My Prom Dress

As I write this, I'm wearing my prom dress. I find clothing sizes confusing, as they are different from brand to brand and year to year. Last March, I was wearing a size 20 or a 22. In October, I could wear 16s in most things, the smallest size I'd worn as an adult. Two or three weeks ago, I got a new winter coat. I'd been trying on Extra Larges but I was at an outlet and not everything came in every size. The one I really loved was only in Large, so I tried it on. It was a little snug, but not too, and I'm still losing weight, so I went ahead an bought it. I kind of thought it was a fluke. But this afternoon I went out to take advantage of our crumbling economy via sales at Macy's. It turns out I'm a size 14 now, or a Large in almost everything. I mean, I didn't like everything I tried on, but there wasn't anything that didn't exist in my size. It's an incredible relief and also kind of surreal. I remember that I was a 14 in high school, or maybe that 14 was a little too small for me, but it was always the biggest size -- I didn't know clothing sizes came bigger than 14. And I didn't want anything that fit me properly then anyway -- I was wearing oversize T-shirts and long flowing skirts with elastic waists. I wore men's jeans from thrift stores. So I'm not sure what size I really was and I'm not sure if a 14 then was like a 14 now. But my prom dress was made for me and right this minute, it fits perfectly.

I'm pleased to fit into it. But it's also bringing up stuff I don't want to remember about being a teenager. I thought this size, the size I am now that feels pretty comfortable, was disgusting. I thought I was so fat that everyone was ridiculing me, that no boy could possibly be attracted to me, that I couldn't try to wear flattering clothes because I would look like I wasn't ashamed of my body. And I was supposed to be ashamed of my body. It makes me sad to think that I allowed myself to feel that way, and that no one else tried to make me feel differently. A lot of it came from my mother, who was and is far too concerned with my weight. Some of it came from the usual public places -- fashion magazines, movies and TV shows that not only starred beautiful and thin actresses, but that openly ridiculed overweight women and girls. I lived in Los Angeles, where being thin is valued over almost everything. There was no other voice. I look around now and even though the actresses and models are thinner than ever and we hear about "The Obesity Epidemic" from doctors and journalists and kindergarten teachers, there is also another voice. There is a pretty loud fat acceptance movement. There are so many more places to buy decent and sometimes adorable clothes in bigger sizes -- not enough, mind you, but infinitely more than when I was a teenager. There are women of all sizes blogging about their relationships with food and their bodies. I think if I were seventeen now, or even twelve, I would be finding some of that. I would be hearing more voices, voices that encouraged me and accepted me and told me I was beautiful, I was fine, I was not alone. I wish I could give those voices to my younger self.

Not Recognizing Myself

I was looking through the pictures on my sister's camera last weekend during her birthday party. I wanted to see one she had taken one of me holding my baby nephew -- he was playing with my glasses and we were both laughing. As I clicked through all the photos, I passed the one I was looking for twice because I didn't immediately recognize myself. It's true that the viewer on her camera is pretty small and also that I wasn't wearing my glasses in the photo, which changed my appearance. But mostly, I just look different. I don't look as I expect myself to look. Sometimes when I catch my reflection in a mirror by accident, I don't immediately know it's me I'm seeing. It's a pretty disconcerting experience.

There's this whole mythology of transformation connected to weight loss in our culture. The ugly duckling becoming the swan. The ubiquitous Before and After photos. We are supposed to look like a whole new person after losing a lot of weight and that's supposed to be a good thing. And I'm not saying I'm immune to that -- vanity is certainly part of the reason I want to lose weight. I'm happy with how I'm looking these days and I was less than happy with how I looked a year ago. But I don't think it's a healthy part of this process to look at pictures of myself from a year ago and marvel at how huge I was, how horrible I looked, how grateful I am not to look like that anymore, not to be that person anymore. That attitude is so prevalent in our society -- in the weight loss industry, in fashion and fitness and celebrity magazines. Part of the story of successful weight loss is: I used to be fat and disgusting and now I'm a whole new, thin and beautiful person. We are supposed to be motivated to lose weight by how much we hate our fat selves, how much we want to get rid of that part of ourselves.

I look at pictures of myself at my very heaviest and I take comfort in still being exactly the same person. If I couldn't do that -- if I needed self-hate to be part of my motivation, I would fail. If I hated my fattest self, I would have to hate my current self and my thinnest self, too, because I know they are all Me. The truth is, I think I look better, but it freaks me out a little to look different. It's disturbing to look at my reflection or my photo and not recognize myself, even if it's just for an instant. I visit a pre-school class twice a month to read stories. Some of the same kids I saw last spring are there again now. This week one little girl said to me, "Miss Jamie, you look different," and it made me kind of sad. I'm not someone else and I don't plan on being someone else when I'm done losing weight.

