Something's Afoot

One thing about losing weight in the Middle Ages, as it were (I’m 41), is that things don’t simply shrink. My tummy, for example, which once resembled a paper bag stuffed full of snakes, and poked out beyond my 48” breasts, has slimmed down considerably these last 63.0 pounds. I cried myself to sleep the time I went to kiss “X” good-night, and my belly touched his chest before our lips met. Thank goodness that is all behind me.

My belly is still apparent, but it has diminished to something closer to normal. It didn’t just retreat though; it left a droop to the skin that is part post-partum body and part Too Dang Much Peanut Butter Chunk Ice Cream. Judging from the eye-rolling remarks that my mommy-yet-slender friends make, I expect that this ‘baby sling’ will stay with me forever. I’ve considered surgery, but general anesthesia spooks me, and at this juncture, I’d rather wear control-top pantyhose than risk death because I want a tummy that is neither accurate re: my body shape, nor earned, as are the rest of my curves. I’m a mommy, and I’m okay with showing the marks of motherhood.

My breasts are shrinking, too. I expected this, of course, since breast tissue is nearly all fat tissue, and I was wholly uncomfortable with the Rack-Gone-Gazongas look I sported in my heavier days. What I’ve noticed, though, is that my breasts aren’t shrinking so much as they’re flattening. There’s little loft and not much swell to them anymore. I think if I ever got the courage to wear a sports bra that I’d have to get one of those tank styles, to keep the bottoms of my breasts from popping out from under the band.

Again, I’ve considered a reduction, if for no other reason than to rid my shoulders of the permanent bra strap marks and to prove to myself that I do not have 4 hook-and-eye closures tattooed on the middle of my back. Now I’m not sure that’s necessary. Looking at the pathetic pair of ‘long johns’ (long janes?) that I have in place of the Perkies I used to own, I wonder if I’d be better served by installing shade pulls to my nipples. This way, when I wanted smaller boobies, I’d just tug on the pull and let my breast “roll up” toward my rib cage. Maybe then they’d actually fit properly into my bras too. Hmmm. I wonder if there’s a market for Boob Shade Pulls. Something to consider. Though I would definitely have to figure out how to keep my breast from snapping up, like the shades used to do.

I’ve also lost 12 inches off my waist-a full foot. I have always counted the curve of my waist to be one of my best features, and I’m delighted that it has returned. Last weekend, I stuffed myself into one of my old corsets and even got it cinched up a little bit. I had a whole Jessica Rabbit thing going on….well, maybe it was more of a Pinched Marshmallow, but still, I couldn’t even get that thing around me before, and now it closes and I can tighten it. I figure I got myself down to about 29”. Yay, a (fake) waist in the 20s! Now if only I had a bustle and some really nasty button-up shoes to go with it….

Speaking of feet…mine are shrinking.

Until I got fat, and then pregnant, and then fatter, I was an 8.5, and had been since I was about 14 years old. Sometimes I wore a 9 in a tennis shoe, and sometimes I could sneak myself into an 8 if it had a wide throat, but mostly I was an 8.5, and I was happy with that. I mean, after all, shoe size doesn’t change. Or, didn't.

I’ve always liked shoes, but in the way I like cars: utilitarian, affordable, and versatile. While I can oooh over a pair of alligator pumps with little satin bows, that is not my style, and anyway, my cheapness spills over into footwear. The most I ever paid for shoes was about $100, and that was for a pair of Nikes that I wore until the soles crumbled. My pumps are usually leather, since my feet sweat in man-made materials, but they’re usually plain, and usually Model-T black. My summer sandals are those wooden, no toe-cleavage Dr. Somebody things that work the calves, and I have a set of deerskin moccasins that I bought at the Ohio state fair in 1987. I don’t wear slippers, I like my sturdy construction-style shoes from the dyke era, and, well, I have them all in 8.5 Or, rather, I did.

When I got fat, and then pregnant, I noticed that a 9 fit better in regular shoes. I didn’t really like going up a size, but I liked toe-pinching much less, and so I conceded. I maneuvered in sneakers and sandals for the better part of 2 years, and when I went back to work, I found 2 pair of oxfords (one black, one brown-black) that I could wear with all my pants --no skirts for this fatty! All size 9. One sympathetic mother told me that a woman’s shoe size increases in pregnancy and rarely goes back. Okay, I’ll take it. Like my stretch marks, I’ll wear my New Feet proudly. Besides, a 9 isn’t so bad.

So I begin my weight loss and eventually I start looking for sexier clothes, and the idea of a heeled shoe comes into my mind. Well, that’s not exactly right. What actually happened was that Howard and I were at Kohl’s one Sunday buying new clothes (what a surprise!), and when I breezed past the shoe aisle, touching a pair of black (of course!) patent leather sling-backs, he said, “I think you’d look really sexy in heels.”

Okay, then! Let’s go shoe shopping!

Inexplicably, I decided to try boots. I’ve never been able to wear them. I have really high arches, and for some reason, boots simply do not fit my feet. But I adore them. I like the tall, thin-heeled babies with the micro fiber sleeve that are popular now, and while I’m not yet ready to try the skirt/boot combo (not ready to share my legs with the world), I was ready to try the tall shoes, as it were. Besides, I’ve noticed that jeans come more often in boot cut than straight leg, and so I know I have some things I can wear with them.

I find a boot I like and I slip it on. Oooh, roomy. Comfy. I stand up and walk-that’s the real test. My toe slides into the shoe and then when I take a step, it hauls all the way back to the heel. This boot is too big! Confused, but also secretly hopeful and happy, I get another 9, and then another. All too big.

Bring me the eight-and-a-hey!

I find my favorite boot in the 8.5. Much better. I step. Still not right. I step again and nearly fall over. Too big. Try another, this one has a wide bottom. Nope, too big. The cockroach-killer got close, but still more room than I need.

Size 8?

I haven’t been a size 8 since I was 10 years old, and that includes all the years I was 140 pounds. I suppose it’s possible that shoes are cut bigger now, but somehow it seems unlikely. I put the 8 on my foot and take a stand. It fits. Not too tight, either. Fits. This is my size.

So here’s how it all worked out: size 8 for sneakers, sandals, casuals, and pumps/boots with square or rounded toes. For the fairy-tail-pointy, ‘triangle toe’ shoes and zip-down boots, I’m an 8.5. I do not understand this last part, by the way. It seems these would be roomier, but whatever. I’m totally fine in an 8.5 as my "spillover" size.

Here’s the cool part: I have no skin sag on my feet, no extra baggage, and no corsets needed. They’re my feet, same as they ever were. Only my size 9s are now an 8. Howard says if my feet get any smaller, I’ll tip over from my breast weight, but I don’t think so. After all, I have my boob shades to protect me.

A the F(igure 8)

Roadkill to Perdition

In years prior, when I’ve been devoid of family obligations, holidays passed as inert ticks on my calendar, neither more nor less important than any other day. This went double for the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s Eve trifecta, where my only registration of the “Seasons” lay in a December-based confusion over why there were suddenly no parking spaces at the mall.

Thanksgiving held a particular contempt for me. First, I don’t like turkey. I like it better now, but I come from a long line of hillbillies famed for their overcooking. For them, nothing is ‘done’ unless it’s been boiled until all shape, texture, and resemblance to food disappears. Once that’s completed, all items must be served under a fried flour gravy with white bread aplenty available for dipping and sopping. Let me tell you: you’ve not retched until you’ve had dinner made this way.

Both sides of my family balked at serving potatoes, and so the dinner starring Sawdust-Dry Bird had instant potato buds as its supporting actress. “Vegetables” consisted of green beans, corn, and hominy grits, all from cans and all boiled into submission, and the pies (pumpkin only) came prepared with canned filling with ingredient lists so long, they carried to the underside of the label. Nobody ever thought to add a little nutmeg or even a sprinkle of cinnamon to these “pies”. What for? Read the can-it says ‘pumpkin pie filling’. What else do you need? Whenever anyone remembered to bring cranberries, they arrived in the jelly form and were dumped onto a turkey-shaped serving plate, the grooves from the metal can intact in the purple form.

