Suddenly I See

So I'm taller now. Apparently.

A woman I work with commented this past week that since I've been losing weight, I look taller now. Actually, she meant to say that, but what she said was, 'you know, since you started losing weight, you're taller.' Really? A growth spurt at 41. Well, at least it's a vertical jump.

The thing is, she's right-at least as far as her meaning went. Since I'm narrower across, I've created an illusion of tallness I didn't have at my starting weight. I mean, I've lost 7 inches from my waist alone already-in fact, I'm happy to report that I appear to have an actual figure now, a curvy, feminine figure that resembles the hourglass of my long-term recollection more than the Weeble/cringing memory of the recent past. I am a smaller width, and that's what creates the illusion of my increased height.

It's true on another level too, since I carry myself differently now. I am tall, at 5'10" and I always prided myself on my posture. That vanished when I got heavy. I developed a slouch; so much so that my shoulders had begun to round and I stood shorter than I was. I didn't bother sucking my tummy in, even for health purposes. I abandoned the thrown-back shoulders of my youth for a more stooped, 'you can't see me' huddle, and I crouched everywhere. For over a year before I began my weight loss, I had tingling in my neck and across my shoulder blades from bending over, leaning over and generally trying to squash myself into a smaller space, so no one would notice me.

It was detrimental in many ways, not the least of which on my psyche. I couldn't stand up straight because I'd lost pride in my appearance and confidence in myself. That led to harsher views in my reflection, which led to poorer posture still. I'd long ago stopped looking at myself in the mirror. Oh, I'd fix my hair or brush my teeth; I did everything I needed to, to keep myself up-though barely, and the ache in my teeth reminds me that I am long, long overdue for a checkup. But that aside, I never made eye contact with my reflection. I never checked my appearance in the mirror for work or for dates, or even just to make sure my earrings matched and I had buttoned up my blouse completely. I couldn't bear what I saw, and so I stopped looking.

The other morning, about 3 pounds ago, when I was dancing around about having lost my son's body weight, I was fussing with my hair. I had slept on it wet, and there was this wild lock standing straight up off of my scalp. I was searching the cabinet for any kind of 'hold still, hair!' product, thinking as I knocked over bottles of Tums and vials of toothpaste that I could not remember the last time I'd even applied hair spray, let alone gel, mousse, or (gasp!) pommade. I found something promising, and, hoping that the 3-year gone expiration date would not mean the substance had turned toxic and would eat my hair and then bludgeon my scalp into flaked speedbumps, I snapped the cabinet shut and turned toward the mirror to apply said substance to my head. Quite by accident, I caught my own eye.

I realized at once that my jowls were vanishing from my chin line. My eyes looked bigger under my brows, and I had cheekbones again. My skin, clearer and cleaner now with the healthier foods feeding it, had a pinkish cast--a far and away improvement from the near-jaundice look it had adopted in pre-diet days. I turned my face to each side, my eyes following the lines in my neck and across my face as I stretched to keep contact with my reflection. And then, realizing that I was looking at myself-really, truly looking at myself for the first time in over 4 years, I smiled.

I'm a tall(er) girl who smiles. I'm pretty happy about that. Let Me-dom Ring.

PS-I weighed in this morning at 205.0 pounds, giving me a 3.5 pound loss this week and 46.0 pounds overall. For the first time in many, many years, I'm sorry that the weather is turning cooler and I have to switch from t-shirts to sweaters. But I can already tell that next spring is going to be awesome, and next summer, I might just go buy a two-piece swimsuit.

A the B(ikini's In Range)

Cheating Has a New Face

This morning I weighed in at 206.50 pounds, bringing my total weight loss to 44.50 pounds. I am 6.5 pounds away from my next goal-a big one, of breaking 200. If this site has the capacity to play brass bands and shoot fireworks, be assured that I will find a way to bring them to that post.

I haven't had a "1" as the first digit in my weight since I was 3 months pregnant. Before that, I'd never even gotten close to the big Deuce. Well, okay, 'close' is a relative term, I suppose, since I'm 'close' to dropping down below it now. The last time I gained weight, I topped out at 194, which, at the time, sent me hiding behind untucked t-shirts and ill-fitting jeans. I blushed and shuffled my way through the largest ring on the racks, a 16, and I vowed that I would never see that number again. I was almost right, in that I got big enough to consider a Misses 16 to be an unattainable goal-something that happened to me pre-pregnancy. I've quashed that forever, since while I am not yet a 16, I can see it from here. If I wanted to cheat it, I could say I've made it already. I own a pair of black jeans in Size 16 Misses. But they're stretch, and so that doesn't count. It only counts if the denim doesn't give, doesn't share space with spandex, and looks the same on the hangar as off.