I'm sure I'm not the only person to lose a significant amount of weight and feel uncomfortable about looking different -- to find it creepy not to be recognized. But I never hear anyone talk about it. I wish someone would.

I Have Both a Vagina and Biceps

Are you surprised?

Apparently Frederic Delavier would be. He is the author of two books I came across this week, Strength Training Anatomy and Women's Strength Training Anatomy. They are apparently quite well respected books. The book for women includes chapters on abs, back, legs, and buttocks. That's right, no arm, shoulder, or chest exercises. No information about the muscles in the upper half of our bodies. In the first book, with the big strong man on the cover, the diagrams and exercises are supposed to apply to men and women, but in the upper body chapters there are 132 images of men (both big and small) and 16 images of women, all but one of which are tiny little inset diagrams.

How fucked up is that?

Hibernation

I've been thinking about bears a lot this week. I am envious of the fur coat, the full belly, and the cozy cave in which to sleep for several months. It is dark and it is cold and I want to hibernate. I believe that's a natural urge. I believe in living, eating, resting seasonally. But I have to live in the world. It's hard to balance.

I usually eat a snack around 11:30 and have lunch at 2:00. On Tuesday, I ate the snack I'd brought to work at 11:30 and then ate most of the lunch I'd brought. At 2:00, I went out and got more lunch. For dinner I ate a whole small pizza. I really needed to keep eating. The rest of the week, I've tried to plan around being a bottomless pit. I have brought extra but healthy snacks to work -- some stir-fried veggies, two apples instead of one, two bags of popcorn instead of one. My lunches have been hot, hearty food that should fill me up. It feels okay. I believe I should eat if my body is telling me to eat, and while it feels a little weird to eat so often, and to keep eating at the end of the same meal that filled me up last week, I think I've been pretty successful at not eating too much crap.

Wednesday, I never recovered from the trauma of getting out of bed. It was dark and I was comfortable and I got up anyway and went to the gym and met my trainer and spent a whole hour with him, thinking about my down comforter. I went to work thinking about my down comforter. I was ready to get into bed the minute I got home (but had to eat first, because I was also ravenous). Thursday, my alarm went off at 6:00, I got up, brushed my teeth, and got back into bed and re-set my alarm for 7:30, choosing sleep over the gym. It felt like the right thing to do. It's been about seven months now that I've gotten up early and gone to the gym five days a week. This was maybe the third time I'd skipped a work-out on a day I'd planned for one. It doesn't feel lazy -- it feels like listening to my body. As I type this, it is 8:30 on Friday evening and I am planning to get into my pajamas as soon as I'm done.

I plan to sleep in tomorrow as late as my body wants and then I plan to eat a big hearty breakfast and then I plan to go to the scary class at my gym and if I need to afterward (which I usually do) I plan to lie on the couch for the rest of the afternoon.

It's a struggle. I want to rest and I don't believe that makes me lazy. I want to eat, and I don't believe that makes me gluttonous. But I still need to keep a schedule, which doesn't allow for as much rest as I want. I still want to lose weight (or not gain, at least) and that doesn't allow for eating as much as I want. I am trying to honor it -- the urge to hibernate -- but not give in to it entirely.

Right now I'm going to bed.

The No Angst Policy

I spent a good part of this morning trying to decide whether or not to go back to that gym class today. I have felt a lot better about it after talking to my trainer who assured me that it's a fucking hard class and most people who come once don't come back and that he knows I don't stop to rest because I'm lazy. I felt all validated and encouraged. And then I got a cold early in the week and thought, well, I may be well enough to work out by Saturday, but I certainly won't be up for that class. Which was a great, no angst excuse. Then the cold really never got that bad and I was pretty much entirely well by yesterday. So I had to make a decision. I went back and forth.

Running would be good.
Maybe I would even be up for a workout as hard as class, but did I really feel like being around other people?
But cross-training is really important.
But I do cross-train. In this very week there has been weight-lifting, running, and swimming -- I'm not in a rut.
But if I don't go today, maybe it'll be easier for me to chicken out of going other days.
Etc...

And then I remembered a philosophy I adhere to at work.