No one in my family drinks alcohol. This is largely religion-based, as both sides attend thrice-weekly services at (different) fundamentalist churches. I did have one grandfather who joined AA in the 1940s, but everyone else is a voluntary teetotaler. So there’s no wine with dinner, no beer for the football, and certainly no spirit(s) of any kind. Soft drinks were prohibited as too expensive and as devil’s drinks, since they could sometimes be mixed with liquor (what liquor?!), and the well water proved undrinkable, even after boiling. So most of us either drank milk (whole milk only--none of that ‘city-fied’ milk for this family), or buttermilk with chunks of corn bread crumbled into it. Silence ruled as the whole of the family gathered at the table, heads already bowed and arms braced against the chair backs to hold themselves up while the Patriarch delivered a 15-minute blessing over the ‘food’.

Maybe my hatred of Thanksgiving is more obvious than I’d realized.

On several occasions, I managed to convince my then-partners to share my "Down with Turkey!" attitude. We declared Thanksgiving a Free Day, one to do whatever we wanted. I wrote, my partner did whatever pleased him, and later, if we felt like it, we went out for a movie. I would buy a paper with the Black Friday advertisements, and together, my partner and I would choose the best place to go and watch the crowds battle one another for that year’s Chosen Gift.

My Thanksgiving Loathe took its own holiday the last few years, since “X” preferred it above all others. I figured since I still got to forego Christmas and New Year’s (I prefer to get drunk at home--it’s easier to get naked, and there’s no (real) threat of arrest), I compromised and agreed to produce a November feast. Luckily, his family lives far away and he doesn’t speak to them, so apart from one year when my Dad arrived, it was just the 2 of us, and later, DS. I bought the smallest turkey I could find, I made real potatoes, and there wasn’t a can or a cranberry to be found anywhere. We scoured the ads together, I let him watch porn on the big television, and life was generally grand.

Two adults can only down so much bird, however, and the smallest turkey I ever bought was a twelve-pounder. So every year when Thanksgiving closed, I found myself with a week’s worth of fowl foodstuffs. Once, faced with the post-dinner carcass and yet another round of turkey “dash” dishes (turkey-casserole, turkey-salad, etc.), I concocted a recipe for turkey-chip cookies. That would work, right? Surely brown sugar and peanut butter chunks could help a spoonful of turkey go down in a more delightful way.

This year, together again and at last with my man, I faced my own fears and volunteered to go away with him for Thanksgiving. He spoke so highly of his friends and with such enthusiasm for the house and the grounds that even I, theTurkey Scrooge, found myself anticipating the event. We planned our trip, an 800-mile trek across 3 states and 2 time zones, down to the minute. We’d drop off DS with his Granny, who was conveniently located midway between Us and The Dinner Destination, spend the night, and then drive on to the East. On the way back, we’d reverse ourselves.

“Granny”, my mother, a normally sedate and under-expressive senior, donned her party hat in anticipation of DS’s arrival. She planned DS’s itinerary to within an inch of his attention span, and when I joked that we might change our plans, she threatened to drive all the way out here, just so she could voice her displeasure straight to my face.

The first piece of the trip passed utterly without incident. It saddened me to leave DS behind, but I was clearly the only one having issue. Granny shoved me away so hard I nearly missed kissing DS goodbye. He barely kissed me back, he was so eager to close his own car door and head off to the park with this sparkling lady who let him eat cookies and swim in cold weather.

Howard and I drove east out of Ohio and slid into Pennsylvania. Barely 10 miles on to I-80, I spotted a dead deer on the shoulder. I turned away quickly, in part to keep my eyes on the road, and in part to prevent myself from registering what was obviously a high-impact crash. Fluke, I thought. Bad luck. I’m sure that’s the last of it.

As it turns out, Pennsylvania interstates and mountain wildlife mix about as well as turkey gravy and chocolate chips. In all, I counted twelve deer, 2 coyotes, 3 cats, a dog and a fox. Each time a carcass appeared, my shoulders stiffened closer to my ears. My hands strangled the steering wheel and my conversation with Howard reduced to grunts and nods. By the time we switched seats so Howard could navigate the twisty roads up to his friend’s place, my neck throbbed with tension and I could not uncurl my fingers. I massaged my hands as Howard drove us from one winding road to another. I’m surrounded by dead things as I journey to meet a houseful of strangers for a holiday I’ve shunned for twenty years. Oh, happy day.

I won’t betray the privacy of my hosts or the other guests in the house, primarily because I would want the same courtesy. Suffice to say that I’m glad I went, I learned a lot about myself and about people who actually enjoy Thanksgiving, and I am grateful to all those who shared their holiday with me.

On Friday morning, still beaming from a Thanksgiving consumption level that could only be described as virtuous, my mother called me and said, “DS really needed to hear your voice.”

We left within the hour.

I had suffered from the moment my mother drove away with DS, but I stuffed it away, certain that everyone’s counsel about ‘he’ll be all right’ was true. And he was all right. Until her call on Friday morning, he’d been content to shout “Hi, Mommy!” from across the room, rather than take a second away from playtime with cousin J---. However, having heard those words from my Mother, whose motto in her golden years has been, “It’s not worth calling unless somebody’s been transferred to a hospice”, I simply could not bear another minute without my little man.

I’ll skip the homebound carrion count, except to note that there were more, but I noticed them less. I rushed Howard through dinner and barely gave him time to buckle his seat belt before barreling down the road to my mother’s house. I found DS in the living room, so clearly busy with his cousin that when I asked him for a hug hello, he got up, but his eyes never left the spot where he and J--- were playing smash ‘em up cars. When I asked DS if he wanted to come back to the hotel with us, he declined, and then when I asked if he was sure, he refused. Refused! I left, dejected, but also secretly relieved. Yeah, I probably took the phone call too hard, and yeah, I cut short my adults-only time with Howard, but I had to see my DS.

Granny crabbed all through breakfast the next morning, but she let go when it was time. She stuffed his luggage full of books and toys and a generous check for the swing set I plan to buy next spring. She also included a button-down oxford cloth shirt that looks distinctly like the things my brother was forced to wear at Thanksgivings past. Guess how often he'll wear that?

Good job, Granny, and thank you, cousin J---. You both seemed completely oblivious to DS’s condition, and treated him like the happy, well-adjusted child he was while in your care. Thanks to my hosts and fellow housemates: may your lives be filled with all the holiday gatherings you wish for.

Oh, and guess what? 187.75 pounds this morning. I lost all that crap-tacular Transition Weight, and 2.25 pounds more besides and I did it over "Thucky" Thursday. How cool is that?

Maybe Thanksgiving is an okay holiday after all.

A the T(urkey)

Truffling with Exhaustion

Remember when I wrote that I was going to bump my calories, and that if I gained a little bit of weight, that was all right? Well, I was full of shit.

I have a balance scale at home, and for twenty one weeks, I watched the lever descend. Sixty-one pounds disappeared this way, the bar inching backwards every week. Since I switched to the New Plan, the bar has resumed its ascent with great enthusiasm, and by day 3, I had gained 2.50 pounds back. I haven’t gained it really, but that’s hard to remember when my New and Bigger weight jackhammers through my skull all the live-long day. One-ninety-two-point-five. Say it with me! One-ninety-two-point-five.

I’m not sure how long this new and irritating gain will last, and I’m not sure how to fix it. Despite eating much more than before, I’m still in a constant state of hunger. How is that possible? I refuse to believe that my metabolism has skyrocketed so quickly and so dramatically that it wolfs down every bite in 20 minutes and then starts banging on my stomach for more. But metabolic rate notwithstanding, that is what’s happening.

As a result of my New Plan/Hunger, I’ve become hypersensitive to food. I’m like a straight guy in a strip club on a Saturday night. Things appear before me, they’re waved in front of my face, and all I can do is open my mouth to protest and then snap it shut to keep the drool from soaking my shirt.

All around the office, there are little buckets of Snickers, little displays of mini-M&Ms, and the ever-popular Tray of Leftovers stacked in the break room. I go in to fill my coffee cup, and I’m accosted by raspberry danish, bagels with flavored cream cheese, and the face-slapping insult, petit fours. Are you kidding me? When the executives at this place have their 5-hour staff meetings, they get Potbelly’s for lunch, and that’s only if the meeting goes past 1pm. People just don’t spend money on each other around here, and they certainly don’t spend it on staff. We at the peon level deem ourselves lucky that we don’t have to bring our own toilet paper to work, and yet somehow there are petit fours in the break room. I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong.