Speaking of cheating, I had lunch with a good friend today and she wanted to know what I missed, being on this diet. My answer surprised me. Not for what I'd given up--that was easy. I'd given up all form of sweets. I've always been a sweet freak. My brother and I used to go on what we called 'sugar attacks', pooling our meager monies, usually in the form of change, and raid the Convenient Food Mart or the Fisher's Big Wheel at the end of his paper route. We'd buy every conceivable fat-laden foodstuff and then shovel it into our mouths as we walked (or, sometimes if the shopping took too long, ran) back home, always with a dinner awaiting us, always with an unspoken rule that we had to eat.

There was no meal-skipping at my house, no declaring that we weren't hungry, no leaving the table unless we had cleaned our plates, even as teenagers. I got into a lot of trouble growing up, and most of it was over food that I didn't want to eat. I hid it in empty milk cartons and torn grocery bags (back then they were paper and leaked like a mutha), or dropped it back into its stovetop container, or, on one particularly desperate occasion, on the basement steps. I always got caught, often had to eat the food anyway, cold, disgusting, and now covered in who-knows-what from the trash.

I spent a lot of time sitting at an empty kitchen table, staring down food that I couldn't even bring to my mouth without gagging, and yet, somehow, had to get all the way down my gullet. My brother somehow never had the issue that I did. Whether he suffered as he ate Mom's barely edible fare, I don't know (her version of vegetable soup was to boil 2 or 3 cans of Veg-All in plain water until the whole house smelled of dirty sponge, let it simmer for a day and then serve it with a threatening, 'you'd better keep eating-there's enough for 5 days'.), but he always ate and I rarely had his company while I sat, devising schemes to keep me from eating.

I managed to make it through those years, and it's a wonder really that I even managed to make it to a normal body weight. I had such an aversion to food that I could barely eat. For most of my college career, I would leave the table long before I was satisfied, and I didn't eat a vegetable voluntarily until my sophomore year in college when my boyfriend Howard took me to a Chinese restaurant and encouraged me to try the Moo Goo Gai Pan. I couldn't believe a vegetable could crunch. And it had taste! A convert was born.

It was likely a combination of the inedible fare from my home years and my insatiable sweet tooth that was egged on by the secrecy of securing the illicit goodies that created my weight problem in later years. Once I made enough money to buy food on my own, and once I got my own place, my whole kitchen turned into a Sugar Attack. I had sweet food all the time, any time I wanted it. Interestingly, though my pantry always had something naughty, I never ate any of it in front of others. To the watchful public, I was still the vegetable hocking Lean Meat Lady who only ate things that came holistically from the ground or had Lite/Low-Fat on the labels. I couldn't explain my weight gains, and I didn't try. I just had slower metabolism, I offered, or I wasn't getting as much exercise anymore. I didn't live on a campus, and I wasn't inside city limits anymore. I drove all the time, and driving didn't burn as many calories as walking. See? Easy to figure. I'm okay with my size 12 skirts. The Junk Food Junkie lived on.

I can't remember my last sugar attack, but I know it wasn't too far away from the start of this weight loss. I don't remember what I ate, but I can tell you that I ate until I was uncomfortable, and possibly until I was sick. I can also tell you that whatever I ate, I did it alone. I snuck a candy bar into the groceries and then scarfed it down on the drive home, tossing the package out the window and risking a littering fine rather than get caught with the wrapper. I faked a need for something at the drug store and stashed a bag of something chocolate and miniature into my knapsack, then spent the evening creeping upstairs, unwrapping them in silence (this takes talent!) and then swallowing a mouthful of Listerine before returning downstairs, so my stealth activity went unnoticed. It's entirely possible that I made a batch of Break & Bake chocolate chip cookies and then ate them all, 3 at a time and layered with peanut butter, throwing out the single-use cookie sheet I'd bought so I could bend it up and hide it in the bottom of the recycle bin, and not have to worry about cleaning the cookie sheet and having my housemate wonder why it was drying in the dish rack.

Those days are gone now. With the exception of a single, small handful of plain M&Ms about a month in, I haven't cheated. I don't eat refined sugar any more, and, what's amazing and wonderful, is that I don't want it. The fat and calories (and WW points) aren't worth the excursion, I know I'll feel woozy and sick afterwards, and I realize that whatever issues or problems I thought these foods solved was a mirage. They didn't solve anything. Eating them didn't soften anything (except maybe my butt). Abandoning them has liberated me. I am free from my sugar addiction. I am alone in the house almost every afternoon, and I don't snack. I don't even have to avoid the pantry: I am free of it. I might have a sugar problem still, but my sugar problem does not have me.

