What's In A Name?

I’ve become my company’s Skinny Bitch.

Fascinating stuff, this, since I may have as many as 38.0 pounds yet to lose. But I’ll take it. Heck, I’m rolling around in it. I’m the Skinny Bitch. Me. Former Fat Lady, is a Be-yatch.

First, I’ll brag a little and report that I weighed in at 182.0 pounds this evening, which means I could be as low as 180.50 tomorrow morning. I will have my evening snack, because I should, and also because I don’t want to jinx myself. But I am consistently 1.50 pounds heavier at night and before dinner than I am in the morning before breakfast. I’m bowling straight toward the 180-pound goal, and after tomorrow, I’ll have a teeny little half-pound spare left standing and nothing else. Yee-ha.

This “happifies” me even more so, since I created a demi-goal of losing 14 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Years, as suggested by my WW leader. She asked us to set a goal for what we wanted on the other side of this 7-week obstacle course, and Howard and I both agreed to continue losing as normal. All went well until the Great Traps debacle, and until this morning, I was cemented on 184.0 sucky pounds. Then this morning brought 183.125 and now tonight, 182.0. So, if I’m 180.50 pounds tomorrow, or even 181.0, I have a true and clean shot to hit 179.0 by January 1, which would be my 14 pound loss goal.

Second, I saw a picture of me from this afternoon when I was crawling around DS’s preschool classroom building a gingerbread house with him (which did NOT come home, btw. Are you high? That thing had jelly beans on it!). Howard and Lynda the Nanny/Goddess were snapping digital shots like the paparazzi, and I got snapped in mid-crawl, my face in profile to the camera, and most of my torso showing behind DS’s reindeer hat. I compared it to my Before Shot (coming soon), and I think I’ve reached another goal, which is that I actually look different from when I began this weight loss. I mean, of course I look different-I’ve lost a whole 3^rd grader off my 2-dimensional heiny (70.5 pounds maybe!). But more than that-my face is not just a thinner version of what it was. I look different. I wear a different face. And that’s as it should be, for I am a different woman.

But the big news is that I have a new label at work. Skinny Bitch.

The place where I work has a cafeteria, and, for the most part, it serves the requisite food, all the while swearing on their perky hats that it’s not fast food, even though it looks and tastes just like it would if it came in a paper wrapper and/or a Styrofoam box. It’s a pretty typical suburban dining hall, with little sections around the perimeter, with such inspired titles as ‘Deli’, ‘Grill’ and ‘Dessert’. Well, nobody can say they’re not direct about that, at least. The salad bar is in the middle, a sort of green oasis treading water in the midst of fried onions, fleshy burgers and boxed “salads” that have a thin layer of ‘garden’ at the bottom, but otherwise resemble the splayed innards of a bacon/cheese casserole gone berserk.

I don’t eat preassembled anything anymore-mostly because I don’t trust everyone to wash their hands before returning to their station. But after the Great Collapse drama, I refuse to eat anything that I haven’t built/created/supervised through its entire foodstuff lifecycle. Besides, I think that any food pressed into the shape of a gong is going to rebel against the first thing that sets it free-sort of like a genie, only one that’s been housed between foul-smelling blue bacteria and hours-old pork ‘crumbles’, and who just got showered with sweet, white glop smelling of poppyseed or a Ranch. Seriously, I just won’t take the chance. So I pay through the nose to assemble my salad ‘open faced’.

Usually I avoid the cafeteria altogether. I need to get out every day, just to see something other than my computer screen or one of a dozen Suck-Ups who come to call on me throughout the day. Yes, yes, I know they’re working, but their very presence prevents me from doing the same, and so I dodge them at lunch, their veritable Witching Hour. I go out, browse some size-down clothes or sneak a coffee in some place where the drinks must be served in stainless steel, or else they’ll eat through the mug, the table, and then my new wool pants on their way to scorch Indonesia and the whole of the South China Sea. These days, though, I’m avoiding the Christmas Crazies, and it’s been whackier than usual at work, so I don’t have more than about 20 minutes and so I’m downstairs with my compadres.