I’m as festive as the next recovering fat person when it comes to Food as Entertainment, which is to say that I’m about as joyous as a vegetarian at a steak house. White sugar lures me like a temple priestess and then leaves me panting at the altar after she’s had her way with me. Food is everywhere, the temptation is everywhere, and--here’s the pants-kicker--I seem to be the only one aware of it. I’m the hero in the horror film who sees the ghost nobody else can. People actually sit at their desks with bowls of snack-size candy bars and don’t eat them! I know this because the guy who sits across from me does this every day. I’m completely riveted by this guy. He’s a stereotypical skinny person who acts as if that tureen of Snickers is just another pencil cup, a decoration on his desk, an accessory to keep until month-end, when it has to take up temporary residence in the overhead file bin.

Every day I stroll over and invent some inane question to ask him, just so I can bowl-ogle. Days pass before a dent appears in the heap. Sometimes he’ll go a whole week without having even a single bar. How can he do that? He’s not the only one, either. A co-worker of mine dumped the entire contents of her children’s trick-or-treat stash on the side of her desk and left it to the general public. When I asked her how much of it she’d eaten herself, she looked at me as if I’d suggested we roast chestnuts on her laptop. “I haven’t eaten any of it,” she sniffed at me. “What kind of example does that set for my kids? Besides, I don’t like candy.”

So many things wrong with that answer.

First of all, unless her children are (a) older than she is, and (b) gainfully employed in the cubicles around her, they won’t know what she eats anywhere, let alone at the edge of her desk. Second, is she high? There is chocolate in that pile! I could understand ignoring the hard candy or the tubes of tarts, but what about the Reese’s miniatures? Or the almond kisses? Can’t you see that PEANUT BUTTER TWIX?!

See, this is why I don’t trust women who wear anything smaller than a size 6. They live in my world, but they are not of it. I don’t eat candy just like they don’t eat these things, but we avoid it for very different reasons. The “teenies” don’t want the treats, but I do. I crave them, and it is only through sheer will, a good loss so far (current gain notwithstanding), and the complete abhorrence of the idea that I’d have to tell my WW buddy that I’d had candy that keeps my indulgence at bay. It works for me, but more often, I work for it. I work for my weight loss, and I mean that in the sweating, gasping for breath, hauling-myself-up-over-the-mountain way. Every pound fights me, and I must box my way past every tidbit. These temptations used to vanish when I dieted, but no more. My metabolism and my PMS conspire against me.

I’ve never been indifferent to chocolate, though I have spent years pretending that I was. Over the course of my life, I have had occasion to entertain. I do the standard hostess thing and over-buy everything, from pre-appetizers to dessert. For some reason, the dessert always stays behind: most likely because I’ve stuffed my guests with avocado wraps and porterhouses until their intestines bulge, but also because I am the unlucky chocoholic soul who has friends that ‘just aren’t into sweets.’ Sometimes I just can’t catch a break.

Anyway, at night’s end, I and my roommate would wrap up the extras, taking care to label anything in foil, and then put the chocolate cake or the tin of cookies under glass, angling my track lighting to spotlight the very delicacy I wanted to forget about.

I did well enough avoiding it that night: after all, I’d stuffed myself along with my guests, and drunk a substantial amount of alcohol besides, and I so I simply could not have eaten anything more. Besides, invariably, “Roomie” would be sitting with me, and I was not about to scarf chocolate cake an hour after everyone else had departed from my Engorge-A-Thon.

The next morning, though, I would find myself inevitably in a Bill Cosby video, cataloging the ingredients in chocolate cake so I could justify having some for breakfast. “Eggs! Milk! Wheat! I can do this. I’ll just have a small piece. It’s no big deal. Roomie can have the rest.”

But enter the Sweet-Toothed Dragon, and a slim breakfast slice became a thicker second piece once “Roomie” left for work. A third slice would come off at mid-morning, and on an on, until half the cake had vanished. Terrified at having to explain myself, I’d spend the rest of the afternoon finishing it off, and then I’d chuck the plate into the sink to wash it, tie up the trash (even if it was empty), and when Roomie got home, I’d proclaim that I’d been too tempted to have it in the house, and so I threw it out.

Exhausting.

So now, whenever I have to see Candy Desk Co-Worker, I tell her to come to me. She has a crush on a guy who works on my floor, so it’s easy to lure her over. I can then spend the duration of the meeting pretending that there’s nothing to see on her desktop. Or at least nothing I’m willing to risk getting caught over. I’m very ‘out’ about my weight loss at work, and it just wouldn’t do to have someone see me face-down and chomping the still-wrapped squares off this woman’s desk, like a well-dressed and psychopathic Pac-Man.

It still infects me sometimes, though. For all my pretense at normal and being ‘over’ sweets, my brain taunts me with sounds and memories until I’m sure that I’m oozing cocoa and that there is more corn syrup than blood circulating through me. When I’m talking to my coworker, or torturing myself by standing at the untouched Snickers bowl, my mouth bubbles, longing to talk about those sugared lovelies, rather than whatever work-related thing I’m supposed to be discussing. My words come out normal, but only by sheer determination. Left to my brain’s devices, my speech during one of my choco-tacks would read something like this:

“So, Snickers, have you truffled the almond bark with the capital fondue? You should. If Godiva included caramel-cashew and the fudge accruals, you could peanut butter cup the double-stuffs, and you’d have a cupcake full of petit fours left to show the boss.”

Exhausting.

At least in the day it’s taken me to write this, I’ve shed a bit of my 2.50 gain. I’m 191.75 pounds as of this morning. I’ve even done a road trip in the interim, where I only ate half an apple, a few cups of (nearly) fat-free popcorn and 2 zesty pickle spears, instead of my standard Colossal Case of Vanilla Sandwich Cremes. I drove 400 miles with 2 men in the car, I had to stop 3 times for potty breaks, and I saw my mother. That should have left me with a pounding headache, early-onset PMS and enough stress to chew my fingernails all the way down to the first knuckle. Instead, I feel pretty good.

Of course, I’m still hungry. But I’d rather be rumbling than grumbling. Well, not really, but I’m trying for the Zen thing here. Right now, it’s the closest thing I can get to yoga, apart from stretching my hands to my laptop keyboard. But at least there’s nothing at the end of my desk.

A the E(xhausted)

Karma Chameleon

After I posted Disorderly Conduct on Friday (post immediately below), I dove right in, opting to eat a real lunch and a real dinner on the night before a weigh-in. I figured it I was going to take the hit of a gain at my official weekly weigh-in, I should do it immediately, and get it over with. I’m traveling this week, and so will miss next Saturday’s meeting. I consider this a sparkling bit of karma, since I’ll probably gain weight next week, in response to eating like a normal person. Well, a normal dieting person. Well, normal for me, where I’m still watching every morsel, but I’m fueling my body instead of flogging it.

Instead, I dropped 1.50 pounds, taking my total loss to 61.0, and, at 190.0 pounds, a full pound below my pre-pregnancy weight. If I hadn’t been so freaked out by my physical sabotage, I would have laughed at the irony of breaking a goal when I expected a clobbering. But I did break a goal, and while I still expect to gain some over the next little while, I know it’s not real: it’s my body adjusting to something closer to healthy and maintain-able. So I filed into the WW meeting room, hope mixing in with my caution. This could be the last meeting for a while that I post a loss. I wanted to enjoy it.

I like the meetings, such as they are. The real motivator for me is the weigh-in, the moment when I step on the scale in front of the leader. The ‘meeting’ part interests me somewhat, but since I have such a spectacular support network, I don’t much need the pep talk inherent in the weekly message. I still stay, in part to support my WW comrades, and in part because I never know when the leader will inspire me with her quotes or her anecdotes.

This week, the leader talked about Thanksgiving. It’s a meeting they do every year right before the holiday. The leader posted a menu of likely Thanksgiving foods, including pies and sweet potato casserole. She instructed us to write down a realistic “plate” of things we expected to eat. I wrote down my dinner plan, remembering my promise to eat more. I totaled up all my foods and showed them to Howard, who had written a remarkably similar meal. For reference purposes, Howard and I built a 7-point meal, and our normal daily point total is twenty-four.

The leader then went around the room, asking people their totals. The first total I heard was 28. Holy crap!, I thought. But maybe she’s the wild point. Not so. I heard numbers all over the 20s, and even more in the 30s. Eventually, the leader found someone who’d totaled eleven points. “Eleven!” The leader puffed in shock. “What, are you not going to eat anything?!”

