photo credit: ant.photos

This came hot on the heels of Wednesday night’s slump (Oh, I’m so tired — I can’t do more than 20 minutes of cardio…) and certainly has psychological and physical ties to Tuesday night, when I couldn’t fall asleep until about 2:00 a.m.

photo credit: krissikes

I’ll probably get into details leading up to the crisis, and the emotions involved (I am a therapist after all), but for now it’s enough to know that the crisis was diverted from becoming much bigger.

Here are the steps from my Preparation Stage that I drew upon to identify and head off the problem as soon as I was able:

• 1.4: Self-talk and visualization
• 1.5: Set my focus
• 1.7: Journaling
• 2.4: Sleep schedule
• 4.1: Select a few supportive friends to be my safety net (and reached out to them)

Active steps I took to prevent the problem from becoming bigger:

1. Mentioned my concerns to Supportive Female Friend, even though we didn’t have enough time to really talk about it.
2. Called Supportive Male Friend, left a message saying I needed him and to please call me back ASAP.
3. Reviewed my focus, my journal, and my visualizing.
4. Arranged to get an extra hour of sleep last night.

photo credit: jaxxon

Here are the results from the steps I took:

• Supportive Male Friend called back and let me open up, admit my mistakes, and express my fears and concerns. He talked about his experiences (he also exercises 2 hours/day — enjoys walking to and from work) with motivation and asked hard questions. I didn’t shy away from the questions, which I’m proud of, because they stung a bit. In the end, he was right. How much do I want this, anyway?
• Supportive Female Friend called this morning at 6:20 to offer support and make sure I was exercising. Even though we hadn’t had a chance to get into details about anything yesterday, she was still loving enough to follow up and show her support. That was pretty amazing.
• I set a new focus based on these conversations and then got back to work.

photo credit: margolove

What’s fascinating to me is that last night, for the first time, someone outside of my support network mentioned to me that I looked thin. Timing is everything.

Last night, as we perched on the edge of my bed, my ex quietly absorbed the reality of my “new” arm shape. He said, kindly stroking his fingers along the fleshy parts, “It’s coming off nicely, isn’t it?” I had to laugh, because the phrase struck me as sweet and a little strange. Like something you might hear from a plumber, or a barber. I wish I could see it the way he does. Yes, the scale blows mathematical sunshine up my bum at 5-pound intervals, but the visible evidence of change is so slight and so slow.

“You don’t spread out right here the way you used to,” he muses, pointing to a certain spot on my hips when we relax on the bed. His words are drenched with true affection and care, so it’s hard to feel any sting in them. He assures me that my back, arms, hips, and even knees look slimmer than they ever have. I had to point out to him, with a sigh, that so do my boobs. He just smiled his genuine smile and said, “But isn’t it kind of exciting? You’re getting a whole new body!”

This alternate perspective means a lot to me, as I still have over 100 pounds to lose. It’s a little bit surreal I have resigned myself to being so big for so long. But, as I tune into the little signs of change — the arm-shaped arms and the emerging ankles — I hope to better acknowledge the non-scale victories just as much as I enjoy pushing toward that 5-pound mark every week.

Maybe that’s unfair (gross generalization, anyone?) but since becoming involved with my first boyfriend 2 years ago, at the age of 31, I have noticed a dramatic difference in the way others seem to view me. It’s almost as though I have achieved the societal stamp of approval. “Well, she’s fat…” they reason, “but at least she’s not unloveable.” Men at work, at church, on the subway, and elsewhere still avert their eyes when I am too friendly with them. I admit: sometimes I flirt with repairmen or waiters in order to get the job done. What I have noticed, though, is that the squirming ends as soon as I casually utter those magical words: “my boyfriend.”

As though the conversation has let out a sigh of relief, I am suddenly back to the real world. I am not unclean or untouchable. I am a person just like they are and, hey. I am probably not looking to them for fulfillment of my fat-girl fantasies. That’s what my poor boyfriend is for, right? And so, I get to feel normal. That’s sort of nice.

