaguing the city for the past eleven years, but the chill. The chill! I am a princess, and I cannot take the chill! Or maybe I am a lazy sumbitch. So far, crawling into bed (at five o'clock in the afternoon) and pulling the comforter all the way up to my chin and reading is what's sounding pretty fine to me. "Serenity yoga" sounds pretty goofy anyway. I'll get my serenity the old-fashioned way – I think I've got a nice bottle of pinot in the wine rack.

you say you want a resolution

2005-01-08T15:17:00.000-08:00

You know what I did over the holidays? Over my break from this journal and my break from work and school? You'll never guess! Unless you guessed "got wicked fat, man." Because that is what I did. Also, I took up smoking. I know! I never claimed to be bright.

So all through most of November

(Thanksgiving, you know. Time off from work equals time off from the gym because the gym is at work and getting on a bus to go to the gym at work on my holiday? That's madness! That's craziness! That's the pumpkin pie talking. Please pass the bottle of wine, some figgy pudding, and also a ham. Thank you)

and then all through December

(Hannukwaanzamas and the New Year and the parties and the pie and the more pie and the pudding and the wine and the cookies and the cake, none of which I could turn down because what if I never not ever ever again got offered another chocolate chip cookie after I turned this one down and spent the rest of my life regretting that moment until I withered away and finally died, bereft, friendless, cookieless, strapped to a bed in a roach-addled nursing home? Then I'd be sorry. Also, the gym closed for the week between Christmas and New Year's day and what was I supposed to do? Go outside and walk or something! You are a very funny person. Now pass me a ham)

what I did was eat everything that made me happy, and what I drank was everything that made me happy, and what I did was sit on my butt.

That is not a "winning weight loss equation." It's a "wow, this is totally the fucking life, man! equation," but apparently the answer to "the fucking life" is "gaining ten pounds, or something like it." I am not sure exactly how much I gained, but I have a shadow under my chin that is totally not a double chin or anything and if you press the issue, I am going to goddamn cry.

But the whole time, I can defend myself, I said "self! You are doing these bad things to yourself. But come the New Year, all in initial caps like that, you're cutting this shit out." And I said sir yes sir! and took a drag of my cigarette and washed down a bonbon with a bottle of wine and then injected pure heroin right into my eyeball.

That's not much of a defense, really, now that I think about it.

And yet, here it is, eight days into the new year, and I am a living cliche of New Year Resolutionisticalness. I have not placed a cigarette to my lips, and I am five days in on kicking my own ass at the gym every work day. The weight loss setting on the Precor is a motherfucker, let me tell you.

As for the bonbons (and ham and pudding and ham pudding and etcetera) – a couple things at a time, okay?

being naked at the gym

2004-11-19T16:28:00.000-08:00

With some tweaking and some experimenting, it turns out that I really fucking hate going to the gym after work when it is dark and the place is crowded and smells like dog and taking the bus home in the dark and getting home late and starving and wanting to eat everything that is in the world, and then everything else besides and I eat all my leftover Chinese food and then start thinking about the leftover Turkish from last week I forgot to throw out and I consider sticking my finger in a packet of dry cinnamon sugar oatmeal and licking it off and my cat, he starts to look plump and delicious.

So no gym after work.

And it turns out I can't get up an hour earlier in the morning. I can't do it. It is not a thing that is possible, when you've got a bed that is as soft and comfortable as mine, and pillows that are as fluffy as mine, and sheets that are as silky as mine, and a boyfriend who is as warm as mine, and a cat to motherfucking spite because he does not need to be smacking me in the face for twenty minutes straight because he only has a fourth of a bowl of kibble left and that is next to starvation and DOOM.

DOOM.

So no gym before work.

That leaves, if you're doing the math along at home, gym during work. Since I work on a university campus, there is a gym right next door to my office, and I am lucky to be able to take a lunch break and do this, bim, bam, efficiency in sweating, and then hopping into the shower.

It's the hopping into the shower thing that has been awful. The days I was going after work, I didn't even head into the locker room. I dropped my stuff next to the treadmill or the bike or the elliptical, and I swat (that is the past tense of "sweat) and then I shot out of there like a light. When I go in the afternoon, I do not want to go back to work sweaty, and so I do the whole get a lock, get a locker, stuff your stuff into the locker thing, and that means going into the locker room (which is where they keep their lockers) and that means I have to see a lot of naked people.

