Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

I’m afraid to get on top.

Starting weight: 335.8
Last week: 324.2
This week: 321.4
Change this week: -2.8
Overall change: -14.4

Okay. That’s better.

This week’s goal: Lose at least 0.6 pounds to hit the 15-pounds milestone.

The talented Marla has challenged my parents’ belief that I am the biggest feminist in all of femi-nazi-dom. She writes a really interesting post about the patriarchy and treadmills. Now why didn’t I think of that?

I can’t use a pedometer, yet.

The mechanism in that tiny machine is not very sophisticated. It’s designed to detect and count each swish-swish of a normal person’s stepping movement. My stepping movement is more like thump-thump, jiggle-jiggle-jiggle and registers as more than one step every single time.

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I’m all for visualization and affirmations. I do live in L.A., after all. But part of the difficulty of losing weight is that I’ve never been thin. I have no point of reference or distant memory with which to feed my fantasies. I can’t remember, in fact, weighing less than 300 pounds in my entire adult life. Losing weight will not be a return to some “glory days” of the past. It will be an entirely new experience, and new is always nerve-wracking.

Like it or not, my overweight has always been in the top 3 descriptors that I would use to describe myself:

1. Smart
2. Fat
3. Funny

When I first typed that, I had Fat at number 3, but I went back and edited it to be more honest with myself.¹ What will move up to take spot number 2 when I approach my goal? What will fill the void left at number 3 if Funny is promoted? Rich? Famous? Insipid? Insidious?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter since that date is, realistically, at least 3 years in the future. I’m sure in those 36 months, something will step up to take Fat’s place as my identifying characteristic. I hope it’s something like Doctor or Artist and not the more likely Obsessive, Egotistical, or Paranoid.

1. In fact, it might be most honest to have Fat at spot number 1, but I just can’t bring myself to do that, yet. [↩]

Starting weight¹: 335.8
Last week: 335.8
This week: 324.2
Change this week: -11.6
Overall change: -11.6

Woah.

Okay, well, with just one week of watching, journaling, and counting what I ate I lost almost every single pound that I put on over the holidays. Most people would be jumping up and down in ecstatic joy at double-digit weight loss in a week. I, predictably, am a little freaked out.

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1. I changed my starting weight from the September number of 326.8 to the January number, just to make a clean start and to make this week’s numbers carry the same impact that they really carried. Besides. Although I was going to meetings from September through December, I wasn’t really following the plan for longer than 2 days in a row. Therefore, I’m officially restarting the count. [↩]

The cupcakes above are not actual size. In fact, I shrank them down (”reduced,” as our grandmothers would be fond of saying) so as to avoid undue temptation for me or you or anyone else who doesn’t need delicious chocolate cupcakes on their mind. These are the cupcakes I made for my friend’s birthday yesterday, and dealing with the before-and-aftermath of baking them was tricky to say the least. It was a lot like sitting here, looking at the photo of them, and trying to avert my eyes. No really, look away. STOP IT.

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Before I finally got back on the wagon this week, I had long, drawn-out debates with myself about the philosophical merits of which wagon was best. Atkins? South Beach? Jenny Craig? Nurtisystem? Weight Watchers? Counting Calories? Spark People? Cyberdiet? Voluntary amputation? Cryogenic animation of my disembodied head?

I’ve followed both of Weight Watchers’ programs, including “Core” (a sort of narrowly modified South Beach program) and “Flex” (a.k.a. Calorie Counting for Dummies), and I do have a clear favorite. The strange thing is that, for now, I am going with the dark horse candidate — my non-preferred method of losing weight.

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What surprises me most about the much-hyped “changes” to the Weight Watcher’s program is that I can suddenly eat 5 more points daily than I could when I was following the program before. I went from 33-35 points to 40 points (which must be well, well over 2000 calories) daily, and that’s without fudging my daily activity level (sedentary) or my gender (okay, okay).¹

I almost feel like I’m cheating. I’ve always panicked at the idea of eating only 19, 20, or 21 points, as some people do when they approach their ideal weights. Fortunately, due to my height, if I were to approach my ideal weight I would still be eating 26-28 points daily. That feels reasonable.

1. Of course, I lose 1 of those points for every 10 pounds gone (and that’s a faster reduction than previously, I think) but still. 40 points. Dude. [↩]