I'm a children's librarian and while we have plenty of rules and thou-shalt-nots in my library, we also have what we call The No Tears Policy. If a small child is panicking about something -- wants a prize she hasn't earned, absolutely must borrow this book even though he has fines -- we go ahead and break rules to avoid tears. Give her the prize, let him check out the book. No Tears is a priority, and I believe in that.

I remembered, after all my deliberating this morning, that I have a No Tears Policy for myself -- or more accurately, No Angst. That's what has kept me sane about all the decisions that affect my body. No Angst over whether or not to eat a second cupcake. No Angst over whether or not I lost weight this week. No Angst over when or how or how much I work out. And I felt so relieved. I put on my workout clothes, went to the gym, waved at my trainer, put my headphones in and ran on the treadmill for 45 minutes all by myself. I stretched for a long time afterward because stretching felt good. Plenty of workout, zero angst. Maybe I'll feel like class next week or the week after, but deciding against it today felt like the right decision.

A couple of you commented last week with similar stories of gym class fear. I hope you can get past the fear if you want to. I hope that if you want to practice yoga or go to your trainer's class even though everyone else in it appears to be in better shape than you, you manage to suck it up and do it and reap the benefits. But I hope that if you decide the angst involved isn't worth it, that you go do something else that makes you happy without feeling like that class is something you should do. You should do what works for you. We all deserve to exercise happy.

Working Out with Other People

I would like to begin with the disclaimer that my trainer rocks. I adore him to no end and any complaining I am about to do is not in his direction.

He teaches this class at the gym on Saturday afternoons. It's a crazy mix of strength stuff and cardio stuff, a couple round robins of different exercises and some stuff we do all together as a group. It's unbelievably hard work. It kind of kills the rest of the day for me because all I can do is lie on the couch and marvel at how my limbs are useless. And I kind of dig that. I like the hard work and it's a good kind of fatigue. I like that it's sort of a freebie session with him -- an opportunity for me to do a workout I wouldn't do on my own.

But there are other people. I'm a friendly person, very social, almost extroverted most of the time. But there are times when I really don't want other people to exist, and while working out is one of those times. When I run on the treadmill, I take my glasses off and listen to my ipod and I'm in a bubble where no one else exists. I love that. In class, occasionally there's someone friendly who introduces herself and wants to chat. I hate that shit. I mean, I understand that for many people, that's why they take gym classes -- because it's a social experience. For me, it's an unavoidable side-effect of the free workout with my trainer. I can live with it.

More difficult is the fact that I cannot keep up. I can do most of everything. But it's damn hard. Everyone is red and sweaty and panting, but I'm the only one who occasionally just stops because, frankly, I want neither a heart attack nor an asthma attack and if I don't stop, one of the two is likely. I'm not vain, really. I don't know these people and don't care what they think about my fitness level. But it makes me feel lame. I get a lot of exercise. I run and swim and lift heavy things and take yoga classes (where, incidentally, it is encouraged to do what your body wants to do, even if the rest of the class is doing otherwise...) When I'm doing those things alone, I feel like I'm in pretty good shape. I don't care how slow I am, so long as my heart rate is up. But when I see everyone else managing to do what my body just cannot do, I feel inadequate. I feel fat. I feel like the reason I can't do shit is because I'm fat, because that's my go-to excuse or something.

I've rested and showered and rested more and eaten lunch and rested still more. My body feels good. I feel strong and also relaxed. But I'm wanting not to go to class next Saturday because it makes my brain feel lame.

Oh, Hello There!

Hi.

It appears that someone is reading this. Maybe as many as four of you! I'm flattered, really. When I decided to do this it was primarily because I wanted to write about the experience of losing weight -- wanted to remember later what the emotional pieces were, since I knew they would be changing day to day. I also wanted to make myself organize those thoughts while I was thinking them. In another piece of my world, I'm a professional writer, but what I usually write is a very different animal. So this is an experiment.

I decided to experiment in the form of a blog for a couple reasons. Reason the first was to keep me writing and keep me organized. If I were writing in a notebook, I'd be more likely to write scattered, run-on sentences about my whole emotional life rather than attempting to organize thoughts specifically about my body and food issues. Of course, there are still scattered run-on sentences here. Oh well.