I like to think that this hasn’t contributed too much to the dynamics between him and me. We have what is probably one of the most sweet and silly, most caring, most careful and gentle relationships of all that I’ve known. He is wonderful and sensitive and unerringly honest. He is a good person and he genuinely loves me and what really seems to floor people is that he is kind of a knock-out. He’s average-sized, cute, and fit. He’s never dated anyone who looks like me before, but that hasn’t stopped him from throwing himself whole-heartedly into love with me. And, I love him.

For reasons that are beyond our control, however, it’s becoming clear that we need to separate. It’s been clear, honestly, for the past year. But, how do you break up with someone that you are still utterly in love with? How do you just walk away from the kind of sweet, affectionate relationship that everyone seems to be looking for? How can you reason that the uncertainties of the future are enough basis to end the realities of today?

And, yet.

There were many tears this weekend. Our respective dreams for the future do not align and so, it seems, we may be holding each other back. There are other things, of course, that are not quite right. But, the relationship itself is so solid that the ending of it — the painful, pitiful wrenching apart — has never yet felt worth it. It may not feel worth it now, either, but we are trying to separate.

And so. I will be returning to my role as the single fat girl. I resume my place in the order of things — and today I guess that feels like insult to broken-hearted injury.

Because he’s my first boyfriend, I’ve never had a break-up before.

This is awful.

Help.

The man set about memorizing my family tree on our third date — and that’s when I knew he would be staying for a while. But, no amount of explaining to him what it’s like to be in a house with my 6 siblings, their spouses and children, dogs, neighbors, and a dozen other refugees of every stripe can dissuade him. He’s giddy with excitement.

No, my boyfriend isn’t perfect, but he’s wonderful. We’re going on a year and a half together now, and if it’s true that opposites attract, we could be the poster children for Making It Work. He’s content and I’m ambitious. He takes things easy and I just go go go. He is black and white and I am shades of gray. He is Mr. Abstinence while I struggle to delay my gratification in even the smallest of ways.

So, he finds it impossible to understand why I can’t just stop eating cookies.

After all — years ago, he just stopped eating meat. Before we met, he decided to give up sugar one day on the hunch that the sugar caused him migraines. He still suffers from migraines, but he won’t eat sweets. Why would he eat sweets? He gave them up. He makes do on the Los Angeles streets carless — the transit system map burned into his brain like neural pathways. When he was 15, he gave up masturbating for three years, for crying out loud. Have you ever heard of such a teenage boy?

When we met, he was working as a clerk in a soon-to-be-bankrupt record store. After the tower fell, he then spent nearly 10 months unemployed. I survived 8 of those months as supportively as I could, but the toll of his paralysis was too much to bear. In the summer, we broke up in spite of being very much in love. I told him why. I offered to help. And, in the interim of “just friends” (with occasional benefits), I helped him with his resume. I edited dozens of cover letters as he sent them out. I pumped him up for interviews and, in the end, he landed a sweet internship. It was truly a team effort. Things have been much better since then.

So, the fact that he cannot figure out how to be supportive of me when it comes to losing weight is very disheartening. Because he is so all-or-nothing, he cannot understand how leftover Weight Watchers points can legally transform into a scoop of ice cream. In his mind, if you are on a diet, there is no place whatsoever for ice cream. He gets frustrated with me, if I just need to have an “off” day and eat the breadbowl along with the soup. He doesn’t mind me eating fourteen donuts and a gallon of hot chocolate on any given day. He curls up next to me just right and whispers that he loves me and the way I look, and that if I never lose a pound, it’s just fine with him — as long as I’m not trying to diet. Once I announce that I am undertaking a Program, a System, an Eating Plan, his all-or-nothing motor goes into high gear.

I’ve tried to explain this to him. We’ve talked about it many times. I usually start the conversation by saying, “I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to find a way to work together on this as a team, but I’d like to try.” The weight of his judgment and frustration is too much for me — a confirmed emotional eater — to bear. I feel so much shame when he reacts to my food choices that I overeat. He is not the only reason I overeat, but he is a consistent one.

He loves me. He wants what’s best for me. He would stick by me if I never lost another pound as long as I live. But, he is having trouble supporting me when I want to do things differently than he would.

BUT.