The human body is a beautiful and glorious thing in all its imperfections, but you know what? I do not feel comfortable in a room full of beautiful and glorious naked ones, perfect or no. I don't want to look at your ass, lady who is bending over at the end of the row, and oh my god, are you doing squats in the aisle? and I am sure your husband quite admires your lush and luxuriant pubal regions, madam, but could you please not brush it in front of the mirror in front of the door to the bathroom, because oh my god.

I do not like running on a treadmill (okay, jogging slowly as all my extremities sort of wiggle in a horrifying slo-motion Jell-O commercial) next to someone who looks perfectly normal, and then find out they like to cram their index fingers in their ear and piston it furiously while they march up and down the corridor between the shower room and the lockers. I do not like it at all.

I avert my eyes, I try so hard to not look at other people, but sometimes you catch a glimpse, against everything you've prayed for, and there is just nothing you can do but shudder.

But that's standard I Hate the Locker Room behavior, isn't it? Even less appealing, I've found, is being naked in front of all these people. I hate changing in front of people so much that I get into my gym clothes in the bathroom here at work before I head over to the gym. But I can't shower and then put my sweaty clothes back on, and I can't wear a towel across campus to the safety of my office bathroom. And marching into the bathrooms from the shower is almost as long a walk. So there are moments, in the locker room, where I am exposing my highly imperfect body

And no one cares, right? No one is looking, and no one cares about your body and no one is judging, so what the hell? But there is that five minutes of flushing with complete and total shame, while I hurry out of my gym clothes and wrap that towel around me and try to hold my gym bag in a way that hides me the most, and I wonder, the whole time (even more and more intensely than I do when I'm out in the gym and wondering if I look stupid, a fat girl trying to run on a treadmill) if these women – so many of them gorgeous college kids - are looking at me and wondering what the fuck I'm doing here, and why should I bother?

I am happy to say I'm still bothering. I am still going and the more I go the easier it gets. And also, I have been building a routine of efficiency and order, so that everything is perfectly aligned and all the steps fall into place and I keep my head down, get in, get out, and with as little nakedness as possible.

bang, bang

2004-11-17T13:19:00.000-08:00

I don't look good in bangs. Every time I cut bangs into my hair, I cry a little bit, looking at the mirror, and then I swear to all that is good and all that is holy and all that is good and holy that I will never, never, ever, never ever ever again, not ever, cut bangs into my hair because I look like an asshole in bangs.

Which is why, last night, I got bangs cut into my hair. Because I am stupid. But I had this vision in my head, of how different and cool my hair was going to look. Short spiky bangs and shaggy shoulder-length layers and hip coolness, all around. Coolness, hipness, a way to mark my transformation into A Healthy Person. Or maybe I'm just vain and was tired of my old hair wanted to be cute.

But I am so not cute. The hairstylist listened very carefully to my ideas about what I wanted, and then she ignored them all. My hair used to be really long, down below my shoulder blades. It used to be all one length, and it used to be wavy. This hair, this stupid hair I don't recognize, is not that much shorter, but much thinner because she razor cut it in the most bizarre patterns, and it waves like the idiot hair of a local teevee anchor person or a fucking soccer mom, or a porn star, and I've got these bangs. These ridiculous-looking wispy bangs, with a cowlick in the middle.

I hate my hair so much. No – you know what? It's a perfectly fine haircut, but I don't look like me. I've been sitting here trying to work but what I'm really doing is, every ten minutes, looking into my compact and fiddling with my bangs, these layers, trying to configure them in a way that doesn't make me look ridiculous and old. And unsurprisingly, I am really not having all that much luck.

Of course, certainly, yes, hair grows! Grow, hair. Grow. Stupid hair.

huzzah!

2004-11-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

My scale isn't entirely clear, exactly, on precisely how many pounds I may (or may not) have lost, weighing myself four times a day after this first week of candy-cutting-out and treadmill-aching, but it appears it could be in the range of five to eight pounds.

I am trying not to wet myself. Five to eight pounds! I'm out of the two fifties, that ugly place, and down in the two forties, and it feels really good. I know the majority of it is that first-week water weight plummet, but this is a gift horse I will gently pat on the nose and feed a cube of Splenda to, and there will be no prying open of its jaws.

And here is where I pledge to not burst violently into tears or throw my hands up in the air and eat a ham, when next week I do not, in fact, lose five to eight pounds.

doubts, apace

2004-11-16T14:58:00.000-08:00

So it turns out that working out? Makes you really fucking hungry. RAAR! kind of hungry. GIVE FOOD OR BITE HAND OFF! kind of hungry. I EAT YOUR FACE kind of hungry. Really hungry. Which makes sense, scientifically. Look at me, being scientific! Now I will say something smart about energy expenditure and calories and things! Hooray!

