While I can’t say this tee shirt was tight at my biggest weight, I can’t say it was loose either. You be the judge. Anyway, the jeans were size 28 (I wore 30-32 comfortably), and the gray moo-moo tee shirt was a 3XL. Okay, that’s all the show and tell for today so keep scrolling down past my knobby knees.

It’s good for me to remember the old days and the old clothes because I absolutely believe that what the poet George Santayana said is true: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And so on a regular basis I remember the misery of my past which allows me not only to be all the more grateful for today but to do what I can to treasure and keep it.

So let me catch you up on what’s been going on since I haven’t been posting much. You’ll notice there’s not been any posts recently from my kitchen exploits because the deluge of Christmas baking basically wore me out and was also adding a few too many calories to my life. As a result there’s been very little culinary glamor to be found around here with our meals revolving around grilled chicken and fish, fresh veggies and fruit, and the more than occasional liquid protein supplement. With outdoor grill season just around the corner though you can be sure you’ll be treated to photos of yet more nearly-burned to a crisp fennel, fowl, and fin. We like to say around here that we don’t like burnt food but blackened food which makes it sound more like a style of grilling than an accident from multi-tasking one too many tasks while the food is on the grill.

And as to exercise to put it simply, I’ve been a maniac! After months of little to zip physical activity due to surgeries and recovery time, I’m focused on getting my muscle mass and girlie guns back to where they were before I turned into a non-green version of Gumby. Recently my fitness schedule has included strength training three times a week with a personal trainer and a whole lot of spinning! I’ve been averaging 4-5  spin classes a week and have found it’s the most effective and efficient way for me to burn the most calories in the least amount of time; anywhere from 500-700 for a 45 minutes class according to my heart rate monitor. Speaking of which, if you tap on the image below a larger version will open up showing the data from my Garmin Fitness watch and heart monitor for the past month, showing that since March 1 I’ve exercised a total of just over 21 hours for a total calorie burn of more than 12,000 calories. Those 21 hours include: strength training, spin class, road cycling, and the dreaded StairMonster. I take the elevator up to the gym so I can get on a step machine and climb nowhere. Don’t even try to make sense of that.

I’d love to tell you all this physical exercise and moderate eating has me at my goal weight but if I told you that I’d be lying through my little crowned teeth. My weight continued to sloooowly climb through January and February to 168 pounds despite my best efforts and an excessive amount of frustration and head-banging. And then….finally….my weight plateaued and since then it’s been letting go an ounce or two at a time and this morning the flashing digits on the bathroom scales read 166.6. I know. 666. The Omen. Scary. But actually this time it’s a good sign in that my body is finally getting back in shape and letting go of the weight. My weight gain over the past few months really has been the great mystery to everyone from my doctors to my trainer to me and the theories have abounded. My personal trainer thinks it was due to the loss of muscle mass from months of inactivity. Doctors suggested everything from a hormone imbalance to the physical trauma my body experienced from the surgeries to it simply being a matter of my age working against me. The last one was suggested by someone so young he looked like Beaver Cleaver with a stethoscope. But then again at my age, all the doctors are starting to look like Doogie Howser M.D.

Even our cats had a theory as to my weight gain that involved me sneaking their bags of kitty treats on the sly. As tempting as Kibbles Tuna and Liver Medley sounds…

So I think this has you all caught up on more than you cared to know about me but don’t think for a minute that’s going to stop me from telling you more! I’ll follow up in the next few days with a final update on where I am in terms of recovery from the reconstructive surgeries (Oh could it be she’ll include photos of her scars? Only time will tell!) and then I intend to start posting on general stuff related to health, weight loss, and nutrition that I’ve collected from my own experiences along the way.

Later Gators!

I spent a whole lot of years in churches that would traditionally hold a New Years Eve service that included a time when everyone would write out what they wanted to see God do in the coming year (a religious version of New Year’s Resolutions) and then we’d seal our note in a self-addressed envelope that the church secretary would drop in the mail to us six months later so we could see how God had answered our prayers and how we had followed through on the commitments we’d made to Him.