Reason the second is this: Over the last several years, as I've lost and gained weight and tried to make some sense of what my relationship to my body means and how I fit into the world, I have read several books about people dealing with the same stuff and I have found them to be invaluable. I grew up, and into my 20s and 30s feeling very alone with my fat. I had never talked to anyone or read anything that made me believe that others were struggling in the same ways as I was. It hadn't even occurred to me. And then, I can't remember how the first book fell in my lap, but it did, and I started reading. Books about people who started out much bigger than me and ended up much smaller. Or about people smaller than me who felt bigger, or people just my size who were comfortable there. Everyone's story was different, everyone's relationship with food and clothing and her mother was unique. But familiar. There was always something that overlapped with my own experience -- the comfort of eating too much when no one was looking, the pressure from family members, either overt or subtle, to lose weight, to be different, the shame of not fitting someplace -- into chairs or socially acceptable clothing sizes, feeling both elation and discomfort with losing weight, with inhabiting an unfamiliar body. It is comforting to recognize myself in these stories.

And yet I know that my story isn't just like any of the ones I read. And I am a writer. A writer writes. Knowing that reading someone else's story is helpful to me makes me hope that reading my story will be helpful to others. I started writing and posting my blog without ever seeking out readers. I am shy, and this is still an experiment, after all. But I am glad you are here. Welcome. Please comment and/or email me freely. I would love to hear from you.

Some of the above-mentioned books:

I'm Not The New Me by Wendy McClure
Passing for Thin by Frances Kuffel
Half-Assed by Jennette Fulda
Tales from the Scale by Erin J. Shea
The Incredible Shrinking Critic by Jami Bernard
Confessions of a Carb Queen by Susan Blech
Thin is the New Happy by Valerie Frankel

Many of these people are bloggers. I'm too lazy to create links, but I'm sure you can find them if you haven't already.

Struggling

The last couple weeks have been challenging for me. Halloween is my favorite holiday and I embraced it thoroughly. I threw a party the weekend before, and though the dinner I cooked was healthy, I also made monster cupcakes and chocolate demon mice for dessert. I made cocktails. It was no big deal -- I had some of everything, but didn't feel out of control. And then there were left-over cupcakes and chocolate mice in my house for a week. I ate a cupcake every night. Still not a big deal, but I wouldn't have eaten a cupcake every night if they hadn't been there. I also neglected to go grocery shopping that week because I'd shopped for the party and had left-over real food, too. But that didn't last and I ended up buying dinner every night instead of cooking. Again, not a disaster, but several less healthy choices than I would normally have made. Halloween day came and there was candy at work. I ate a lot of candy at work. And eating candy somehow brought back old feelings of needing to eat as much as I could while no one was watching, so I ate plenty of real food, too. Then I went to someone else's dinner party and ate more candy. On Saturday, I had to work and ate more candy.

When I went to my Weight Watchers meeting on Monday, I had gained two pounds.

None of that, in and of itself, really bothers me. I feel like it's important to be able to embrace Halloween, to eat crap if it makes me happy, and to not feel guilty about it even if it doesn't make me happy. I've been losing weight steadily for seven months, so gaining two pounds one week doesn't really matter.

What scares me is that while I'm feeling that way, I don't trust that I'll get this back. This has been easy, losing weight. I'm enjoying myself, and I have no interest in getting to a place where I start worrying and feeling guilty and telling myself not to eat things I want to eat. That mindset fucks me up. I truly believe that the most valuable thing I'm doing right now is not worrying.

But it only works if I keep wanting to eat spinach and chickpea curry and go running at 6:00 every morning. If I start wanting to sit in front of the TV and eat cupcakes, it's all over. Right now I feel like I have it back. I made that curry over the weekend, as well as a vegetarian chili, cucumber salad, and roasted root vegetables. The idea was to distract myself with an abundance of yummy healthy food, and it worked. This week has been better. But it feels tenuous. I fear that I'll feel out of control again and not bounce back so quickly. I couldn't even write about it while I was wanting to eat candy constantly -- it felt like the struggle would be real if I named it, so I name it now in the past tense because that's safer.

I'm entering a place I haven't been before -- a longer period of successful weight loss, a smaller clothing size, and it feel scary and like it will be easy to lose.

More Semantics

I find myself in a socially awkward situation when people say to me, "You've lost weight." I believe that they expect me to say, "Thank you." Only, is that a compliment? It's an observation, a statement of fact. If someone said, "You got a new tattoo," or, "You cut your hair," it would be unclear whether or not she approved of the change in my appearance. I would say, "Yes I did," and would not say, "Thanks," unless she expressed a positive opinion.

So I follow my belief in language, rather than the universal assumption that losing weight is an inherently good thing. I nod and say, as neutrally as I am able, "I have lost some weight." If she then says, "You look good," I smile and say, "Thank you."

Am I being petty?

"You're wasting away,"

...said one of my co-workers this morning, then added, "You look great!"