In his natural environment, my Dad does okay with eating well. He really likes vegetables (!!!) and so generally he’ll steam up asparagus or broccoli even when my mom makes a pasta/meat/bread/sweets spread for dinner. But, in my family of 9, he was generally the only one who would eat them.

He has a natural hunger switch, eats less than the rest of us, and quits when he’s done.

Dad also doesn’t mind walking across campus to mail a letter, or go to a meeting, or whatever else, even though campus is nearly a mile long. For a while, actually, he was doing a lot of walking and lost some weight on accident. He looked and felt great. He used to play basketball and, for a while in my childhood, would play raquetball on Saturdays.

But, Dad loves my mom. He loves her so much that he enables her in her inactivity. They both work at the same university, but he has a parking sticker which allows him access to all of the roads and lots on campus. He routinely picks her up and offers her door-to-door services for her campus errands. He has crafted a life for her which is virtually without effort. She buys the groceries, but he hefts them out of the car and carts them up and down the stairs to put them away. He does the laundry, which involves another round of up-and-down-stairs runs. He even protects her from her greatest enemy: cooking.

Who can blame her? She hates cooking. After feeding 7 hungry babies, who wouldn’t? Apparently, she has always hated cooking, but now she especially hates the exertion of it — the standing and bending and lifting and chopping — so they routinely eat out. She doesn’t like exotic foods or anything with too much spice (and won’t even add salt to the foods she makes because “it tastes so strong”) so she’s stuck with places like Tony Roma’s, Outback, Applebee’s, and her favorite — Sizzler.

Believe me, she’s not eating from the salad bar at those places.

I was telling RecordStoreRomeo about it this weekend. I had made a delicious panini from scratch, using whole wheat artisan bread, fresh mozzarella, heirloom tomato slices, and pine nuts. I coupled it with a butter lettuce salad tossed with a homemade garlic/lemon dressing. It was superbly delicious, fresh, and whole. He asked, “Where did you learn to cook like this?”

Unfortunately, my answer was, “Mostly from cookbooks and tv shows.” My mother was a child of the 50’s, and her cooking reflects that. Her primary method of cooking involves various combinations of pre-packaged foods, relying heavily on Kraft products and other processed stuff. There’s nothing she loves more than a summer bar-b-que of chicken breasts, ribs, steak, and shrimp. She’ll fill up on those meats and not even leave room for mayo-drenched potato salad, let alone a leafy green. Costco provides a never-ending parade of frozen appetizers which were once fried — taquitos, chicken strips, egg rolls, and the like — on which she binges. And, she taught the rest of us well.

It’s going to be really interesting to see if she can survive Weight Watchers. I know it’s been hard for me.

I finally got my mom on the phone to own up, and exclaimed incredulously to her, “I mean, did you go to a meeting and everything?”

Well, no. They signed up for online services including e-tools, but hey. It’s a start and, shoot: that’s basically the plan I’m following at this point. But, I did my time with 2 years of meetings before I quit.

A few weeks ago, she called me to complain about insomnia, and blamed it largely on worries about her health. I’ll admit — I tuned out a little bit. How many hundreds of times have I heard her say, “I really need to lose weight. I should start walking. I should stop eating dessert. I should… I should… I should…?” She’s always trying to rope me in to be her diet buddy, which I think has contributed in some way to my whole diet aversion. I couldn’t bear the weight (forgive the pun) of her ill health along with mine.

Anyway, during the insomnia, she told me she was up all night crafting and concocting new diets. One of them was called the “100 Bite Diet.” I was almost afraid to ask what that was. “You know,” she chirped. “I’d just count my bites and only eat 100 a day.”

The magic of telecommunications allowed me to roll my eyes and still seem like a good daughter. “And how is that going so far?” I ventured.

“Great,” she said. “It only took me 10 bites to get through breakfast, and I just had 4 bites of candy bar, so that’s good.”

And that is when I heard myself dropping the bomb.

“You know, mom. You don’t actually need to stay up nights inventing diets when so many other people have done it for you. I mean, maybe you should just join Weight Watchers and see if their plan would work for you. It’s sensible and for some people it really works.”