By the time I was in young adulthood the arrival of that envelope, addressed to myself in my own handwriting, was like a slap across the face, a literary reminder that once again I hadn’t done what I had been so earnest about doing six months earlier. Once again I was reminded that I’d failed to make any headway on the first item on every single New Year’s Resolution list I ever written during my lifetime. The wording was different from year to year but the intent was always the same.

1. I want to lose weight.

1. This year I will lost 50 pounds.

1. By next year at this time I will have lost 100 pounds.

1. I commit to losing weight in the coming year.

1. I promise that with God’s help I will get my weight and my eating under control.

One year I’d had enough of making New Year’s Resolutions that I knew I could never keep and so while everyone else was in church writing out their resolutions and commitments for the coming year, I was scratching out another kind of message to myself. Six months later when it arrived I tore open the envelope and read,

So, it’s now six months later and I bet anything you weigh more today than you did on New Year’s Eve, don’t you? When are you ever going to just accept that you’re always going to be fat? You’re such a failure.

No small amount of self-loathing in that little note to self. Ya think?

But it wasn’t just once a year I’d failed to live up to the word I made to myself. Every Monday was going to be the start of a new diet and this time I was going to stick with it, and sometimes I did stick with it. At least until Tuesday afternoon. Every night after I’d eaten Chinese take-out for four or a deluxe double-thick pizza with extra cheese and a half gallon of ice cream as a chaser and I was stuffed sick I’d swear to myself I was never going to eat like that again, and just to prove how serious I was I’d storm (or waddle as it were) into the kitchen and throw any food that remained (if any did) into the garbage can. But by the next day, after a small breakfast or no breakfast at all, and eating little more than a salad and a Diet Coke for lunch, I’d head to the fast food district of town and fill up the back seat of my car: a six pack of tacos from Taco Bell, two orders of onion rings from BurgerKing, and a half dozen Dilly Bars from Dairy Queen. Then I’d go home, eat it all, and feeling stuffed sick with self-loathing and food once again I’d swear I’d never eat like that again. But I would. Again and again and again. All the way to 325 pounds.

I haven’t lost 170 pounds because one year I made a New Years Resolution to myself to lose 170 pounds. There wasn’t a single ginormous last supper that made me so violently sick in body and spirit that I swore that was the last time and then I followed through from that moment on. My weight loss journey didn’t start on a Monday or on the 1st of the month or the 1st day of a new year. It began on a Saturday. May 8, 1999. I didn’t wake up that morning knowing I would always remember that date. I didn’t know that between then and the beginning of 2010 I would never again gorge on a fast-food progressive dinner, never order Chinese take-out for four for a party of one, or never lose myself in a half-gallon of ice cream or a two pound bowl of pasta and butter. When I backed my car out of the driveway that morning I didn’t know I would never be that heavy again. I didn’t know the next time I’d buy a car I wouldn’t have to have the driver’s seat soldered in place to keep my weight from breaking the steel joints. I didn’t know the time was coming when I’d stop waking up in the middle of night gasping for breath or fearing the pains that occasionally ripped through my chest. I didn’t know in a few short months I’d be wearing pants that zipped all the way up rather than being held in place with jumbo diaper pins and prayer. And I sure couldn’t have imagined that in a few years from that day I’d be wearing size 10 jeans and medium size shirts, walking a half-marathon, hiking through the Redwoods, or hearing my doctor say, “Anita, you are in more than excellent health.”

May 8, 1999 was the day that led to where I am today but I didn’t know it at the time.  I just knew I was going to go to a morning meeting of *Overeaters Anonymous that happened to be held in the back room of my favorite Mexican restaurant in town. I figured I’d sit and listen to a bunch of fat people talk about the diet they were on and whine about how much they missed eating ice cream and cake and cookies, and then at the end of the meeting I’d slip into the main room of the restaurant and order my usual double cheese enchilada plate with a side of chips and guacamole to go. Instead I went to the meeting and listened to thin and heavy people talk about having spent their lives eating like I thought only I ate and that they were grateful that for today they no longer had to eat like that. And at the end of the meeting, rather than leaving with the smell of a greasy plate of Mexican food covered in foil on the passenger seat beside me, I left with hope that at least for that day, I stood a chance of going to bed without being stuffed sick and ashamed. And I did.