At that moment, I decided not to worry about the upcoming shifts in my weight.I will always be a recovering fat person, of course, but I have enough "immunity" to the bad foods that I can stave off any despair that comes from watching the scale tip upwards. So long as I'm doing the right things, it'll come down again. I want this to last forever, and eating right is the only way to ensure it. Besides, even with the modifications to my diet to increase my calories, I had 7 points totaled. More important than that, I had an identical meal to Howard, which to my mind means it was a reasonable, well-constructed dinner. I’m still going to track everything, still going to write every food down, and still build my points and calorie count every day, but I’m finished with starving myself. I know I can eat now; really eat properly, and I’ll feel stronger and healthier, and I’ll still lose weight.

I figure with the new plan, I’ll lose about 1 pound per week; more if I exercise to burn calories and invigorate my metabolism. I lost 61 pounds in 21 weeks, and now it will likely take me at least 30 weeks to lose another half of that. But so what? The whole point of this was to build a way to eat sensibly, and to live properly in this food- and fat- infested world. I believe I have found it, but if not, I know I have the strength and the courage to change what’s needed.

I’ve had 2 days on the new plan, and I’ve noticed some interesting things. First, I am always hungry. I find this hilarious, since I’m eating more than double what I was eating before. My brain has knocked on my stomach and yelled, ‘Yo! Is that food? Send me more!’ I figure it’s temporary, and anyway, I bore 5 months of hunger. This hunger is different, though--better. The old hunger felt like starving: sick and harsh and painful. The new hunger feels like my stomach is empty and needs something good and proper to quiet it.

This new plan allows me (forces me, really) to take care of myself. I think this is key to part of the ‘why’ behind what happened before. I’ve always sucked at taking care of myself. That’s why I got fat in the first place. I wasn’t eating right then, and I wouldn’t take the time away from DS to exercise or re-energize myself. But it’s not an option any longer. Just as losing weight hit a critical mass, as it were, and I had to change my habits, so now have I hit critical mass again, and must find a way to carve time for my lifestyle into my life.

Thanksgiving still frightens me. I’m traveling to a place where Howard and I will be the only WW’ers. We’ll have to prepare much of our own food, and do that in a place where I’m an unknown, and where the self-imposed pressure to make a good impression and fit in with this group surpasses my angst over being away from DS for 3 days (and OMG that is flipping me out!). This pressure compounds on me, since my hair, which I have been growing out, and which has behaved beautifully until this afternoon, has chosen to stick straight out from behind my ears, despite all attempts to spray, gel, mousse and pomade it into obedience. Oh, well; it wouldn’t be fun if it weren’t terrifying. Apparently.

I’ll make it through. I know it. I’ll have my buddy with me, I’ll have a cooler full of crudites, and I’ll have something sharp and painful in my back pocket to jab myself with, should I be tempted to sneak any non-program snacks in my host's house.

A the F(ull-filled)

Disorderly Conduct

This morning I weighed in at 192.0 pounds. I’m up half a pound from last Saturday’s weigh-in, and so it appears I’m being punished by my smug satisfaction at sliding down 3.5 pounds last week and hovering just half a tick from my pre-preggers body. I’m annoyed and frustrated, but it doesn’t matter at all, because I can’t stop thinking about Luisel Ramos.

Ramos, a 22-year old model, collapsed during a runway show in Madrid last August and was pronounced dead at the scene. Coroners later ruled that she’d died of cardiac arrest. At 5’9”, she weighed just 98 pounds.

I’ve yanked myself out of the culture in many ways. I don’t wear make-up, I would home school my son if it appeared prudent at all, and I only bought a house this past spring when circumstances dictated that I must stay put for the next several years. I have experimented wherever I could, testing and stretching myself, pushing beyond my comfortable spaces to discover what is really true for me, and where I could improve myself. I believe that this life is It, and so I do all I can to make It worthwhile, even if that means stepping outside acceptable cultural standards. I am still a product of this culture, however, and I remain vulnerable to the culture’s more dangerous tethers –particularly eating disorders. Anorexia is my Siren, and no, this irony is not lost on me.

I look past the sunken eyes and the protruding bones, and I think, ‘wow. That woman controls her body. I wish I could do that.’ Yes, I cringe at the clearly-defined rib cage where cleavage should be. But awe trumps judgment, and I bow to the discipline that this Monster demands. What pain it must be, to feel the hunger and not give in. And what a triumph to lay your heads down at night, having conquered your desires.

According to anorexia.com, a person could be deemed anorexic if her weight is at least 15% below ideal. But to me, it’s not the weight so much as the intention. It’s not that someone is below a minimum standard of “ideal” but how she got there and what she does to curb her eating urges.

I always know what I weigh. I know it, and I recite it to myself all day long. Before I started this loss, I would chant the highest number recorded. Even if I was fresh off my period and down 3 pounds, I would whisper to myself, “251”, rather than the 248 the scale showed that morning. Now I do the opposite. Even though I weighed in at 192.0 this morning, I consider myself 191.50. I figure I’ll swing back down there tomorrow, and hopefully dip a little lower besides, especially since tomorrow is my official weigh-in.

And herein lies my problem. When I started the program, I skipped breakfast before my WW meeting. It’s at 8:30am on Saturday morning, and while I ached to talk about food while my tummy grumbled in protest, I did it. Hey, you never know how much that egg is going to tip that scale, and anyway, the WW scale is as sensitive as a woman during her PMS Angry Day. Why wake the dragon? I could eat at 9:30 when I got home, and since I’d just made it through a weigh-in, I could eat a little more at breakfast to compensate for the ‘lost’ meal.

Well, skipping Saturday breakfast turned into whistling past Friday dinner. I’d make all sorts of excuses to Howard for why I didn’t want to eat. Howard, in his peaceful, gentle-soul way, sighed in concern but abstained from argument. When I didn’t get any pushback, I pressed on.

I came to know the last workday of the week as Fasting Friday. I never actually fasted, understand. I drank my protein shake in the morning, same as every day. But I would have salad at lunch instead of my regular chicken breast wrap, and I refused anything for dinner, even when I was so dizzy and light-headed that I could not stand up without assistance. When I lay down for bed at night, the room spun until I nearly hurled. But I didn’t care. I bolted my eyes shut and waited, whispering to myself that I had only 11 hours more to go before I could eat again.

My body responded to these fasts by yanking the carpet out from under my metabolism. I went from burning approximately 9 calories per pound per day (right in the middle of the range for women), to burning just over 4. Plus, even though I kept things well under program on Saturdays after my weigh-in, I’d still eat more than any Fasting Friday, and so I got to where I spent the whole of the week chiseling off the 1.5 pound “gain” from eating actual food on Saturdays. The fast crept deeper into the week. I cut out all carbohydrates from my nightly stir-fry. For weeks, my daily calorie consumption hovered around 550, somewhere between one-half and one-third of what I could have (should have) eaten.

Week after week, I’d hit Friday night, the Dizzies would hit me, and still I refused to eat. I can’t give up any of my weight loss, I’d protest. I can’t stop this now. If I eat more, I’ll gain weight. Gains lead to other gains, and those lead to fatness. I can’t do it. I had traded addictions: food for starvation. Where once I could not stop eating, now I would not start.

Just one more week, I told myself. I’ll get to 25 pounds off, and I’ll correct this. Just let me get out of the BMI obese category and we’ll add food to my diet. Look, I’m so close to 50, let me go just one more week. But now I’m almost below 200….and on it went. Each Monday, Howard would offer help. He put milk in our breakfast shakes instead of water. He added shrimp to the stir-fry and sprinkled black beans into the wok. I responded by sabotaging the efforts I’d begged him to make. I stopped filling my dinner bowl, and I picked through the wok for the vegetables, leaving the meat behind. After Howard caught on to that, I used smaller bowls. I gave up all solid foods, eating only nonfat yogurt for lunch. When I still couldn’t budge the scale, I started dumping parts of my breakfast shake into the sink. Hunger followed me everywhere, a mangy, rabid dog that growled at other people with such ferocity that my cubicle neighbors heard it. I slurped my coffee to cover the noise.

Then last night, as I logged yet another 400 calorie day, tilting my computer away from Howard so he couldn’t see it, I happened upon the news article about Ramos. She’d been told that she could make it big, if only she could lose ‘a lot of weight’. So for 3 months, she ate only leafy greens and drank diet soda, sometimes going 2 weeks at a time without food. Her father confirmed this, stating she had not eaten anything for several days prior to the show. I saw the angular features in her face. I noted the scrawn of her arms and the protruding nubs of her spinal column, clearly visible through her skin. She’d gone 3 months without eating anything of consequence, and her heart arrested, too drained to hold up her tiny body even one more minute.