Am I really supposed to take "wasting away" as a compliment? Makes it sound like I'm dying of consumption. How glamorous.

Dangerous Leaps

I realize I'm making up for lost time, here. Blogging is new to me, as are the changes happening to my body, and sometimes I'm not quite up to looking either one in the face.

I've lost a little over 50 pounds, now. I weigh about 200, depending on at what hour I step on the scale. 200 was my goal for the end of October, so getting there a month ahead is a bit startling. It's not just a number -- I seem to have leapt forward all at once. I lost more than 6 pounds in two weeks. All of a sudden, none of my clothes fit. Nothing. I had to buy new bras (and I know I'm not the first to say this, but I did not sign up for losing a cup size!) I had neither time nor money to go clothes shopping, but I had to do it anyway. And people started noticing. I lost 20 and 30 and 40 pounds and pretty much no one said anything -- a couple people thought I was tan or had cut my hair or something. But in the last two weeks, everywhere I go, people are commenting on my weight loss -- my co-workers, who I've seen every day all along (including one person who never speaks to me), friends I hadn't seen in awhile, friends I see all the time. And suddenly, I feel like I'm walking around in a different body. It's not entirely comfortable. It's weird. Maybe a little scary. Weight loss is a loss. Part of me, a big 50 pound chunk of me is gone now (and where did it go? seriously, I'd like to know) and that frightens me in ways I don't entirely understand.

This week, after losing 6 pounds so quickly, I actually tried to eat a little more -- I was never starving myself. I always ate all my daily Weight Watchers points and a few more due to all the working out. I have always indulged here and there in pizza and cupcakes. But this week, I did a little more indulging. I ate heavy dinners Monday and Tuesday nights when I had friends visiting from out of town. I found myself craving heavy food on Wednesday and ate several mini-chocolate bars at work, plus lots of after dinner snacks. I was in a grumpy mood all day Friday and ordered greasy Chinese food for dinner. Now, Monday and Tuesday, I was deliberately relaxing, allowing, even urging myself to eat more because I wasn't comfortable with my rapid weight loss. But the second half of the week the indulging has felt more emotional, a little out of control. Part of me wonders if this is where I will start sabotaging myself.

Once before I lost about this much weight and stopped right here. Here as in October. Here as in 200 pounds. This might be the place I'm afraid to go past. But I do feel different this time. The few people who know I'm trying to lose weight will occasionally say that I'm working so hard. It doesn't feel like it. I hear that and it sounds wrong and I point out that I'm not doing anything I'm not happy with. I love working out. I'm happy, really, entirely happy with my food -- happy with the veggies, happy that I'm able to do pizza and cupcake just often enough, and happy that I'm not hungry. And that feels different. It's hard to sabotage something like that.

The other thing is, I don't feel so alone. I have always felt really alone with my food/body struggles. My friends are thin, and mostly have pretty healthy relationships with food and their bodies (and I'm kind of proud that I've gravitated toward people like this). My sisters are thin, as is my mother. My mother has not been helpful -- I'll write about this some other day. So whether I've been frustrated with my size or working at trying to change it, I've always felt I was in that alone. My body, my issues, nothing anyone else could help with or understand. It felt lonely, and feeling lonely makes me want to eat cookies. It was trying to get away from that loneliness that inspired me both to join Weight Watchers (which as you know I have mixed feeling about) and to hire my trainer. Going to Weight Watchers meetings is helpful. I haven't made friends, have rarely spoken to anyone outside of group discussions, but I feel them there, working on the same stuff, and that helps. And my trainer just rocks. It helps that he's all about getting me in shape, getting me stronger, and not about denying me food or making me thinner. I like focusing on strength. And I like knowing he's there. Yesterday I was at the gym on my own, not paying him for a session, and he snuck up behind me (not hard to do, as I take off my glasses and put on my headphones when I work out) and raised the incline on my treadmill. I growled at him, but kept the incline where it was and kept running. I was thinking about it all day and smiling. I realize the reason it made me so happy was because it felt like someone was watching out for me. It felt safe.

Heavy Lifting

It was chilly last night. I got out my down comforter and wished the cold air wasn't coming in through the vents in my window air-conditioner. In past years, including this spring when I put it in, I have depended on my brother in law to lift it into and out of the window for me and put it into storage. This morning, I moved some furniture out of the way, lifted it out of the window with my very own muscular arms, and carried it out to the trunk of my car to put it into storage. Not only could I lift and carry it with relative ease, but I knew ahead of time that I'd be able to. It's nice to be aware of my own strength.

Recovering from a Funk

I was kind of in a funk yesterday.