That was the beginning for me. And there’s a beginning for you too. You just might know when the journey begins. But then again, maybe your journey already has started and you don’t even know it has or can’t believe it has.

—

*Overeater’s Anonymous is part of my story but it might be part of yours. Instead it may be Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or private therapy or a plan of eating that you find in a magazine that works best for you.

I had my reasons, logical reasons or so I thought for not buying a coat but in the end the answer for why I never did is as simple as I never thought I deserved one. I’m not saying that was ever a conscious thought but that’s really what my actions were saying. I was willing to freeze and get drenched in the rain because I was fat and until I wasn’t fat I refused to buy myself an essential piece of clothing that would have protected me and kept me warm against the elements. Had I deprived a child of a coat in winter I would have been called negligent or seen someone freezing in the cold and said, “I’ll get you a coat but only if you do this and that,” I would have been considered cruel, but I had no problem punishing myself year after year by simply not buying a coat for myself.

I doubt I’m the only person in the world who punished, deprived, and mistreated myself because I was obese and thought I deserved no less. Anyone who feels like a failure in one area of their life tends to see their whole life as flawed. If I can’t fix this one thing about myself then nothing else I do well matters. The scales always tip toward our weaknesses rather than our strengths. An obese person who struggles with their weight (I leave room for those round folks who are perfectly content as they are) could find the cure to cancer and in receiving world fame and accolades all through the day, would go to bed at night thinking of themselves, “….if I could just lose the weight….” Enough is never enough as long as the extra pounds remain.

For years I called myself names I would never consider utterly toward another human being. I would never have looked at another person with the kind of disgusted disdain I could muster for myself when gazing in the mirror.

We would never consider calling another person the names we call ourselves. We would never look at another person with the disgusted disdain reflected in our gaze when seeing ourselves in the mirror. I abused my body and jeopardized my health by eating the most unhealthy foods ever conceived in the commercial mass-production marketplace. I ignored the mysterious pains and racing heart. I neglected to get enough rest. I put everyone first in the world before me, not because I was so loving and compassionate and giving but because I felt through and through that no one deserved less than I. Not because I had intentionally tripped a blind person. Not because I had tortured a cat. Not because I had been a disrespectful daughter. Not because I threw trash out my car window when no one was looking. No. I deserved to be considered last and to be cared for least simply because I was obese.

It’s remembering how I once saw myself and treated myself that made me feel emotion over the glimpse of a few coats in our hall closet. That was who I was and how I saw myself and it’s so far from who I now am that I can hardly believe it and at the same time I never want to forget that’s where I came from and that’s where some people still are today; still filled with self-loathing and wrestling with the idea that if they just weigh less they’ll be more worthy of being cared for by themselves and by others. What a tragedy that anyone would waste a single day of their life living under such a lie because that’s all it is. There’s not a soul in this world who deserves any less than any other because beyond our physical appearance or talents or intelligent we are the beloved and you just don’t get more worthy than that.

I am of course equally irked to learn at this point in my life that they were right all along.

The past couple months have been uncharted territory for me and more than a little complicated around issues of weight loss, body image, and adopting a lifestyle that includes a sustainable activity level and satisfying plan of eating that will allow me to maintain my weight and lead me into my golden years.

Here are the stats. I set my original goal weight at the first of this year at 160-165 pounds. I weighted 217 at the time. I reached 165 when I had my first surgery to remove some of the excess skin I’d accumulated over the years. Following my second surgery about two months later my weight had reached 147 (for about an hour and 15 minutes) but then tenuously balanced off around 152.