I have lost nearly 60 pounds, and I have done it all through deprivation. I stopped exercising 3 months ago for no good reason, and now my hunger and my low-calorie consumption exhaust me so completely that I cannot rise from bed in the morning to work out, nor stay on the treadmill without losing my bearings and balance from lack of food. It’s catching up to me now. This week, despite an average daily consumption of 463 calories, I am up 0.50 pounds. My hair is starting to fall out and I’m bleeding between my periods.

This morning, I lost the support of my buddy. I saw that look on his face this morning, and I acknowledged what I was doing to myself, and still, I persevered. I sat at my desk this morning, stomach rumbling and plucking hairs off my sweater and wondering how long I could make it before I had to go to lunch, factoring in that I couldn’t wait too long or it would spill over into the dinner hour, and I can’t eat dinner on a night before a weigh-in. This is Fasting Friday after all.

Then I found another article about Ana Reston, a 21-year old model who died from complications of anorexia. At 5'7", she weighed 88 pounds, or roughly was a 5'0", twelve-year-old girl should weigh. My fear of failure yielded to fear of death. I don’t want to die early. That was the whole point of losing weight in the first place. I gave up peanut butter and pasta and ate more vegetables precisely because I didn’t want to die of a weight-related disease.

Do I have the disorder? No. But I do exhibit disorderly conduct. I’m an extremist in every form, and dieting is no exception. I took the principles of healthy food and fat-free living and I sprinted all the way to the edges, axing all but the zero-point foods from the approved vendor list. I’m goal-driven to the exclusion of everything else, and now it’s come back to eat me alive-literally.

I’m scared beyond the abilities of my fingers to write it, but I’m going to fix this. If I can’t do it for me, which seems likely, then I will do it for the others in my life. I don’t need to be 140 pounds or a size 6 or anything external that spells success if it means I’m torn to shreds on the inside. It’s not worth it. Even if it feels sometimes like it is.

If there’s going to be any arrest around here, it’ll be me doing the arresting, and it’ll be my behavior, and not my heart, that stops. I swear on my life, on my health, and on the men that I love, this will stop.

A the A(rrested)

A Ring of Truth

As some of you know, I am dating my WW buddy Howard, who also happens to be my college sweetheart. After a 16-year silence and a 20-year gap in seeing one another, we each found ourselves looking the other one up in the earlier part of this year. He called me in early June, just a day before I had planned to call him. He got a job in Chicago, and I set him up with my realtor to find an apartment. He took me to dinner as a thank you. I invited him over to spend the evening with my son and me, and then Howard escorted us both on a tour of Elmhurst.

About a month after Howard moved to Chicago, we were still doing the Getting To Know You Again dance when I suggested we go to the Poetry Slam in Uptown. I couldn’t determine Howard’s interest in me, but I knew my interest in him, and I wanted to explore it. That morning, we’d had a long talk after the WW meeting (our first together), and we’d embraced upon parting. But was it just friendly? Certainly it could have been. I did not know.

I conceived of a game to help us pass the time on the drive into Chicago. Let’s talk about the things we’ve regretted, I told Howard. Let’s confess the things we’ve always wanted to say. My desire to hear everything that had happened to him in the silence of years that followed our break-up trumped all wish to be safe, or to move slowly, or to see if Howard had a plan of his own. It’s just the two of us in a moving car. We’re friends and WW buddies now. Let’s talk. Let’s share.

“I’ll start,” I told him. “I have a confession. We haven’t seen each other in twenty years, but I always knew where you were. I followed you via the public library, and then once I got internet access at home, I followed you on line. I lost you briefly when my son was born and you moved to Connecticut, but then I found you on LinkedIn. And then I found your blog.”

Howard nodded once, sending a glance in my direction. “Even though I’ve seen you and I know where you live, I’m still looking for you. I see a woman who resembles you, and I ask, ‘Is that Amy?’.”

On went the night. We watched a terrific poetry slam, we confessed to each other, and then, after ten hours together, we kissed for the first time in twenty years. From that moment on, we were together.

We had very little time together at first. We suffered through the weeks, willing the clock to race until we could be together on Sunday afternoons. We talked, we kissed, we shared, and though the span of half our lives had separated us, there was neither a hiccup nor a blip on the path back to each other. I have loved Howard all of my adult life, and he has loved me just the same.

Howard and I insisted we would move our relationship forward at a normal pace. We wanted it all, but we would take our time and savor every moment. Over the next few months, we talked through everything. Howard and I have so much history, but we’re different people from the twosome we were in college. This was a new relationship. As a new and budding love, it deserved the time and breathing space of any new affair.

Still, I’m a planner and a forward-thinker, and my brain kept jumping ahead to the future. How long does ‘normal pace’ take? What’s long enough before we can announce our intentions to others, so I can go shop for a dress? Howard and I were back, we were in love, and it was time to stop all the waiting and get on with it, already!

“We’ll get to all those things,” Howard told me. “First we walk.” All right, I told him. Walk it is. But don’t expect me to like it.

What I've realized after wasting 3 months sulking and trying (unsuccessfully) to guilt him into speeding up, is that I am right where I want to be. Whatever happens next, I’ll love it, and I’ll want it, and it will be right. But I wouldn’t give up today, or all these moments, for any of it. Those things will come in their time. For now, I love my man and I want to relish every day while we build the life we were always meant to have.

Still, I wanted something to symbolize our commitment to each other. Howard liked the idea, and so we started looking. We decided on rings, with one caveat. “They can’t be too wedding ring-y,” Howard cautioned. “If my folks see us wearing rings, they’ll assume we got married without inviting them.” Easy enough, I told him. We’ll get them for our right hands.

While we were at it, I suggested silver. With Howard perhaps 30 pounds away from goal and me even farther, I shrunk from making a commitment ‘around $600’ for something that I could only wear for a few months. We started looking, but we didn’t find much we liked. Then last Saturday, I was digging around in a drawer, and I found a braided silver ring. I pulled it out and looked it over.

“Try this on,” I suggested.

It fit perfectly. Howard wore it the rest of the day, and every time I looked at his hand, my heart swelled. Two days later, Howard announced at dinner that he wanted to keep it.

“It’s what I want,” he told me. “It’s yours, and it’s from you. I love it.”

The next week, we found the identical ring in my size. I’m wearing it now, and I can’t stop looking at my hand.

I’ve never been so happy to wear a ring, and I’ve never been so happy with the man who gave it to me. I love that it’s silver and that it’s on my right hand. It represents a passion and a peace that didn’t exist until my man returned to my life and made it so. This is our ring of love; our ring of truth.

First we walk. Happy to do it, my darling. Let’s walk hand in hand through every normal-paced and silver-lined day.

A the C(ommitted)

Hobby Horse

First, the news. I weighed in this morning at 191.50 pounds, down a total of 59.50 pounds and just 0.50 pounds away from my pre-pregnancy weight of 191.0. I am officially caught up from that annoying plateau last month, and I have 3 pairs of size 12 pants I can wear out of the house, so I'm chucking my size 16s. This will be the first Misses-sized item I’m recycling because it's too small to wear. They’re not really too small, but they're history. These days, I only wear things so tight that, unless you can tell whether the change in my pocket is facing up heads or tails, they're too big and out they go.

I'm going to have to get some more 12s, since one of the above-mentioned pants trio is a pair of painters that I love, but which are so far fashion-retarded that I can only wear them in my bathroom at night with all the lights off. I admit, they are flattering to my figure, but even my sand-draggers aren't big enough to leave the house wearing a reject from the Basic Training Workout. And so for the sixth week in a row, I will be spending my Free Day by clothes-shopping at the mall.

I’ve never been much of a shopper. I don’t like the whole covered-streets-city look to malls, and I’m suspicious that the Muzak they play holds secret and sinister messages, such as ‘Happiness is emptying your wallet and filling your stomach.’ It’s not enough, either, that I’m accosted at every angle by Size Zero jeans that look like they’ve been through a wood chipper and blouses that scarcely cover teeny breasts and show off the latest in belly-button jewelry. I’m not tempted really, and in any case, even down 59.50 pounds, I’m too large to squeeze past the shirtless ‘model’ standing at the entrance, gunning to undo his jeans so everyone can have a look at the tighty-whitey underwear poking out from his low-slung pants. Ick, but I can handle it. I’m not there for the barely dressed barely-men.