Sunday night I watched Olympic gymnastics and it made me want to give up -- I was just so in awe of what those bodies could do, it seemed worthless to try doing anything with my body. Then when I weighed myself yesterday morning, after being down two pounds for several days, I was back where I'd been a week earlier.

I carefully loaded up a cart of books when I arrived at work and as soon as I was done, the wheels fell off and they all landed in my lap. I was hungry and cranky all afternoon until I was weighed in at Weight Watchers.

And in the evening, I received a text from, I thought, someone who has been annoying me, so I responded kind of rudely -- we went back and forth a few times before I realized I hadn't recognized the number and it was actually someone completely cool. I texted an apology and didn't get a response.

Then this morning I woke up and read this and it helped so much there were tears involved. Sometimes the universe provides exactly what you need.

I went running outside, rather than on a treadmill, even though it was raining, and it felt amazing.

The completely cool person thought my misguided texting was hilarious.

I got to read one of my favorite subversive stories to a group of third graders.

And tomorrow morning I'm going to a yoga class.

It's good to remember that most everything, especially small annoying things, can be repaired.

Why I'm Not Watching

I don't have cable. My choices of passive entertainment are limited, and sometimes, I really need passive entertainment. So I bring home a lot of TV on DVD, and am always looking for a new show. This week I tried How I Met Your Mother, which I'd been hearing and reading about, and thought might be funny. It was kind of funny. It was brainless enough that I could relax into it, and brainy enough that it actually made me laugh occasionally.

And then a few episodes in, there was a fat joke. One character finds out that her boyfriend left a bar with another woman and she doesn't care. When asked why she doesn't care she replies, "I'm not freaking out because in my mind, she's fat." Fat=Unattractive-to-All=Not a Threat.

And in the next episode, there was another one. After two heterosexual men act like a couple for most of an episode, they "break up" and later run into each other. One of them says to his friend, "Even if you don't believe it, tell me he looks fat." Because, again, Fat=Unattractive=The Worst Thing That Could Happen After a Breakup.

And in the next episode, one more. This one was so offensive, it hurts me to relate it here. One of the characters sees his assistant, an overweight woman, take out her lunch, which is a huge tupperware, containing far more food than one person could eat, including a whole chicken. He says, "Oh, awesome, you brought lunch for everyone?" and she runs away crying, and subsequently quits her job. I turned it off before that episode was over and returned the DVDs to the library.

Because three fat jokes in three episodes is a pattern. This is a show that hates fat people. Who has time for that shit?

Nurture, Not Torture

Occasionally I complain that I don't get enough sleep because I get up so early. And I complain when my muscles are so sore I can't perform basic tasks like walking down stairs or washing my hair. But for the most part, I love working out. I look forward to it. Really.

So I've started to get slightly annoyed by the universal assumption that I'm torturing myself as means to some all important end.

1. When I mentioned that I go to my gym every morning to someone I'd just met, he said something like, "Well, you'll be happy when you get results." He said it pretty innocuously, but I bristled. Is his implication that I'm fat and out of shape and am spending a major portion of my free time working out so that I can fix that? He clearly assumes, (though I smiled when I told him,) that I don't want to go to the gym. Does he assume that because I'm fat? Is that just the universal assumption about exercise in our society? I decided he was too new an acquaintance to have that political argument, so I kept smiling and said, "I'm happy about it now," and let him interpret that as he chose.

2. A co-worker, with whom I've spoken about my training and early morning schedule a lot said, "You're torturing yourself so much these days."

3. Almost every article I read online or in magazines about fitness is about motivating yourself to work out or forcing yourself to work out. They are always from the point of view that you don't want to do this, but you should.

Don't get me wrong. I know I'm one of those people. I've spent most of my life in that place where I had to motivate myself to exercise because I thought I should. It was hard. Arguing with myself about whether or not to exercise was damn hard work. But even then, exercising wasn't. I always enjoyed it while I was doing it, and always felt good when it was done. It was only the thinking about it part that was hard. I like to think that if, when I was still in that place, someone had talked about working out as a joy, an indulgence, a way of pampering myself (the way people talk about going to spas or eating chocolate ice cream) I would have had an easier time with the decision.

My Sundress

I always wear the same thing to my Weight Watchers meeting -- it takes away a small variable and I like to keep things as stable as possible so only my actual body weight changes. Since it got warm enough it's been a JJill linen sun-dress that I bought on eBay this spring. At my meeting last night my leader mentioned that it's getting too big for me. It's true, and pleases me to no end. But I love it and am going to wear it as often as I can while it's still summer. I'll buy smaller clothes in the fall. It's gratifying to find that my clothes are too big, and much more gratifying to find clothes that have been too small for me for over a year are now fitting perfectly. But it's also hard to give up things I love and expensive to replace them. Especially since I plan to keep needing smaller sizes.