Now, this word tenuously is important because while it’s normal for body weight to fluctuate between a 3-4 pound range, my weight can leap anywhere from 3-6 pounds overnight. I don’t even need to eat a quart of ice cream or a large pizza with extra cheese to do it. It literally just takes a little more salt or fat or rounding up my portions of my usual food plan and my weight will bounce up like a Wham-O Super Ball. I’d love to tell you that my weight bounces back down just as effortlessly but then I’d be creating a work of fiction rather than reporting on the facts. Instead it takes not only paring back down to a bare bones food plan but kicking up my normal activity level to have it drop back down again.  People who don’t know me might think I’m making this up; that I’m eating more than I realize or making poor food choices that are dense in fat and calories but that’s not the case. There’s no question as my blog attests, I’m a full-blown foodie at heart. I appreciate food and I love cooking and baking. I thoroughly enjoy pouring over cookbooks and creating a beautiful meal or baking something ridiculously decadent but when I’m whipping up the baked goods and other gooey wonders, except for a bite or a taste, they all go out the door to church or to my eager neighbors or are tossed into a shipping box headed to family or friends.

A month ago I weighed in at the medical clinic (where I go every week to attend my follow-up maintenance meetings) on a Wednesday afternoon at 153 which I held for a couple days. That Saturday D and I went out for dinner at The Slanted Door, a most excellent Thai restaurant at the Ferry Building in San Francisco where I ate too much of a good thing and by good thing I mean the menu leaned heavily toward vegetables and low-fat protein sources. If memory serves me, which it seldom does, I don’t remember whether I had dessert or not but looking at their online menu nothing stands out as familiar so I’m hazarding a guess that I passed. Passing on desert is my default. But as I said, I ate more than I normally do with my indulgance in white rice and some other off my normal food chart ingredients like eggplant cooked in coconut milk and caramelized tiger prawns. The next morning I weighed in at 160 (7 pounds overnight) and have held steady at that weight through this morning. And as a side note, while others might be having their annual Thanksgiving meal over-stuffed regrets, I’m okay with how I handled the meal we had at Cafe Beaujolais in Mendocino. I had a diver scallop appetizer, two ounces of turkey (hold the gravey), a half-cup of brussel sprouts, one single bite of each other item served on my plate, and for a rare happening I admittedly didn’t pass on dessert.

It comes back again to a fact I’ve resisted accepting. I’ve blogged about having a survivor’s type metabolism; an explanation given to me by a doctor with more than 30 years of experience with bariatric patients when explaining how my weight held numerous times for 2-3 weeks in a row with no weight loss while on the liquid fast causing me to lose weight at a much slower rate than most other patients. My body tends to grab onto calories with a tight fist and then refuses to let go without a rigid food plan and stepping up physical activity. Is there a hereditary factor involved? Is it a consequences of 30 years of extreme dieting and equally extreme overeating? Does it happen when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars? Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. All I can tell you is that while I’m not particularly happy about things being this way, I’ve come to learn this is what is and I can either accept and adapt accordingly or continue to ignore the evidence and go all delusional which is going to ultimately lead to some miserably tight pants.

So here I am at 160 at the low end of my original weight loss goal but at up 8-13 pounds from where I was a couple months ago at the end of the fast and surgeries. I have a whole world of body image issues that are going on in my head that are making it extremely difficult for me to decide what weight is right for me and where I can be with my body and be satisfied. That’s too big of a discussion for this long enough already post but I’ll be blogging more about it in the coming days because body image is something we don’t talk enough about when talking about obesity or weight loss. I just know that to maintain any particular weight on the scale, I’m going to have to accept how my body responds to nutritional fuel and eat accordingly. I’ve taken a couple months to find my way around with the food and now the time has come to return to a clearly defined plan of eating….and for anyone interested, if anyone is still with me, I’ll spell that in detail tomorrow.

And just so you know, I’m being totally honest and out there with all this. I tend to not soften the edges much or paint the picture in unrealistic colors. Instead it’s about keeping it real both for myself and for anyone who might find themselves struggling with similar issues or celebrating similar successes in the future.