So yes. I exercised five days last week, all five of the days I was shooting for. I promised myself I could just do two, and three would be bonus, and four would be a gold star, and five means I can get a haircut. I can get a haircut! Today's the day I treat myself to that haircut, and so far every single person I've run into, so far, has told me how cute my hair looks today. Because that is always the fucking way.

But cute is as cute does. Anyway.

This is usually the time I am leaping into the air and congratulating myself on my coolness and my awesomeness, and rhapsodizing in long sentences about how this is the way things are meant to be, this is the way things will always be, how I cannot imagine anything will ever change, because I have found The Way, I have stumbled on The Truth, hallelujah, what's that over there in the corner? It's The Light! Come to Jesus.

Except my doubts continue apace - this time I am still feeling a little more war-torn than other times, and a little more realistic about my chances of ever being a size [insert tiny size here] or being fit or even being healthy.

I am trying to remember that it feels amazing to be in charge of something in my life. I can't control my myriad of mental problems, I can't control my shitty finances, I can't control the crappy way of the world, or control the emotional troubles of people I love, or control my goddamn cat who keeps waking me up at five in the morning with a claw in my face, but by god, I can slap on a pair of sneakers and I can fucking wheeze on a fucking treadmill, and then worry about catching Creeping Foot Doom from the locker room floor. Which is very satisfying. The control part, I mean.

like that

2004-11-12T11:55:00.000-08:00

And like that, just like that, I am counting weight watchers points, and I am exercising. I've been afraid to say it to anyone, been afraid to write it down, been afraid to think about it. I've just been keeping my head down and plowing ahead as unconciously as possible, for fear I'd jinx everything and ruin it all and I'd be back to my old slothful ham-eating ways.

I've been to the gym every day, since Tuesday, and have been clumsy on the Precor and bored on the stationary bike, but tripped off both machines after 45 minutes, feeling triumphant and shaky-legged and exhausted. I've been experimenting with when I go - right after work? On my lunch hour? before work? - to see when I feel best, when I am most likely to go, when I am most likely to keep it up.

I've been bringing food from home - the only way I can combat being both terrifyingly fucking broke, and making my way towards figuring out what I can eat to keep me satisfied (because I'm starting to consider that growly empty hollow stomach feeling the worst feeling in the world - maybe because I'm so not used to it, after months of that mindless eating-to-overstuffedness). I've been taking a multivitamin every single morning, and have plans to pick up calcium and vitamin C pills.

I'm sleeping all through the night again, which is amazing to me. I've started to feel like I have more energy, and I'm feeling that dark sort of hopeless feeling lift off, just a tiny little bit. I'm making to-do lists, and I'm crossing stuff off. Progress.

Four days seems to early to declare victory over sad, slothful, ham-eating ways, but I am cautiously optimistic. And cautious about being cautiously optimistic.

closet shopping

2004-11-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

I've been waiting for the click. The thing that will turn off the "not on a diet with a vengeance mode (also known as the "I CAN EAT WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT, GOD FUCKING DAMMIT, and life is unfair!" plan) and switch back on that good feeling, the one that overwhelms you with its goodness. The one where you're eating healthily and exercising steadily, and you can't believe that there is any other way to feel, and any other way to be when you are in the midst of it.

It's kind of like that feeling you get when you're just plain happy – that sense that you can't imagine feeling any other way, ever, that unhappiness is some kind of terrible myth, and you'll never be like that again.

I have been eating the world, and waiting for the click over into determination and desire and go-to-itiveness, in a lazy, passive way, kind of disgusted that I had given up so easily, kind of horrified, but in a quiet, back-of-the-head sort of way, that I wasn't working to fix things, I was just waiting for things to get better. And I think, in a dumbass, dumbluck kind of way, it happened.

I do not, however, recommend you wait for it, though, because it hurts when it happens like this. Because it usually has something to do with a "my god, how did I let myself get like this," and a "my god, when did I start to look like that?" kind of thing.

It happened on Saturday, for me. Getting ready to go out, realizing nothing I had hanging up in the closet fit. I stood there, surrounded by clothing, and I didn't want to put anything on, because it would be too tight, or too short, or both, and make me feel even fatter, stupider, dumpier.