But what’s up with those kiosks? Do these remind anyone else of those carts from the Old West where bearded men hawked snake oil and medicinal waters until the tar and feathers came out? These new ‘carts’ have more glamour and the hawkers are better dressed, but they sport the same useless crap. At least the girls honor the salesperson’s rules of not bothering someone who is obviously avoiding eye contact. The boys have no such grace. They jump out from behind their displays, rope people with neon-colored feather boas or hair extensions, and insist the customer cannot take another step until their look is updated. Let me tell you, I am almost 42 years old, and I have never seen boas as a standard fashion accessory, and anyway, there will never be a boa made to ‘complete’ the track suit.

In a way, though, I’m thankful to the Kiosk Kings, because their ‘hound the harangued until they call security’ sales methods have moved me out of the “mallways” and into the anchor stores.

I used to loathe the department stores. They’re more expensive than most of the boutique fare, and you can’t find salespeople or ladies rooms, even with a map, a directory, and a clerk in tow. They have their own form of the kiosk, the skin care gauntlet, but now it seems that the clerks in white lab coats (what is that all about?) now spend more time over-applying their make-up and talking with each other than chasing down commissions. When I bought my perfume to celebrate breaking 200 pounds, I had to scour 3 anchors before I found a saleswoman, and even then, I had to get her to stop “blending” her black eye shadow long enough to wipe her hands on her smock and open up the cash register.

When I was fat, I discovered that while the department store Women’s clothing cost more than the boutiques, their selection was better, and some of it actually qualified as business wear, rather than the flower-bedecked housecoats at the Big & Beautiful stores. Now that I’m a Misses, I find that I like the displays of their label-wear, and that I can always find my size, because items are always neatly hung and graduated on the racks, size 2 in the front (bitches!) and size 16 in the back. If I don’t find what I need, there’s always something similar right next door, or, if need be, in the next anchor down.

Since I don’t like to shop and I’m not very good at it, I try to buy things that are sturdy enough and plain enough to last me for several seasons. I’ve never had This Year’s boots, and I will probably never be fashion-forward at anything. I wear simple, straight lines that compliment my figure when I’m showing it and hide it when I’m not.

And even though I’m in the ‘look at me!’ stage of my weight loss, I hesitate to spend any real money on clothes. On Friday, I found a sweater at T.J. Maxx that really enticed me. It was a deep v-neck angora with sparklies and bugle beads splashed across the bust. I’d have to wear a t-shirt or a turtleneck underneath, because even in my 'OMG, my boobs are shrinking!' state, I'm not ready to flaunt them to the public at large. Ever since I started buying bras at Frederick’s of Hollywood, I’ve been less reluctant to give glimpses of my lingerie, but I remain a conservative when it comes to flaunting my foundation garments, as it were. Still, I liked the sweater and plucked it off the rack to take a look.

They had 2 sizes, Small and Large. I can wear the Large now, but not for long. I’m already dancing with Mediums in sweaters, and I’m sure the blouses aren’t far behind. I suppose I could snake into a Small, and then the knit would cling hard enough to my torso that my bra wouldn’t really be on display, though my fat rolls would be. I could also buy it and wait it out. I know I’ll be a size Small eventually, and while the sweater has a holiday hint to it, it’s clearly an all-winter garment, and I could still get some use out of it in January. Convinced, sort of, I pull the tag out. $29. I sigh and put the sweater back. Too much, especially for something I can only wear for a little while.

I told Howard about this and he shook his head. “Get the Large. Wear it while you can, and then donate it.”

But I like the sweater, I respond. This is not just something pretty to wear on my way down the scales-I’d want to keep this one. I’d rather wait until I fit it, and then get the next size down. And it’s $29. I can’t justify $58 for one sweater, even if I do get to buy it twice.

“Get the sweater,” Howard insists. “Reward yourself. It’s $29. This is the cost of losing weight. And the reward. Think of it as your new hobby.”

My ex-husband used to tease me that I had no hobbies. Not true, I’d counter. I quilt. “X” insists that quilting is not a hobby. “A hobby is something expensive that takes up all your time and gets you nowhere,” he remarked once. “Quilting is productive. It builds something. So it’s not a hobby.”

I don’t agree, but I saw his point about having a hobby-something where I could spend my money that didn’t necessarily contribute to the GDP. I’ve always wanted to be trendy, or at least fashion-appropriate. I’ve had a subscription to Vogue for years. I got it originally so I could “dress” the characters in my fiction books. I’d been so indifferent to clothes that I wouldn’t bother describing a single outfit in 400 pages of manuscript. Once I did, everyone dressed like me, and while that’s easy, it’s dull and of course, fiction heroes need to be forward-thinking. Solving life-threatening problems loses it’s compelling edge when the hero is pacing in painter’s pants (see above). So I got the Vogue subscription, and then DS showed keen interest in the pictures, and suddenly I was flipping through it every month, checking out the trends and the changes, and eventually I saw a pair of shoes I liked.

Of course then I saw the price, with the tricky “around” modifying the terrifying $600 price tag. How does that dilute this, and what does it mean, anyway? Around $600. How far around? For me, that would be ‘around’ the time I set the shoes down and went looking for Nine West.

But still, moving up the fashion food chain might just be worth the slimmer wallet. Decorating myself is a reward I’ve always wanted to have. I’ve never indulged the desire even when I was thin, precisely because I didn’t want to spend ‘around $600’ on some item, only to find that it was out of style the next fall. But I think now I understand that while I’ll never be a Burberry’s regular, and while I am still in transition, so there’s no need to dump $1,200 on the Mark Shale leather shearling, I have decided to splurge-a little. So look for lined pants with labels you recognize, and don’t be surprised if some day my purse (which I don’t currently carry) has a label other than the Target bull’s eye stamped on the tag. After all the years of drooling over those Vogue models and all these months of slimming myself down into something resembling a real person, I’m ready to clothe the horse.

Looks like I have a new hobby. See you at the mall!

A the C(lothes Equestrian)

Holding the Snake

My exceptional manager strikes again. Last week, he invited me to the departmental GluttonyFest, otherwise known as the annual outing.

At first I thought this was the departmental holiday party, and I wasn’t sure whether to applaud his efficiency or guffaw his gaffe. After all, it’s November 6, with forty two days of shopping days remaining until Christmas, and almost 3 weeks until we kill all the turkeys and give thanks for their brave sacrifice. On the other hand, we’re less than 2 weeks removed from Halloween’s Blood Sugar Free-For-All. Maybe this guy is a huge Roseanne fan from way back (or a pagan) and considers Oct 31 to be the real holiday. What I finally decided was that he’s a finance guy at his core, and budgets come due in December. There’s no time to Fest, as it were, with spreadsheets crawling out of the In Box, and he becomes the office equivalent of an Old Testament tax collector.

As it turns out, this is simply an annual outing, a trip to the department’s Mecca, Frank B’s. I like invitations, and I like being included in the employee things, so I accepted. It’s a restaurant in a grocery store, after all. The salad is likely to be a lonely tomato perched atop some untorn clump of greenery, but I’m okay with that. I can drink soda, and I can swallow coffee, and it’s a party.

Let’s go!

It turns out that Frank B’s is not a restaurant so much as it’s a Refueling Station for People Who Labor All Day. The buffet comes fully loaded with all things potato and greased meat, wrapped in pasta and covered in a nondescript sauce. I had never been there, so I asked one of the regulars about the salad bar. The guy actually snorted at me. “This is a food buffet. You can’t get vegetables there.”

So vegetables aren’t food, and potatoes aren’t vegetables. Okay, then.

I’m screwed, because while WW’s plan does allow for this kind of food terrorism, my personal diet plan does not. Actually, I’m not sure that WW really does have room for a place like Frank B’s buffet, since I’m pretty sure “lean meat” at this place is less a description than a serving suggestion, e.g. “lean meat against potatoes, and pour gravy over both.”

Panicked and PMSing, I talk this over with my WW buddy, where talk means ‘screaming in frustration over stupid men making stupid choices for stupid holiday parties that aren’t even on a HOLIDAY’. Lucky for me, my WW buddy is not only understanding and helpful, he is deaf. Well, he is now. He offers that I should eat my regular lunch before arriving, sit with my team, and drink only diet soda or coffee. I can still go, and I don’t have to compromise either my team-playerism or my diet.