I had a blast! It’s been months since I’ve baked and with the exception of my annual gingerbread house bake-off when I bake and assemble 30-40 of them for the children at church to decorate at Christmas, it’s been years since I did something like this. I shipped four boxes of cookies to friends, took a tray of cookies to my plastic surgeon whose office is one block from our front door, sent a tray of cookies with D to work, and still had plenty to load off on some friends who came over for dinner that night.

But there was a problem. For all my resolve to not taste any of them, I did. I’m not a big lover of all things cookie myself. For me, it’s all about the dough. And the little bits of chocolate, toffee, coconut, and nuts that are tossed before baking. Those little bits of goodness that so easily manage to find their way from bowl or cutting board into my mouth are my undoing. If I just sat and ate cookies it would be easy to add up the damage but given it was in dabs and morsels, it’s a little more difficult to calculate. My best guess is I ate about the equivalent of 6-8 cookies over the 8 hour bake-a-thon.

Could it have been worse? Oh sure. For every time I popped a nibble in my mouth there was five times when I said no, but that’s not the point. The point is that I don’t want to go down this slippy road of consuming calories that a) are empty nutritionally and b) are eaten mindlessly rather than with intention. If I eat a cookie, I want it to be because I make the intention decision to have one and then I want to take the time to enjoy it and be satisfied with that bite of sweetness. I want to know that I can occasionally bake treats for friends and family and when I’m done, have no regrets that I had managed my own behavior better around the food.

I use to weight 325 pounds. I now weigh 150 pounds. My body shape has changed dramatically, my clothes sizes have dropped from size 30 to size 10, my self-esteem has risen and my level of health, according to all the doctors, rocks. Only one thing hasn’t changed and that is that I remain a compulsive over eater. My years in Overeater’s Anonymous taught me that and my own personal history with food since I was a child only serves to confirm it. My baking adventure on Monday reminded me yet again that unless I work consciously and deliberately at doing things differently I will default every time to my compulsive eating ways.

So what do I do with this information? Never bake cookies or cakes or pies again for friends and family and church? Some people would say that’s exactly what I should do but I hope it doesn’t have to come to that. I love baking for people. I fell in love with baking standing at my Grandma’s side. She’d dropped spoonfuls of peanut butter cookie dough on the cookie sheet and I’d follow behind making crisscross designs on the top of each with a dinner fork. She’d slide dozens of chocolate chip cookies warm from the oven onto the brown butcher paper that lined her counter top and when cool I’d gather them up and stack them in her beat-up silver metal cookie tins.  Never do I bake without thinking of my Grandma and every time it makes me smile because I know how proud she’d be of me and how she’d eat one of my cookies and act as though it was the best cookie she’d ever tasted.

But…if I can’t bake cookies without nibbling and tasting and “sampling” then giving up baking is something I’ll have to consider because I will NOT jeopardize all the work I’ve done to get to where I am. I love my health. I love feeling comfortable in my body. I love moving easier and more gracefully. When I add it all up, I love it collectively more than I do mixing cake batter or pressing a pie crust into a pan or making crisscross markings on the top of a peanut butter cookie. If I have to give up the one for the other than the baking goes. I just hope that doesn’t have to happen.

That leads me to this…how could I have done Monday differently? What plans could I have put in place that would have supported my resolve to not nibble away on empty, wasted calories? What can I do different next time? Here are some ideas I’ve come up with. Feel free to add some of your own because clearly, I can use all the help I can get.