So I tore open the fat clothes bag, the one that had been sitting in the back of my closet for almost a year, the one I had been meaning and meaning and meaning to bring to Goodwill but never managed to – which is kind of interesting, psychologically speaking. And really fucking depressing.

Almost as depressing as the fact that no matter how cute the skirt that I dug out of that bag of fat clothes was, it was two sizes bigger than anything else I had been wearing, and it fit comfortably – maybe a little loose, maybe a little – but it fit.

And there we have it. A wake up call, a call to arms. A fit of despair.

I hate so much that it takes something drastic to shake me out of the downward spiral, that it takes being shamed into it, it takes vanity and a tag with an ugly number. Hello, brain - it couldn't have been feeling tired all the time, or having a little more trouble walking up the stairs, or the pants getting a little more snug? It couldn't have been some kind of early five pound signal, instead of this ridiculously late in the game oh my, goodness me, when did I gain 40 pounds?

At least, you could argue, it finally happened. Which I'm happy about, yes. I just don't have to be happy about how it happened.

conversations

2004-10-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

I said "Man, I've gained so much weight."

He said, "You look just the same to me."

I said, "My clothes aren't fitting right. Everything is uncomfortable. These pants are tight."

He said, "You look great."

I said, "God, I'm ugly."

He said, "You're beautiful."

I said, "Oh my god, I'm so ugly."

He said, "No you're not. You're beautiful."

"I'm fat," I said.

"You're not," he said.

"I'm going back on my diet," I said.

"If you really want to," he said, "if you really think you have to, I'll help you anyway I can." He said - "But you're beautiful now."

He is crazy, but he keeps me from being entirely crazy. If only I could believe him just a little bit more.

dinner bell

2004-10-27T00:39:00.000-07:00

I've noticed for the past week or so, that I haven't been in the mood for eating lunch. I could drink a diet coke and be perfectly satisfied. Wow, I thought. Maybe I'm getting my appetite under control. Maybe I am learning to really understand the signs of hunger, and pay attention to my body's needs and wants, instead of my emotional cravings.

I was really proud of myself until I realized I wasn't hungry because I've been snacking on Halloween candy non-stop from nine to five. And I didn't even notice.

This is not particularly shocking - one of the things I hate about being on a diet kind of plan is being mindful of what is going in my mouth, and one of the other things I hate is the very first day of a the kind of a diet that includes all the requisite "food journaling" and busily doing my food journalling and realizing, as I think really hard about what I've eaten that whole day, and writing it all down and the list gets longer as I remember "three bites of cold pizza" and "two hershey's kisses" and "part of a pastry" and the mayonaisse on my sandwich not to mention the cheese, that it adds up. Every bit I put in my mouth, mindfully and not, adds up.

Did I mention how unfair that is?

That's always the biggest change I have to make, mentally and emotionally - remembering that it adds up, and trying to find ways to make it add up to something good for me and satisfying. It's what's been stopping me from actually committing to any kind of diet, this sense that I can't switch over from eat what I want mode to eat what I need with a soupcon of what I want mode. I sit around, waiting for the switch to be flicked, while I eat yet another chocolate eyeball and think about how unappetizing the pasta I brought from home sounds for lunch.

Mm, chocolate eyeballs. With stuff in.

perspective

2004-10-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

I was getting breakfast the other morning, and was in line behind a ballerina. You could just tell she was a ballerina – the tights, the slippers, the loose sweater over the bodysuit, the bun. You could also tell by how long her legs were, and her neck, and how slender and muscular and tiny she was. Teeny-tiny. A scrap of a slip of a wee bit of a thing half my size.

And I hated her a little bit, and completely automatically, a knee jerk skinny little bitch, especially when I saw that she was buying just a cup of tea and a bowl of fruit, and I was standing there with a chocolate croissant and a non-fat latte loaded with sugar.

But I got all rational, and I was kind of proud of myself. Self, I thought, she is a ballerina. She works to look like that. You see the fruit? She eats to look like that. She takes care of herself. Self, you do not take care of you. If you were eating fruit and doing calisthenics, you would – well, you wouldn't look like that, but you wouldn't look like this either. And thus, it is unfair to judge her unfairly. And lo, sanity and perspective was restored.

And then her friend, who was also a ballerina, bounded up all perfect and slender, holding two giant egg, cheese and croissant sandwiches, one of which she thrust at the girl before me. Then she said, "I need a muffin, too!" And she sashayed her tiny, perky ass back over to the pastries as ballerina number one licked the grease off the bones of her wrist.