"Cheating" now consists of a nonfat yogurt at the end of dinner, and even this is to replace the good bacteria that the penicillan has murdered (I had strep last week). I don't even eat the WW ice cream or desserts. I could, but I don't bother. What for? They only serve to remind me of a past life, a time when food controlled me and I bowed to its alluring forces. No more. I am not that woman. That woman struggled with sweets. This woman does not.

View both victory and defeat as the imposters they are. I have not defeated sugar. I don't hate it. I am indifferent to it. I gave it up, but I don't miss it.

How about that?

15% equals one 4-year old boy

This morning I weighed in at 207.50 pounds, bringing my total weight loss to 43.50. As of this writing, I have now lost 15% of my original body weight, or, to put things more concretely, the whole of my son. My boy had a checkup last week-just an annual physical, and when they weighed him, he clocked in at 43.50 pounds. Today when I pick him up, I'll feel his weight and know that I used to carry all that around with me. It's gone now (he's not, thank goodness), and losing this much weight so far really has been like pulling a preschooler off of my shoulders. Or, really, in my case, from my midsection.

At my height (somewhere just shy of 5'10"), my ideal body weight hovers somewhere in the 135-174 pounds. I don't really understand how the range can be so broad, even accounting for bone structure, etc. My WW leader might be able to help me, though frankly their ranges are pretty high, and I know that I would not consider myself 'finished' with the weight loss part of this journey if the scale stopped descending at 170.

Yes, I know, middle aged weight ranges and all that, but I'm not convinced that is completely accurate for me. My metabolism might be slower now, but my bone structure is what it was when I was 17 and 26 and 35, so I don't see where that matters. Right now, my wrist measure 5 7/8th, meaning I'm a small to medium-sized frame. Given that, I'd say I should wind up somewhere in the 150 pound range. In one way, I'd really like to get to that point, since that means I'd have lost over 100 pounds.

I'm a bit stunned that I'd have that much to lose, but in truth, this is probably where I need to be, given my frame and size, etc. After all, I'm 43.5 pounds down and still in the Big Lady sizes. At approximately 10 pounds per size, 150 pounds would put me in approximately a size 8 or 10. I'd rather be a size 8, since clothes are cut larger now than they were in the "sunrise" of my life. I don't want to be just inside the ideal body weight range. I want to be comfortably inside, well inside, on the low end of inside. I don't want to be just thin and healthy-I want to be Thin and Healthy, exuding strength and fitness and the Unbearable Lightness of Being Me. I will persist until I succeed.

On other news, I've discovered that I've lost my taste for sweets after dinner, and I've started salivating at the idea of a vegetable-rich stir fry with turkey breast. I'm proud of this, since as early as June, my glands would be doing the Pavolvian thing over peanut butter pie, egg rolls, and anything sweet that I'd snuck into my mouth when no one was looking.

I still have an eating problem. I won't call it a disorder, but it is a problem. Just this past Friday, I walked by a display of muffins and cake and my stomach ordered me to stop and load up a plate. My brain contradicted immediately and kept me walking, but still, I had the impulse first, and I had to squash it. Those needs are psychological, but they are real. No matter: so long as I can recognize them for the imposters they are, I'm safe. And so long as I have my WW buddy to talk through these things, I will not falter. This is who I am now. That was just a little flashback, and a good, important reminder that I am not immune to those old, comfortable, bad, bad, bad habits.

Onward and downward I press,

A the K(eepin' it Thin)

A Round Tuit

Two hundred and fifty one pounds.

251. Two-five-one. Dos ciento cinquenta uno. That's how much I weighed when I started this.

It's freeing to write this, though I admit to more than a little embarrassment at the figure. I was 251 pounds. Me, the perpetually skinny girl with big boobs, the mesomorphic athlete who could eat anything, and gain or lose weight in direct proportion to ingestion, me who always wanted to be a little thinner, but who knew inside that I was right where I should be.

I spent most of my adult life hovering around 140 lbs, and then, once I became a hard-core bodybuilder/corporate office drone, I skipped around 165, depending on how much cardio I was doing, whether I was lifting for strength, shape, or size, and how far into a relationship I was. I could always drop 10 over a weekend, or, later, a week, without doing much other than switching from cereal to fruit, skipping the mashed potatoes and parking my car at the back of the lot, rather than in my reserved space. I had total control of my body, and it worked as the well-tuned machine I had created.