After that little lecture, I felt guilty. For the past few months, I’ve thought I could craft my own plan by piecing together bits of knowledge from various sources. I should restrict somewhat, but not to the point of measuring. Gosh, no. I shouldn’t eat any sugar at all, but should rely on a sort of South Beach mentality with “only good carbs.” That’s it… and then I’ll count points but only eat Core foods, and then every 3rd Wednesday I’ll allow myself to have ice cream. Or a Free Day. Because that’s what I think I’d like best. And other diets let you have a Free Day. So, hey. It must be okay, right?

Well, sue me. I am my mother’s daughter. So, I sat myself down and gave myself the same lecture about not reinventing the wheel and have gotten back on the Weight Watchers wagon this week. I don’t really think it’s dramatically better than any other plan out there — but it’s a plan, and it was written by people who supposedly know more than I do, and so it’s a fine enough place to start [over].

There’s a part of me that’s a little bit excited about having a WW buddy in the family. Today she told me she felt guilty for the bagel she had at breakfast. “I only put 1 tablespoon of cream cheese on it, though, and it was whole wheat.”

“Mom,” I soothed. “There are no bad foods. All you do is write it down and then, at dinner time, decide what you can eat based on the points you have left.”

And then, I stopped. And blinked. And I realized I have never once heard of my mother having a whole wheat anything on purpose. And she was at least aware of how much cream cheese she was using, and holy crap. That’s progress.

I’m proud of both of us.

I mean, I find it kind of amazing that, for 10 (or more, in this case) days of the month, my body is totally and utterly hijacked by a complex biological function. This function is beautiful, miraculous, ancient, mysterious, feminine, tidal, and blah blah blah… but the fact is that for a huge chunk of my life, it doesn’t matter what I eat. It doesn’t matter how much I do (or do not) exercise. No amount of drinking water, counting calories, or eschewing refined flours can budge the scale downward. Rather, I gain weight steadily. Sigh. Step off the scale. Keep on trucking.

Then, at the end of the jolt, the pounds drop off. Equally quickly. Sometimes (depending on how well I have fended off cravings), the scale dips slightly lower than it dipped before my period sent out its advance scouts. Sometimes not. Then, I get about 3 good weeks of eating right, exercising, and seeing some progress before the Hormones attack again.

What I’m trying to say is that the better I get to know my body and what happens to it from day to day, the more aggrivated I get by the traditional “eat less, move more” mythology. I don’t think it works that way for women — it certainly doesn’t seem to for me. I think it is a construct of the male-dominated collective, and the feminist in me snarls back from her dark corner.

As we know, the tradition of Western Medicine was largely founded and perpetuated by Old White Guys. These guys found a formula (and oh, how Old White Guys love formulas!) for weight loss: expend more energy than you consume. What a formula! It is as simple as it is obvious! It’s practically a couplet, and might as well rhyme for how it is memorized by school chlidren and housewives: Eat Less; Move More. For Old White Guys, it works perfectly. Almost every time.

The problem I keep coming back to is this: beyond the obvious accoutrements, men’s and women’s bodies are so different. We have different plumbing, chemicals, hormones, chromosomes. We have different functions, really. Purposes. Roles. People generally accept that, in general, even our brains are built differently, with complementary learning styles and strengths. The expectation that a simple weight loss equation could work so simply for both genders is really kind of ludicrous. To get depressed, disappointed, or to give up because our bodies aren’t responding like good little robots is natural, maybe, but unenlightened.

I’m thinking of examples from my real- and internet-lives that illustrate this well. How about Fred and Robin? I used to read both of their blogs religiously. I became discouraged, however, when it was clear that they were living similar lifestyles, yet Fred was losing weight and Robin wasn’t. Robin was exercising daily, taking 5-plus-mile walks, routinely recording what she ate, trying different programs, etc. They each indulged in one “free day” per week. And yet, Robin’s weight stalled. It soon became painful to read. She’d try new things. She’d increase her exercise. She’d decrease her intake. She’d give up the fight for a while and then she’d come back. She went to the doctor. She got sick, and got well. She tried thyroid meds and merrily bitched along. She continued to live her life, yes, but you couldn’t help but wonder — how hard was it to crawl in bed every night with someone who seemed to just eat less and move more?¹ Now, she is post-op and has lost half her body weight, but without the surgery, no amount of genuinely Eating Less and Moving More worked for her. It worked like a charm for her husband, though.