What My Body Knows

I used to do a lot of yoga. I went to a class once a week at my gym for awhile. I've been to Kripalu three times for retreats, which usually resulted in new spurts of classes when I got home, and for a while, doing yoga at home with dvds several times a week. I fell out of the habit, and then got into my new workout regime and hadn't been to a class in several months.

On Friday, I both pulled a muscle in my leg and told my trainer I wanted to be able to do push-ups, which led to a solid hour of upper body strength training. Afterward, I had to wait to take a shower because I couldn't raise my arms high enough to wash my hair. Saturday, I ached. And then I remembered yoga. I went to a class at my gym this morning and was shocked at how much more I can do now. Not only am I stronger -- Downward Dog doesn't hurt my arms, and my ankles don't scream during balancing poses (even my balance has improved a bit) -- which makes sense after two months of strength training, but I am also much more flexible. I can reach my toes in all the poses that I used to stop mid-calf. It was terribly gratifying to see the improvement, plus my muscles are all happier.

Must remember that my body likes to stretch.

Being a work in progress

I'm finding it very roller coaster-y to be in the middle of losing weight. I've lost almost 35 pounds now, which is enough to feel really different. This is especially true given that I've been working out a lot and doing strength training for the first time ever. My body is different. I feel different. I spend a lot of time lying in bed at night feeling around at my muscles in places where I wasn't able to feel muscles before. It's fascinating and thrilling.

And then sometimes I look in the mirror and remember that I'm still really fat. I'm not self-depricating here. I weigh 219 pounds, which makes me obese according to BMI charts and abnormally huge according to the fashion industry. I still have 80 or so pounds to lose. Mostly I'm not in a rush. This is a good pace -- I'm losing an average of two pounds a week, which is plenty. But it's hard to place myself. It's hard to feel where I am now while I am still and constantly changing (and of course, not changing -- I continue to be Me, which is a comfort and a delight as well as a frustration).

Kicking Ass

Back in the late 90's/early 00's, when I was watching too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I decided I really wanted to be able to kick ass. So I signed up for a Tae Kwon Do class and went three times before I gave up. My main problem was that my sense of balance is so poor, I couldn't stand on one foot long enough to kick. I was also generally out of shape, it was winter, and dragging myself to a fitness class after work in the snow was just not convenient enough for me at the time.

Now I get up way too early in the morning and work out at my neighborhood gym, sometimes with a personal trainer. He tortures me with balance work, which I was not expecting. I stand on one foot on a squishy foam mat and do odd things with hand-weights. And slowly, my balance is improving. And then last week, not even knowing about my Buffy/Kicking Ass/Balance fiasco, he asked if I wanted to learn to box.

Um, yes.

So today I got to put on big vinyl gloves and punch in his direction until my arms stopped working. It was damn hard work and really fun. I think I'm really going to enjoy it. Someday, I may even be able to kick someone's ass. You know, someone much smaller than me and evil enough to deserve it.

I've become one of those people

I get up at 5:45 most mornings and go to the gym. And I love it. It's what makes me want to get out of bed. Seriously. Being motivated to exercise is kind of unfamiliar to me. I have never been entirely sedentary -- I love to walk; I have been swimming and practicing yoga sporadically for years; I even took up running a couple years ago and went so far as to participate in a 5K (miserably, and very slowly). But even though I enjoyed all those activities, it was always a chore to make myself do them. I would shoot for three or four days a week and spend all day in discussion with myself about whether or not this was a work-out day. I liked the exercise but hated deciding to do it.

Weight Watchers does this Pavlovian thing where you can trade activity points for food points. So I started out walking a little more than I used to so I could have another snack. It somehow evolved into me going to the gym five mornings a week and hiring a personal trainer. Go figure.

The turning point was the difference between five days a week and three. At three, I had to fight with myself about doing it. At five, it's part of my routine, and my body is so used to it that I feel antsy when I'm not moving. I also remember how good I feel after working out so I go to the gym as a treat -- the way I might have eaten ice cream as a treat several months ago. Seriously, I hate myself a little bit for saying this shit -- who can stand the person who says, "No really, working out is a comfort just like pizza is?" But I seem to be becoming that person.