Then a whole bunch of things happened that only my True Love knows about completely, and I changed. I lost confidence, I lost stability, I lost desire, and in their place, I gained weight. Even when I played grinding, grueling tennis 5 days a week and pumped my lungs full of searing air in a martial arts dojang 3 days more, I couldn't get that nasty bulge to disappear from my abdomen, and my heart-shaped bottom started looking more like a box of Valentine's Chocolates-and all their contents.

Oh, I could still pull it off if/when I wanted to, but now it involved diet plans and gym memberships, and little reminders that I couldn't eat peanut butter & banana sandwiches with chocolate chips anymore, or that 'dessert' would have to be something that other people had while I sat, smug and unsatisfied, with the fruit cup, carefully pushing my plate away before my fork could pierce the pastry shell that harbored it. But that was okay. I wasn't 21 anymore, I wasn't the hot bod from college, and frankly, I was glad to let that girl go. I was a woman now, and women presented differently from girls. I was no longer a junior-I was a Misses. And while I cringed when I read '12' or (gasp!) even '14' on the insides of my clothes, I knew I still looked passable in shorts and tennis whites, and, if necessary, I could slither into a swim suit-a one piecer, mind you, but still, my body fit inside something spandex, and I didn't have to wear a t-shirt over my suit, and my cover-up was still for the trip from my room to the water, and not a substitute for my actual 'bathing costume.'

Then I got pregnant, and, unrelated to that, I got incredibly unhappy, and suddenly food became simultaneously my comfort and my enemy. I gained 60 pounds during my pregnancy, shuttling all the way up to a size 22 pant. I measured my "waist" just a few days before I delivered, and I clocked in a whopping 48 inches. But there was a 9-pound baby in there, and I'd been assured by my midwife, my then-husband, and everyone around me that the weight would just 'fall off' me after I delivered, especially since I was breastfeeding.

Wrong.

I did drop 35 pounds more or less on my son's birth day and in the weeks succeeding it, but, at last when I stepped on the scale one month after his birth, the scale read 216 and I knew I would have to diet the rest off. No problem, I thought. I have to keep my calories a little bit higher since I'm nursing, but I can do it. I've always done it. I'm me. Professional dieter. Skinny gal with the Big Boobs. Hot Bod Mac. I'd do it, and with style.

The temperature hovered near 100 the whole, long summer, and my son found comfort only in walks or in attaching his toothless mouth to my breast. I took him for walks, sliding him into my Over the Shoulder Baby Holder (actual name), our clothes immediately sticky and wet from the weather and the contact. I carried an umbrella to shade us from the sun, and I plucked out a path around the grid-blocks of our northside Chicago neighborhood. I walked 3 miles a day, sometimes more if I could manage it, or if I couldn't get my son to nap indoors. We lived in a dive of a carriage house without central air, and the drone of the window unit kept both of us awake and shivering inside the confines of a room darkened by the quilts on the windows to keep the blistering rays off our skin. I walked, and I sweated and I nursed until my nipples bled, and still, the scale remained stubbornly at 216.

Frustrated, I turned to my new friends, Ben and Jerry. My husband helped out with takeout every night, and, eventually, we moved to the suburbs where walking became tougher and the cooler autumn drove me indoors. I walked around the house, my son still attached at the breast, my body still clinging to its baby fat, my mood dropping with the day's lengths. By the time my boy turned 1, I had slithered back up to 225. Disgusted, and unable to wear anything other than my husband's sweat pants, I gave my son over to his father for an hour, bit down my humiliation, went to the women's clothing store, bought their smallest size jeans and took them home, crying all the way.

Over the next year, I would drop a few pounds, then pulled it back in, a life raft of comfort around the chaos in my home. By the time I returned to work full time, 2 years after the birth, I was wearing women's sizes in everything. The morning I drove to the office for the first time, the scale tipped at 233. I was crushed, but still determined. Being at the office would help. I could eat salads at lunch, instead of mac&cheese or chicken nuggets. I'd be walking around the building, I could go to the gym at lunch, my son would wean and I'd return to normal.

It never happened. It took another 2 years and another 3 gym memberships to realize that whatever ability I had to drop weight in my youth was gone, and whatever motivators I'd used to get skinny in the past had abandoned me. I tried being the Big & Beautiful woman, I tried to embrace my fatness as a sign of prosperity and pride, but that's not me, and it left me empty. Even now, I envy any woman who is comfortable in her skin, no matter her size. That is not me. Whatever baggage I carry, including my extra pounds, I am not completley myself unless I am well inside the Misses range and far down below 200 pounds. This is me, and I have accepted it.