So, we hobble along. Some of us hobble along better than others, but even our big heroines (I mean, have you ever seen PastaQueen’s chart? Maintain, maintain, maintain, LOSE. Maintain, maintain, maintain, LOSE.) don’t seem to be falling into the “simple math” category. I’m thinking of certain other bloggers (Marla, Debbi, and others…) who are doing everything “right” and their bodies refuse to release weight. Maybe there are examples of men who have the same struggle, but I haven’t seen them.

For me, the math is somewhat more complicated. I have PCOS, and have for over 15 years. My body’s hormones, insulin, and other chemicals are all out of whack and I have to respect that, if I intend to live more healthily and build fitness. I see so many women experience a little hiccup in the system, set goals beyond their control and not reach them, and go through a period of maintenance or even gain. Often, women get frustrated, give up, and blame themselves for not being able to do the simple math. We eat less and move more, and we don’t always lose weight. Something must be fundamentally wrong with us, right?

Generally, we act as though our bodies should function as some sort of calorie bank — we want to make deposits and withdrawals and be able to balance the checkbook at the end of the month. All I’m saying is, maybe it doesn’t always work that way, in spite of what the Old White Guys say.

I, for my part, am going to give in to the wonderful, ancient, mysterious experience of living in a body made up of estrogen and ovaries and sugar and spice. I’m going to just keep nurturing myself and stop expecting my body to have read all of the textbooks. I’m going to fault the system, instead of myself, when my body doesn’t comply with Their rules. I’ve always been a bit of a rebel, why shouldn’t my body, too?

1. Note: I’m sure Robin would be the first to tell you, in her characteristically and wonderfully brash and honest way, that it was just fine and dandy thankyouverymuch… I’m mostly just talking about my own personal thoughts and reactions here. I’d have been pissed. [↩]

There’s a lot to do in Orlando, I hear. I’ve never been there, but without even calling on my higher mental functioning I could tell you that most of what there is to do in Orlando involves walking. Lots of walking.

Without getting into details, it’s easy to say that my family is not in any way health conscious. Certain siblings were blessed with higher metabolisms than others, but they do not seem to share those genes with my parents. Both are overweight, and my mother is quite obese.

I don’t have the energy to get into it tonight, but my father completely enables her: she never has to exert herself more than to climb the stairs to her room, hoist into bed, and watch Law and Order reruns from her cozy cushions. Sometimes she also lifts big boxes of cookies or cakes into a shopping cart, but dad and my brothers hoist them out and into storage when she gets home.

Mom suffers from major depression. Not that I’m an expert in mental health or anything¹, but a daily walk would really go far in alleviating her symptoms without taking so much medication. Still, she won’t do it. She’ll only think about it, talk about it, and give reasons why she can’t do it.

Mom has been blessed to see the world, thanks to my dad’s travel bug and an accommodating profession. The thing that amazes me is that, no matter where she is, my mom is surprised by the way her body protests against the rigors of travel. One day of walking lands her in bed for the next 2 days. She complains and exclaims of her feet, knees, hips, and other assorted body parts aching after sight-seeing. She does nothing to prepare herself, physically, for travel, and sometimes it’s easy for me to lose patience with it all.

Tonight she told me that she and my aunt had rented scooters to maneuver through the Magical Kingdom. I was hit with a wave of sadness. I want to escape my genetic heritage so badly.

1. I am. [↩]

What I needed was verification. I wanted to be proven wrong in my lifelong belief that I wasn’t good enough because I was fat. I had to work the fat-girl chip off my shoulder a little bit, to stop blaming everything in my whole damn life on my weight, and to be — just once — seen for who I am on the inside just as much as for what I am on the outside.

I also feared that if I were to wait until I had lost a bunch of weight before I started dating, I’d be bitter against the men that would be attracted to a thinner me. After all, the list of things I’ve got going for and against me will¹ basically be the same.