• Limit the hours I bake at one time so that I’m less likely to get “worn down” by being around so much food for so long.
• Prepare any meals I might need on baking day ahead of time and then STOP baking, sit down at the table and eat.
• Keep a glass of cold water on the counter.
• Fill a glass with ice water and some nibble veggies like sticks of carrot, celery, or jicama.
• Chew sugarless gum. I thought of this toward the end of the day and it really did help to keep me from putting anything else in my mouth. Chewing cinnamon gum and cookie dough at the same time isn’t all that appealing.
• Remember the quality of life I’m enjoying that I never want to risk losing for a few sugary-fatty bites.
• And maybe it would help to have these two photos taped side by side on my kitchen cabinet within view…

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The days have mostly been spent sleeping because the nights have mostly been spent whimpering and whining. They warned the pain would be worse at night and if there’s one positive thing I can say about the faceless, nameless they’s is that they do not lie. Every time I woke up during the night it felt like a car, more along the lines of a SUV than a Pria, was lying on top of me, crushing everything from shoulders to knees. I finally discovered that to beat the pain I had to have my alarm go off every three hours so I could pop a pain medication and when I started doing that, while it still felt like a car was crushing me, at least the circus clowns who were weighting it down had jumped out and lightened the load considerably.

So has the pain been worse than I anticipated? Yep. Do I regret having done the surgery? Nope. Even when I’ve been whimpering my loudest the words “What was I thinking?” has never crossed my mind because I knew I’d chosen to do this, the pain would eventually pass, and the end result would be worth the price, and after having caught a first glimpse yesterday during my post-op with the surgeon, Dr. Elliott Lavey, I’m absolutely convinced this was the right decision and path for me.

D accompanied me to Dr. Lavey’s office yesterday so that he could remove the sutures from the liposuction sites on my legs and the surgical bandages that covered the incision site across my upper back and the one that runs along my lower abdomen from side to side. There are actually three layers of sutures on the two full incision sites and all run below the surface skin layer and should dissolve on their own. I was surprised and pleased to see how well the incisions have already healed. The incision is little more than a pale red line, the thickness of a fine point Sharpee with a series of dots set about an inch apart on either side. Within another week the skin should be completely closed together so that I can begin massaging the area with aloe vera and Vitamin A oil to increase the healing and fading of what scars will remain.

Even though I’d removed my Lycra body suit a couple times during the week for cleaning (both mine and its) the thick padding of the bandages had made it virtually impossible for me to see the early results from the surgery so yesterday in his office was my first chance to take a real look.

This is one of those times when a picture could indeed say more than a thousand words but this is also one of those times when due to personal boundaries that do not include the public viewing of before and after photos of my body al naturale, the words are going to have to do.

I’m thrilled. I am beyond thrilled. I’m ecstatic. The hand fulls of loose skin are gone and aside from some general squishiness attributed to the remaining swelling, my belly is flat. The tauntness of my stomach is due not only to the removal of the excess skin but those aforementioned tightened stomach muscles which were shortened by approximately four inches. In the future if you ask me what I’m doing and I tell you I’m just gazing at my navel, understand that the odds are I mean that literally and not figuratively. I’ve been belly button gazing for the past 24 hours just trying to get use to the idea that this is my body, my belly, and my button. Now don’t get me wrong. I always had a belly button. It’s just that you had to pass through a long tummy tunnel of fat to actually locate it. Now it’s just there. The same ol’ belly button I was born with minus the tummy tunnel. The results on my back side are just as exciting with no sagging skin or bulges and if nothing changed from this moment on I’d be more than satisifed and yet with a procedure like this it can take as much as a year, even a little more, to see the full benefits of the surgery. Cool.

So this is how my body looks now and as I come to accept it in its new form, it’s important to put it out into the universe that I never did any of this because I wanted someone else’s body. I never fantasized about having “her hips” or “that woman’s waist,” or “curves like that woman over there.” I’ve never wished I was someone else or looked like someone else or acted like someone else. In every area of my life; spiritual, emotional, and now physical, it’s just about finding and living in to who the “real me” is and this surgery, along with the final one to follow soon, is just another step along that path.

I’ve noticed the past few days I’m paying more attention to my body. Holding my “love handles” and the other squishy areas of my body that will be changing over the course of the next months following the surgery and the time it takes to fully heal. It’s a little ironic that having made peace with my body after a number of years of abusing it and hating it, I’m now going ahead and allowing someone to cut into it, remove part of it, and sew what remains together.