I figured that I could not have any success with weight loss as long as I carried full-time work and childcare responsibilities. I resigned myself to several more years of fatness, and I tried not to think too hard about my increased risks for breast cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure. I ignored the tingling in my fingertips, I covered my low back pain with ibuprofen, and whenever it came time to visit my doctor, I would write out my weight on a slip of paper and hope against luck that they would simply write it down and not ask me to step on that scale. Sometimes it worked, and I took the victory, however fleeting and unreal, and vowed that next time, I would step on, and I would not be afraid.

Never happened.

Then this past June I got hit with some weird disease, where whenever I ate fat, I would double up in pain, the cramps far worse than any labor contraction. I grew to fear eating and ingested only what would keep me from fainting. Hunger gnawed at me constantly, but it was a manageable pain-nothing like the gremlins that sawtoothed my innards whenever I ate. The doctor diagnosed gall stones, but there were none. Eventually, with nothing but a zero-fat diet and time, the condition went away and has not returned.

In the interim, I lost 14 pounds. I wasn't down a size in clothes (my current state was a Women's 20, and had been for the last 2 years), but things fit better and I noticed that I had a little bit more energy. I decided to give Weight Watchers a try. Why not? I'd had success with them once before, and while I found the meetings tedious and dull, the program made sense and was easily adaptable to a lifelong pursuit of thinness and health.

Well, I always seemed to 'forget' the meeting on Thursday night that I'd chosen to attend. I wasn't losing any more, but I wasn't gaining the 14 back, and so all I figure was a good old dose of willpower and some exercise and I'd be set. At month's end, I was up 5 pounds, bringing my total 'loss' to 9, and I still had my PMS 3 to pick up. Clearly, I couldn't do this alone. My then-housemate and cook told me she didn't believe in diets, and while she served us grilled lean meats and steamed vegetables, I wasn't getting the support I needed, and I knew I had to go back to WW.

Then Howard, my old college boyfriend, called me out of the clear blue sky. I'll hope to get into all that history some other time, and probably in some other forum, but for now, suffice to say that he'd had tremendous success with his weight loss, most recently through Weight Watchers. We had dinner together a couple of times, and then he suggested that we do WW together-as buddies. He outlined the premise and suggested a meeting equidistant from our respective homes and said it was okay if I didn't want to do it, but he'd like to do this together and was I interested? Was I? Again, no time to detail this, but at the time, I could not have received a better offer.

That first Saturday, I tipped the scales at Weight Watchers Lombard 244.8 pounds. Crushed and humiliated, I sat down next to Howard, freezing under an air conditioning vent, and listened as the leader cheered and laughed 40 dieters through the next 30 minutes. That was July 22, 2006. My last day as the old Amy. My last day as a Fat Person. Howard and I had a long talk outside the meeting room after it adjourned. We hugged good-bye, and as I drove away, I vowed that this would be the last time. This is the last weight loss. This is the last time I'll be a fat person. I'll always be a recovering fat person, but I'm okay with that. I'll be a recovering fat person in a shrinking body, and then, someday not too long from now, I'll be a recovering fat person in a thin body, and then my journey really begins. I can't wait. I am inspired, I am motivated, and I am successful. Thank you, Howard, every day of my life and every pound off my body, and every ounce of happiness we share, for coming back into my life and for suggesting we buddy it up. I will be forever grateful.

Since that first meeting, I've lost 34.6 pounds on WW, and 43.25 pounds overall. I haven't declared a goal weight yet, and I'm still not really sure what that will be. I have hit a few milestones already, including a big one this week, when I dropped out of the BMI obese category and into it's overweight designation. Never in my life have I been so happy as to declare that I am overweight.

This morning I weighed in at 207.75 pounds. Today, Howard will be taking the once-monthly shots of me to show my progress, something I hope eventually to publish out here. I am careful to dress similarly each time, so the progress pictures mean something and the results they show make sense. For the first time since I began, I'm actually looking forward to having a camera point at me. That's a big deal for me: a big, honkin, awesome deal.

I'll catch you up on the rest of the journey, and then catalog things real (blog) time as I go. I'm happy to share, and I'm glad you're on the road with me. Come, friends, and let's away to the land of Thin, Healthy Happiness.

-A the S(hrinking Woman)