I’ll still be an artist, a therapist, an intellectual, an NPR snob, a musician, a world-traveler, and a culture geek. I’ll always be a writer and a designer, a bit of a packrat, and a sucker for fluffy white puppies. I’ll always know too much trivia about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ll always know the words to every single Rogers and Hammerstein musical. I’ll always have to pluck that hair from my chin every 5 or 6 days. I’ll always be me.²

In spite of my good qualities, though, I had managed to go 30 years without a boyfriend. 30 years without being kissed. 30 years, for Pete’s³ sake, without even holding anyone’s hand. It wasn’t for lack of wanting or trying, believe me. It was the chip on my shoulder — the belief (not the fact, since I know lots and lots of overweight people in relationships) that no one would ever want me. That’s why, when the Record Store Romeo asked me out on a second date, my response was a startled, “Really!?”

If 2007 is the Year of Regulation (by which I mean food and money), 2006 was the Year of Romance. I joined a few dating websites, wrote a cute, kick-ass profile, and waited.

Throughout the year, I dated a lot, actually. Every other week or so, I would go in and change the checkbox that denoted my body shape or size. It was more of an experiment, really, and a bit of a feminist rage against the machine. I mean, I would go out with these guys that were listed as “a few extra pounds” and end up thinking, “That’s not fair! They are more overweight than I, and that’s saying something. No one is questioning their body-image cred. That’s not fair!”

Besides, what exactly are the subtle differences between “Big and Beautiful” and “Curvy” and “Lots to Love” and “Full Figured” and “Could Stand to Lose a Few Pounds” or whatever other clever monikers the website creators concoct to spare us the shame of having to mark the medically-sound “Morbidly Obese” or the politically-incorrect “Fatty McFatterson?”

I’ll tell you what, though. Based on my unscientific experiment⁴, men on dating sites will not approach women on dating sites who are listed as being in the upper weight limits, no matter how cleverly phrased those weight delineators are. On the other hand, I got a lot of dates when I was listed as “Above average” or “A few extra pounds.” I got a lot of second and third dates, even.⁵

For the most part, since I had photos in my profile — including full-body photos — I never had a problem with the men I met when I was advertising myself that as “Above Average” or whatever, instead of the more accurate “Twice your body weight, no matter what your body weight is.” They never seemed overly turned off by my looks or my body. But, sometimes I got to feeling a bit dishonest. I’d go in and switch over to something larger. Something more elephantine. And, the dates would drop off.

So, yeah. I had a lot of dates. I tried to keep a good attitude about it, and mostly looked at it as an opportunity to collect funny, ridiculous party stories. I’d pretty much go out with every person who asked me, reasoning that I needed the practice. As the year waned on, I started wanting more. I liked some of the guys I was dating. I wanted to start holding hands. Kissing. Stuff like that. I wanted to know what it was like but, as a 30-year-old who’s never been kissed, I didn’t know how it worked exactly.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I did all sorts of juvenile things in preparation for the big 1K. I watched movies and went slow-mo through kissing sequences. “Move your hand here, close your eyes there…” It was like I was studying for an exam. I even asked one of my friends to come to my house and give me a first kiss just to get the damn thing overwith and get past the nerves.⁶

Record Store Romeo is an average-looking guy. He’s average height. He’s average weight. He is attractive and sweet. He’s not, as he puts it, a “chubby chaser” and I am the first overweight girl he has ever dated. But, he doesn’t care about any of that. He says that he really loves me for me and I believe him.

He and I have been together nearly 6 months at this point, and for the most part our relationship is really good. We have open communication. We care for each other and we care about each other. We enjoy our time together and have cute rituals and routines that make me happy. The best part is, when and if we ever break up, I am 120% certain that it will not be about my weight. He’s supportive of my current goals, but his overall attitude is, “Lose weight, don’t lose weight, it doesn’t matter to me. If it’s something you want, I’ll support you in getting it. If not, don’t do it.”

Now, my excuses are gone, and for the most part, so is the big fat chip on my big fat shoulder.