And my god, did I hate them both.

I learned a lesson that day. And the lesson was – I want an egg, cheese and croissant sandwich, please.

or not

2004-10-25T21:18:00.000-07:00

Seriously, though - I have been overweight for forever and also another day past that. I have been struggling for just as long to not be. To not feel uncomfortable in my body, ugly in my skin and under it. It is deeply unpleasant to not be able to move the way you feel like you're supposed to move, to look the way you know you're supposed to look. You see your face in the mirror and yourself in your head and you are convinced that you are so very cute, and you are always astonished to see that it is not the case, it is not the truth, when the pictures from the wedding or the party come back, when you catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror, your reflection in a store window. And you hate it, and you hate yourself, and this dissonance - the way your outside lies about who you are. Because it's lying. You are not that fat person, because in that moment of shock, you know how everyone knows fat people are unpleasant people, sweaty people who dress ridiculously and have no self control, who are affronts to aesthetics. And you hate it.

And you'd think that would make it easier. You don't like it? Knock it the fuck off. Eat a grapefruit instead of chocolate - that is a brilliant plan and I have just lost thirteen pounds in my head, having simply accepted the way, the truth and the light.

Can I tell you that it's not that easy? That you can cut go to the cafeteria and walk past the taco stand and the sandwich stand and the pot of chili and the plates of cake and make yourself a salad on which you do not even put fucking cheese, for god's sake, because that is just how goddamn good you are (and can I tell you how much I hate how moral values are assigned to fat and thin, to food, to our foodchoices? Remind me to tell you some time) and you gnaw on your leaves and your beans and your goddamn dry chicken breast and you are overcome - overfucking come by how goddamn unfair it is.

How completely unfair it is that you are not eating a grilled cheese sandwich like every other person, you think, in the whole goddamn world, because everyone else is eating grilled cheese, they really are, and you are not and you never will again, if you ever want to be attractive, if you ever want to please god stop feeling like the first thing you say to someone, in that silent split second of first impression, is hello, I am fat.

I have gone on diets and off. I have lost the same thirty five pounds over and over - up to 250, down to 215, bounce, bounce, bounce. Through weight watchers, usually, but one really brilliant time, through this really cool anxiety disorder that made it impossible to eat because my stomach was so knotted. Bam, thirty five pounds gone like that. It was awful and unpleasant and I subsisted on cigarettes and caramel macchiatos from Starbucks and I was miserable, but when my pants started falling off and I was fitting into normal girl clothes at normal girl stores - that kind of ruled.

That's the kind of mentality I'm dealing with. I want magic. I want instant solution, I want to eat cake and watch DVDs and not be fat any more. I want to stop thinking like that.

I've been able to ignore the fact that I'm on an upswing, that I'm back up to the very top of the cycle until recently, when my cute clothes have finally all ceased to fit, my pants are tight to the point of unwearable and I cannot afford new clothes, I can not, and I came face to face with one of those terrible and shocking holy fuck kinds of pictures.

I need to do something. I'm still figuring out what I'm going to do. This blog will probably become a whatever it is diet I'm going on kind of blog, but right now it's a place for me to stay mindful, to think about what I'm eating and talk about body issues and rant and cry and feel sorry for myself. Because I need to start somewhere. And I need to get back into those goddamn pants.

yom

2004-10-07T14:39:00.000-07:00

I just had a snickers bar. Bucket O' Chicken said "ME WANT SNICKERS!" and I said "hey! okay! me too!" That is the glory of going off a diet in a spectacular fashion. You dig around in the bottom of your purse in an ignominious fashion, scrambling for every last bit of change that has gone hiding in the corners of your bag like cookie crumbs or bits of biscuit from the McMuffin you stuffed in there for an after-work snack, and you take your pile of greasy change and you go downstairs to the breakroom and you punch in E5 and you barely manage to wait until you get back up to your desk to cram the whole thing, in three bites, into your face.

That's what going off a diet is like.

hello, i am fat

2004-10-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

Hello! I am fat. And this is my weight-gain blog. I have tried very, very hard to lose weight, except I cannot because God hates me and also I like to eat cookies. This is the record of me eating cookies, and snickers and also ham and bacon and peanuts and probably more ham and some more cookies.

You can call me Hello. Please meet my ass, Bucket O' Chicken, My thighs, Ham and Hock, and my big tummy, who I call Pork. We are pleased to meet you.