Well, of course I forgot to stock my backpack with yogurt, and of course I got too busy to race out before it was time to head to Captain Obesity’s. When the time came for lunch, I drove alone, chanting, “Coffee is my friend and Frank B. is my enemy.” As I walked in, I saw the buffet table, a steaming snake of silver trays and yellowed lights. I don’t even see a soda dispenser. I do a quick-scan of the grocery aisles, but everything is labeled in Cyrillic, and everyone who can translate is busy rolling up their sleeves and tucking their ties into their shirts. That's when it occured to me that I would likely have to eat my napkin.

The Green Fairy smiles down on me, however, as there is not only a salad bar, but a pretty good one. They have at least 6 non-fried items, and there’s even fruit at the end. I build my lunch, careful to keep my back to the Snake, even though it’s grown hands and is rubbing them all over my shapeless bottom, looking for a place to drop dumplings. I race back to my table, skipping the salad dressing just in case there’s something in the poppy seed designed to make me crave sausage rolls, and sit down.

I’m first back to the table, of course, since it takes far less time to dump lettuce than it does to skewer polish hamburgers or strawberry pierogi. People and plates arrive, and the snake’s tendrils curl up my nose and slither down my throat. I swallow some coffee. It's scalding, and I'm grateful. If my throat’s blistered, then it won’t matter what follows.

My salad is surprisingly good. I eat it in small bites, so I’m not sitting around and drooling over everyone else’s plates. Eventually, though, the allure dissipates and I lift my head and look around. Just as I suspected, everything is golden brown and swimming in fish gravy. Heads hunch over plates and fork scrapes accompany bread sops and lip smacks. Only when someone comes up for soda or air do I make any eye contact. I recognize most of the food, and I know that I've eaten much of it, and....I don't want it.

The only thing that squicked me was the hot dogs rolled in croissants. They've always looked vaguely pornographic to me, with that rounded pink head poking out of the roll, but here, they positively glisten with oil. The dog gleams, the roll bubbles, and everything is stretched and bursting at its edges. I don't need to see anyone open wide and bite down on that, let alone a whole table of men who are already glassy-eyed from kishka in natural casing. For those not in the know, that is blood sausage stuffed into intestines. Apologies to those with plans to eat in the next 24 hours.

Since most of the team is young, everyone makes 2 trips to the buffet and then a final journey to the dessert table. Cannoli crunches in my ear, and the guy sitting next to me nabs a slice of cheesecake that is roughly the size of my first apartment. There’s no gravy, but everything is dusted with powdered sugar. I’m the only one not groaning when we get up to leave.

I made it. I cleared the Gauntlet and while I'm wobbly, I'm feeling decidedly more like a noodle than a sausage. I’m limp from the experience, but there’s not a speck of gravy on me, and I am not at all stuffed. How about that.

194.0 pounds today, down 57.0 and wearing my size 12 no-stretch jeans to work. Can’t breath and don’t care.

A the S(nake Charmer)

The Yo-Yo Sisterhood

Given: I've lost 56.60 pounds as of this morning and now weigh 194.50, and

Given: I am now 3.5 pounds away from my pre-pregnancy weight of 191.0, and so am also 3.5 pounds away from being truly post-partum now that my son is 4 yrs and 5 months old, and

Given: I am still on my quest to buy no-stretch jeans, a search that appears about as likely to succeed as my housekeepers burning a calorie and actually cleaning the bathroom, insead of simply pushing the dirt around to the corners,

Therefore, prove:
I have increased my clothing tightness tolerance into the riduculous.

When I was heavy, everything was tight, and so therefore, nothing was tight. Though it humiliated me to buy clothes in yet-another-size-larger, I did it. I did it only when I'd lost circulation in the offended body part, and I paid in cash so the Great Data Collectors would not ever discover that I was a card-carrying (as it were) Fat Girl, but I made the purchases.

Oh sure, I'd go through this whole, 'I'm not buying clothes any larger and giving my body a reason to grow into them' bullcrap. I even tried the, 'hey, if I'm uncomfortable because my clothes are tight, that will motivate me to lose weight.' Didn’t work. I climbed from a 10 all the way to a 20W with that logic, so you see how well I handled discomfort on the road upward.

Once, during my heaviest days, I wore a pair of size 20W stretch jeans to work. I'd made a critical error the last time I'd washed them and put them in the dryer, and on high at that. I only dry things on high: it seems a waste of the dryer to use those lower settings. As a result, none of my clothes exist in their original size and shape, but still, nothing loses a whole size. I figure that I had owned those 20W-s long enough that they were actually a size 19 (none such beast exists), and I was PMSing, so I was carrying 3 pounds of water in my abdomen, my biggest problem area, and that water was doing its best to display itself between my pubic bone and my beltline, pressing outward until I could feel the zipper tines against my bare skin. Yep, that’s right: I go commando. Sorry mistake on that day, let me tell you, but there was no way my pants would have closed if I had worn even the thinnest of unders.

After a lunch of fish & chips at the English pub, Elephant & Castle, my jeans had cut their initials into my tummy, and my uterus cramped in protest. “Gimme some room or I’m gonna blow,” it seemed to yell. Reeling from my food coma and the cigarette smoke from my 2 dining companions, I retreated to the ladies room, untucked my shirt from my pants, and then, praying there would be no reason for me to get out of my chair the rest of the afternoon, I unbuttoned my jeans.

It helped-a little. It helped too that I squirmed so much that afternoon that my pants had come practically unzipped by the time I shut down my computer for the day. I didn’t realize this until I stood up to leave and there was distinctly more room in my pants than there had been earlier. Facing away from my 3 (male) officemates, I discretely pulled my zipper back into place. I tried to reinstate the button, but my abdomen was having none of that, and anyway, by the time I’d snuck the zipper back up north, 2 of my 3 room-pals had turned and were staring at me, wondering what I’d found so rapt out the windows. I clamped my hand over my stomach without a word of explanation, grabbed my backpack and trucked out of there.

That night, I got my period and the pressure on the 20W-s eased enough that I could wear them again. I stopped drying them, I started sliding them on while damp so I could stretch them out a little more, and I could walk again, but I acquiesced to the inevitable. Before my next period, when the Tsunami hit my innards, I would go out, wearing a mask to protect my fragile ego, and buy size 22W.

My DS and then-DH conspired to fill my weekends for a month, and so I never made it out. I never owned a 22W, though clearly I was that size. I simply gutted it out, somehow managing to keep my weight level even so that I wouldn’t have to suffer this one extra insult. I discovered during this period that the longer I wore the jeans, the “better” they fit. My algorithm looked something like this:

1^st wearing: suck it in while tugging on; try to move around a lot before forced to sit for first time

2^nd wearing: easier on, a bit of room in the stomach; pants no longer sticking to calves after sitting

3^rd wearing: Hey, these are getting loose! Maybe I’m ready for a smaller size…

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Ever since I slithered into my size 14W-stretch at 215-ish pounds, I’ve been in love with tight clothes. Even when they’re distinctly unflattering (as these were then), I will prance around, twisting to see every angle, estimating when I can wear them out, or how long it will be before they get relegated to the Donate pile. Well, I suppose “prance” is a liberal term. What I really mean is that I walk around as if there are bed slats stuffed into my pant legs, because the material is too tight to permit real motion. But I don’t care. Even as my feet turn blue from oxygen deprivation, I preen and grin and dance about, bed slats still in place.

My algorithm differs now. I have 6 levels of ‘fit’ with my clothes, particularly my jeans. Any woman with a fluctuating weight will recognize this--and that’s all of us. Admit it girls; we’re all in this together. Power to the Yo-Yo Sisterhood! So, many of you likely have a similar scale of Acceptable Tightness in clothing. Mine looks like this:

Stage 1: Can get up over hips but cannot zip up, and forget about buttoning. Belly looks like trapped octopus fighting with jellyfish in the mouth of a gold-toothed shark.

Stage 2: Zipped and (maybe) buttoned, this done lying down while holding breath and staring at ceiling. Advanced Stage 2 Yo-Yos may attempt to sit and/or stand. Caution: contents under pressure! Do not attempt to squat or bend over in Stage 2!