I think this is how it should be; to love yourself before changing it rather than to change it in hopes you might love it. I wouldn’t want to go into a surgery like this hating my body or having any thought that once this surgery is done I would finally be content with this fleshy shell that’s held the truest part of me, my spirit and soul of who I am from the first day I appeared on the scene.

That’s not how it is for everyone. Some people; brilliant, reasonable, capable people, believe that a few nips and tucks will be the pathway for them to love their bodies and by extension love themselves. I was reminded of how true this was when signing the final batch of forms at the surgeon’s office the other day there was a statement I was required to initial with all the rest that read, “I understand that by having this surgery my happiness in life won’t necessarily be increased.” After all the medical warnings that preceded it, what a strange thing to read those particular words on a medical form! And yet they were there in black and white because there had been patients in the past who passed through my surgeons office and were upset because their life was the same after surgery as it had been the day before. Their hips were a little smaller, their nose more sculpted, their wrinkles less noticeable and they were still discontent and had problems. Even after all the reconstructive work and all the effort and cost and energy it took to go through the process they still weren’t happy with who they were and who they saw in the mirror. After all the bandages had been removed, the stitches gone and the scars faded, they turned to their reflection and still couldn’t see the beauty there and the inner sense of well-being they thought would be there when the surgery was over still escaped them. Reconstructive surgery may have changed the shape and tone of their bodies but it didn’t change the quality of their life in all the ways that most matter.

How much easier would that be if all it took was an operation to find contentment and be at peace with ourselves?  Instead, true contentment comes in understanding that the body we have isn’t all that we are but part of who we are and what is within and what is external was created by God’s very handiwork. Our happiness comes in accepting that the greater beauty lies within and that what is within requires more of our attention and care than flesh and skin. True contentment comes in accepting that sometimes life is hard and sometimes life is grand and sometimes it’s as stunning as an oil painting created by a master artist and other times it’s as messy as a preschoolers finger-painting and this is the body we have to experience it all and this body is good.

Acceptance is the key and it took me accepting, appreciating and being grateful for my body that brought me to the point in my life where I could treat it well by nourishing it with what it needed to thrive, giving it the movement it longed for to be alive and active, and then as I’m doing tomorrow, saying goodbye and letting go to the surplus of flesh that served me well and did it’s job by holding me all together for so many years.

This has been quite a journey but it’s not over yet…just another corner rounded in the road.

.

,

,

What I do know is that during the month of transition (adding foods back in), I should continue to lose weight but again, I have to tell you that my weight loss, despite existing on 650 calories a day (plus a bite of bread and a sip of juice every week during communion) has been incredibly slow. All together I’ve lost 50 pounds while other women in my group in the same period of time have lost 15-30 more pounds and don’t even get me started on the men’s weight loss! I’m okay with the slowness of it because it is what it is but still, I hope to lose another 15 pounds in the coming months by eating well (moderately, nutritionally, carefully) and remaining physically active. Hopefully when my body realizes I’m not intent on starving it, it will begin to cooperate a little more willingly.

Anyway, here are a few stats. On January 6 I weighed in at 213 pounds. Today I weight 163. My waist measured 41 inches and is now 32 inches. I was wearing a TIGHT size 16 jeans. I’m now wearing LOOSE size 12 jeans. And I feel great physically. Plenty of stamina, surplus energy, and whatever vim and vigor are, I have both. In other words, I feel good. Really really good.

And still there’s a certain weirdness to the whole thing. I don’t recognize my body in the mirror and some days think I’m just as big as when I started all this. When someone directs me to the smaller sizes in a store, I hesitate for a moment thinking I should mention that I’m actually a big girl and need big girl clothes. Only thing is, the big girl clothes are too big. Weirdness, but wonderful weirdness.

So that’s the scoop for now.

And rest assured, I will be taking a photo of that first bite of chicken.