1. With the possible exception of increased self discipline and motivation, not to mention a little boost of esteem that comes from achieving goals but let’s face it. I don’t really need huge esteem boosts. [↩]
2. I realize that this may or may not be true… but it’s just my current line of thinking. What do I know? [↩]
3. Pete who? [↩]
4. And this could be based on any number of things, not the least of which is that I was trying to date in the Los Angeles pool, ugh. [↩]
5. Women, lesbian or bisexual women, on dating sites, though, don’t seem to mind. I attribute this to a collective conscience issue related to female body image and a shared sympathy. But, I ended up dating mostly men, so that’s a post for another day. [↩]
6. This, fortunately, was called off before the stupidity really set in. [↩]

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.

It’s not that I’m not excited to be nearly 12 pounds thinner in a little over one week. It’s not that I really restricted or denied myself treats this week, either.² It’s not that I didn’t get a little happy-jolt when my boyfriend³, after a few days of absence, did a double-take when he saw me.⁴

No, the freakout is more metaphysical than anything. It’s too fast. I know it’s too fast, but it’s the way my body reacts. At my weight, my body is practically begging me to eat less and move more. Once I begin to make small changes to those ends, my body jettisons the weight like a slutty prom dress. It seems to misplace a few ounces of fat and water weight every time I stand up. I envision it like an animated tracking device — a puddle here, a grease spot there, and wee wee wee all the way home.

But it’s too fast. It’s way too fast. At some point, it will slow down. Until then, however, I feel I need to strap in for the ride. I’ve never totally ridden out the initial tidal wave of weight loss and seen it through to its conclusion. I don’t know exactly how long it will take to slow down. I don’t know how many more clothes I will have to buy between now and then in order to keep from flashing my coworkers and clients every time I reach for the phone.

12 pounds in a week is just too damn much, and that’s what people can’t seem to understand. Incidentally, there are people who attend Weight Watchers who want to lose 12 pounds in total. I recognize that those people would gladly slap me upside the head right about now, and I don’t blame them. But, if those same people gained 12 pounds in one week, it’d be a different story.

It’s not that 12 pounds up or down is such a big deal (to rational, post-modern people), but that it doesn’t give time for growing accustomed. There is no time to acclimate. There is just a speeding train traveling downhill with no one to man the breaks. There is a sense of being totally out of control. There is a panic, a white-knuckle grip, a holding-on-for-dear-life that is nearly as uncomfortable as those 12 pounds were, hanging off my body like (as the Weight Watchers website boasts) 9 or so ripe cantaloupes.

Ew.

The weigh-in lady clapped and squealed when she read the scale. She wrote “Terrific!” across the sticker in my log book. She asked if I wanted to have the leader announce my loss in front of the meeting so that everyone could clap and squeal, too. I declined her kind offer, though, saying that “It’s just this thing that my body does” and “I don’t want anyone to think they’re supposed to lose that much weight in a week.”

They’re not. I’m not. No one is. The whole 1-to-2-pounds mentality is perfect for a reason: it gives you time. It is a gradual slope. It lets you get used to your body as it changes and that is a nice thing, overall.

I called my therapist as I drove away from the meeting. Her comment? “We’ve been through this before. We know this is what happens, and we will get through it.” She also reminded me that I’m a very, very different person now than i was 2 years ago. I have better boundaries. I stand up for myself more. I have a really rocking support group, which I did not have back then. In fact, last time I started Weight Watchers, I didn’t have anyone to tell. I kept it a secret. People began to wonder if I had cancer, because no one knew I was trying to lose weight.

And, she’s right. Things are different this time. I’m fully expecting to be on plan when the slow-down hits, and I’m currently predicting the slow-down to occur in March.

Then, I’ll be crying for these days. Until then, however, I reserve the right to be a little freaked.

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. [↩]
2. If anything, I went a little over plan and didn’t obsessively count, measure, and track things. I guestimated. A lot. [↩]
3. Yeah, okay, I have a boyfriend. I’ll write about him soon, since I just got his permission to do so. [↩]
4. He said that he noticed immediately that I looked “different.” When I prodded, “different” translated to “thinner,” yes, but, until I told him what had happened at weigh-in, he thought that it must have been a new t-shirt or new lip gloss and not a ridiculously-dramatic weight loss. He knew that I was trying to “be good” this week but (and this makes two of us) he didn’t think it was possible to lose so much weight in one week that it was visibly noticeable. Surprise, since last time I lost weight, it was nearly 40 pounds gone before anyone noticed. [↩]