Stage 3: Zipped and buttoned while standing, movement permitted (be sure to insert bed slats first). Advanced Yo-Yos may squat or bend. Attempt stairs or car entry/exit with extreme caution. Have loose, long-fitting shirt at the ready in case you wish to venture out.

Stage 4: Fitting, except perhaps in problem areas. If immediately post-period, problem areas vanish by end of 1^st wearing. Okay, 2^nd wearing.

Stage 5: Loose in best areas. Time to circulate next size down into Stage 1, or, for the Advanced, Stage 2.

Stage 6: Starting to sag in problem areas, even when dried on high. Chuck jeans for next size down. Grab that long, loose-fitting shirt, and

Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

This morning, I decided to try on a pair of my size 12 NS (no-stretch). I was sagging a little in my 14-s, but not enough to merit a trip to the store. I got my period on Thursday and am waiting for the water to shrink the octopus, so I can get a realistic view of what stage the 14-ns are for me. Last month, I got the 12 to Stage 1-barely. They came past my hipbones, but both sides of the fly were flapping and the seams screamed for relief. I figured I’d have them at Stage 1, or maybe get part of the zipper up. I could haul myself up off the bed (of course I couldn’t zip them while standing!) and check to see if I had a shot at Stage 2 before my next cycle. Well, not today.

Stage 3!

It took some colossal, professional-level Stuffing the Octopus, but I got them zipped and buttoned while standing, and, while I admit they cinch my waist a la a corset tightlacer’s dream, they are ON, baby! Today I’m wearing a pair of Sweeter by the Dozen, Pre-Pregnancy, Don’t Stretch on Me size 12 jeans.

In reality, I’m a size 14, but that’s Misses-no stretch. I’m a 14, and, with long shirt in tow, I’m a 12. I have the whole of the stitching pattern tattooed on my legs, and the octopus is heaving from the restraints today, but I wore them out, and even had lunch in them. I’m a 12, folks. TWELVE!!!

Well, maybe a 13, though no such beast exists. But today, and for the only time in my post-fat girl life, I’m proud to label myself the same as a big bag of doughnuts.

A, size B(aker’s Dozen)

Tightness tolerance increased to the ridiculous: Proven.

The Blindness of Strangers

Kohl’s in Wheaton, IL has lost my business for the last time.

I have had my issues with them over time: the clerks are surly, the toy section blows, and the women’s shoes are so divorced from reality that it’s a wonder they sell any ladies footwear. Come to think of it, I’ve seen the same crap in there every time I go, so perhaps it is Inventory Paralysis after all. However, it is close to my house and it’s in a plaza with my mother ship, Target, and so I have put aside my complaints in exchange for convenience. No more.

Last Saturday, Kohl's was having yet another Biggest Reductions of This Weekend sale, and I was in the market for business blouses that fit. It was almost 2pm, past the Witching Hour when DS has had enough of my post-WW errands and loses all interest and patience in doing adult things. He’d been pretty good that day, though, even though he'd gotten up at 5:30am (what was that about?), and had thus far refused to eat anything but a handful of goldfish crackers. He even seemed excited at the idea of going to Kohl’s, and so I shelved my original idea of going to Target and bribing him with a new train engine, and off we went.

Since he was being such an angel, I let him drive the cart when he offered. Actually, ‘offer’ is code for 'he grabbed the cart, reported he was going to push it, and promptly banged into some innocent old woman trying to dodge him'. I complied with his ‘request’, which is code for ‘I don’t agree with this, but I’ll be close by to avert anything too bloody, so okay’. Despite aerobic effort from me, however, he kept banging into displays, and eventually I had to pull out my Disappointed Mommy voice. I warned him to steer or I would put him in the stroller and take the controls.

Part of the challenge in a child with PDD is that he fails to process information in the same way or speed as a normal child. He doesn't know, for example, that driving a cart means steering it, and he doesn't get that crashing into people is bad. I’ve barely finished my warning when he bangs the cart into a display of velvet blazers, nearly toppling them. I grab the cart away. DS flips out.

Instead of calmly removing him from the store, which is what I would normally do, I decide that this was the right time to implement a new behavior-modification method. I crouch down to his eye level and try to talk to him. I keep my voice low and calm, thinking if I’m talking softly, then he’ll have to stop screaming in order to hear me. Well, that might work for somebody else’s kid, but my son doesn’t care what I’m saying, because he wants to be heard. I keeep trying, wiping his tears away as I talk. He winds down a little, but then when he tries to get out of the stroller, and I tell him no, the screaming resumes. Eventually my brain kicks in, I realize this isn’t working, and I give up. I pull him out of the stroller and turn toward the door.

At that very moment, a woman appears. She’s wearing a nametag and a wild-eyed glare, and she’s waving her arms in wide circles around her body. She’s shouting over DS, announcing to the room at large, ‘any child that screams like that for more than 3 minutes has to have something wrong with him. He is out of control. There’s something wrong with him, if you…'

I keep my calm for my son’s sake, even though he is melting in my grasp and I’m frazzled from listening to him yell. "This is not your child,” I respond as I lift DS to my hip and turn away. She rants on, insults pouring from twisted lips, her mouth curdled in anger and arrogance. She rants about how I can’t control my son and how there’s clearly something wrong with him. She just keeps hitting that word. Wrong. There’s something wrong with him. That’s just not right if a kid cries that long. You can hear him all the way in the back of the store. This has to stop, you have to stop him. If any kid cries for more than 3 minutes, he’s got to be….

There’s a 3-minute limit on how long a child is allowed to cry before he simply must clam up and accept whatever offense he’s protesting? Sometimes I really hate the post-Victorian culture. Yes, he’s loud, but he’s 4. He can’t tell time, and anyway, who decided that 3 minutes was the limit? I cried longer than that at my first WW weigh-in.

DS is still screaming, and now he's angry because we're leaving. I pull him to me, no small feat since he’s now flailing and kicking, and I leave the Ranting Bitch to yell at someone else.

I know it’s hard to hear a child cry, and harder still when he’s screaming. I know we’ve been lucky, because the times we’ve had to stick around during meltdowns are very few, and then, no one has approached us with threats and insults. I wouldn’t have noticed it anyway, because my eyes and my efforts are on DS, and whatever else is happening matters not to me until DS is calm and happy again. We work it out, and the crowds have so far been understanding. It’s lucky that I meet a psycho for the first time when he’s this old. I don’t feel lucky, though. I feel targeted and singled out and judged and a bad, bad mother.I should have taken him out of the store much sooner.

I should have removed him from the site of the offense, and I should have taken him to a place where we could have talked (or screamed) our way to a solution. After I removed him from the store, we went to the van. He cried for a few minutes more, and, watching him, my own anger overwhelmed me, and I cried too. \As soon as he saw my tears, the DS rant ended. He came over to me, wiped my eyes and said, ‘What’s wrong, Mommy? Why are you crying?’

I loathe crying in front of him over issues like this. I know he needs me strong and supportive, and not buckling over some meaningless provocation. But I couldn’t stop myself. PMS and a railing from an ignorant educator-turned-weekend-clerk proved that I am not as strong as I want to be, or even as strong as I think.

We stayed in the van for another 20 minutes, and when I was sure he was all right, I offered to drive him home, and he accepted. He chatted happily all the way back, and when we got home, we had lunch, and it was clear that for DS, the incident was forgotten.

It’s my job to shield him from predators like that woman, and to keep his life as safe as possible. At the same time, though, we must both continue to challenge and stretch the boundaries of normal and comfortable-to prepare him for the inevitable crappiness of this world. We must work through his mind blindness and teach him the rules of Normal Behavior in Public Places, and to do it by rote and repetition, because he’ll never absorb it on his own. His PDD won’t allow it: he can’t read faces, and he doesn’t see the nonverbal ‘language’ around him. I will guide him, and he will learn, and maybe someday if we’re lucky, we’ll drive a cart together and not even notice that sometimes we bump into things and most time we’re steering in the aisles, just like everyone else. Someday even, if I’m very luck, I’ll have forgotten all about last Saturday.

We do not see things as they are: we see things as we are. Guess what you are, Wheaton Woman? And guess what I am right back? By seething about you all this week, I’ve become all the things I loathe about you. So I’m forgiving you. My son deserves no less. He deserves it, and I deserve it. You’ve taken up enough space in my head. Time to flush you and move on.

Struggle is Nature's way of making us stronger. Let it please be so.

A the S(trengthened)