I have more energy. I stress less about what I eat because I know I'm working some of it off (though I don't eat a lot more -- I don't trade in my points very often). And I seem to be getting in better shape, which is oddly more gratifying than losing weight. This week on the treadmill I noticed that when I do intervals of running and walking, my running intervals are faster and longer and my heart rate doesn't go up as high.

I hope I don't somehow fall out of this habit. More than anything I fear my own ability to stop doing what's good for me.

Supporting the Diet Industry

I have a serious problem with the diet industry. I believe they're making gazillions of dollars by making people (mostly women) feel bad about themselves. I also believe they're setting people up to fail so that they'll come back and spend even more money. I hate the success stories that are all about how disgusting someone looked before and how she's a whole different person now. I hate how the success stories always state in teeny tiny print that those results are not typical. I hate to give my money to companies that do shit like that.

And yet. I joined Weight Watchers. There are some things I hate about it -- most notably the politics of the industry -- and also some things that are really working for me. I'm trying my best to use what tools are helpful and still do my own thing.
What I like:

• Getting weighed, officially, once a week
• My leader (more on him later)
• The online tools (looking up foods, calculating points from my recipes, etc...)
• Counting Points (isn't that freaky -- I thought I would hate this, but I don't. More on that, too)
• It inspired me to get more exercise, which has changed my life more than losing weight is.

What I don't like:

• That I'm supporting the evil diet industry
• That the food they sell is total processed crap in small portions and they pretend it's good for you because it's low in "Points"
• Most of the other leaders I've encountered
• The "success stories" that make people sound like they were disgusting losers before they joined Weight Watchers

What makes me feel like I made the right decision to join is that I ended up with my leader instead of someone else. My leader is gay, Jewish, in his 50's, entirely un-perky. He tells stories about his mother hiding food from him when he was a child. He never uses catch-phrases. He rarely gets to the Weight Watchers assigned weekly topics. I adore him. I wish he was my friend.

The first leader I encountered had been working for Weight Watchers full time for about thirty years. She was drinking the sugar-free Kool Aid, big time. In discussing how to deal with celebrations -- your own birthday, for instance -- she pulled out a Weight Watchers cookbook and pointed to a chocolate cake recipe. She asked us to guess why a slice was only, I don't remember how many points -- 2? 3? I was thinking, less sugar? whole wheat flour? eggless? The answer was: a serving size is approximately two bites. So she's trying to sell a cookbook based on its serving sizes. Fucked up. I drove across town to get away from her.

Once my leader (across town, and completely worth the drive) missed a meeting and our substitute made me want to play corporate bingo. She kept saying "your weight loss journey" and smiling too big. She said that at the end of the summer "there should be less of us." I walked out.

Another time he was gone, our substitute handed out plastic sun-visors.

I got really lucky.

And so, I let them charge me every month so that I can go to meetings and be weighed and count Points on my computer. Did I sell out?

Stats, a mission statement, and a piece of history

When I hear someone else's story about being fat, losing weight, gaining weight, I want stats, so I'll start with stats. I'm 36, 5'4", and currently 224 pounds. At my heaviest, (most recently in March of this year) I was 253 pounds. Once, several years ago, my size 24 jeans were getting too small for me. Right now I usually wear an 18.

After a lifetime of being fat and several years of losing and gaining weight with a lot of ambivalence, I am now losing again, and trying not to get smaller in the process. On this blog, I'll be trying to work out my ambivalence.

A good place to start is the incident that inspired my blog's name. About twelve years ago, I had a brief medical scare (all is and was well, so I'll not go into details) which was traumatic in and of itself, and which led to an appointment with an endocrinologist who, (winning the award for worst doctor ever) poked at me, answered no questions, and then said, "There should be less of you."

Afterward, I managed to not go to any doctor for three or four years and to gain probably fifty pounds. As someone who has always been overweight, I have always felt self-conscious about how much space I take up, but I have never, in my most insecure moments believed there should be less of me. Me is good. Fat, maybe is bad. Maybe there should be less fat. But in one brusque, offhand prescription, this overpaid asshole defined me as my fat and told me not to exist.

When I've lost weight in the past few years, usually stalling at about 200-215 pounds, I have struggled with the fact that by intentionally losing weight, intentionally changing my body, I am somehow admitting that my body (and thus me) is and has always been wrong. That pisses me off to no end. It makes the process of losing weight all about hating myself, which I don't.

So I am here, losing weight again and trying to figure out how to keep going, how to enjoy my body right now, as it is changing, rather than feeling that it's a bad thing I need to fix or get rid of.