Like I said, the cafeteria is pretty nice as in-house eateries go, and the salad bar works. I avoid all mayonnaise-based concoctions, steer clear of anything misspelled, including the “Chik’n Bits”, and I skip the dressings altogether. Usually my salad is a good layer of romaine, cucumber slices, tomato wedges, a smattering of black olives, mushrooms, broccoli, a wee bit of smoked turkey and egg white.

This last is how the whole S.B. thing started. The salad bar does that egg-slicer thing and seems to expect that I’ll just drop a whole julienned, once-fetal chicken on my plate. Well, forget it. I’ve never liked egg yolk, and now I refuse to eat the fat. So I pluck through the bin with the tongs, finding the egg “crusts” that have only the whites. This slows up the line, and I get a lot of exasperated sighs as people ‘play through’ the bar on their way to the soups.

I built my salad in the slow lane, with no fewer than 5 people passing me on the right, and when I was finished, I got a Gargantuan coffee and headed to the cashier line. The line was pretty long, so I did the expected thing and started looking at people’s trays. That’s when I realize that I no longer eat like a typical person, and that I probably never can again. Onion rings were everywhere, along with fried fish, layered burgers and plates stacked with pizza ‘slices’ bigger than the last 8-cut medium that I ate before I started my diet. Plus, nearly everyone had a dessert of some kind on their tray, and yes, I count the Nutri-Grain bar. Compare the fat and sugar content to any Twinkie. The N-G is better, but only by degree. When it comes right down to it, the N-G is not a grain so much as it’s a soft candy bar too cowardly to dip itself in chocolate, and so markets itself naked, pretending that somehow, that’s healthy.

So as I’m cataloging the fare around me, I catch a woman whose been eyeing my tray. Fair’s fair, I guess, and since I’m in line and we’re all bored (and of course, there’s no talking in line, just like in the elevator), my tray is fodder for commentary. This woman, who looks like I did about 50 pounds ago, has a ‘salad’ that is covered in cheese and Bac’n, and is so heavily layered in dressing that it looks like someone orange bled all over her bowl. She also has a roll and a cup of cream soup so full that broccoli-infused lava is squirming out from under the lip. I don’t know this woman, but I think I know what she’s doing, and what she thinks she’s doing. She got a salad, because she wants to lose weight, and you eat salad if you want to drop pounds. But lettuce and tomatoes alone are dull, so you have to fancy it up a little with cheese and bacon. Why not? It’s a salad, after all, and salads are good for you.

How I wish.

Anyway, I catch her face just before our eyes meet, and I see her nose crinkle and her lips curl upward in what is clearly a silent ‘ewwww!’. Then she catches my eye, sizes me up and a pursed-lips expression follows as she looks away. Look how I’m eating. And then look how I look.

I saw that same woman 2 days later. She had more or less the same thing on her plate, though this time there was less cheese, the soup was gone and a slice of cheesecake had replaced the roll. She’d brought a friend along, a man of stature who wore his spare tire as a sign of prosperity. We did the tray-glance exchange, and then I saw her elbow her friend and tip her head toward my lunch. I hear their whispered exchange, and it goes basically, like this: Who eats like that? Not me. Heck no. Me neither. Let that skinny bitch have her rabbit food.

The thing is, despite my pride at being labeled, even with the Bitch piece (and hey, that ain’t the first time I’ve been called that!), I have empathy for this woman. I suspect that behind her chide at me, she suffers.

There is no arrogance in what I say. I remember the confusion over why I could eat so ‘little’ (at 1,800 calories a day) and not lose, or when I ate ‘salad’ with cheese and ham and didn’t get why I stayed the same nasty fat-girl weight. It’s burned in my brain how ugly and bloated I felt when I saw those skinny girls choosing nonfat yogurt and ‘lettuce’ –you couldn’t call what they bought a salad. There’s nothing on it! I feel for my sisters, and I want to reach out to them. But what do I know? I’m a skinny bitch who eats like a bird. It’s not natural. It’s not normal. If that’s what it takes, then weight loss is impossible.

Sometimes I think that the best way I can show support is to keep doing what I’m doing. To show the people around me that one can eat ‘light’ and show loss, and be happy. I am clearly healthy, and I’m smaller every week. And I’m right here. If anyone asks me how I stay so thin, I tell them the truth-I watch every bite like a Federal Reserve driver with a truckload of cash, and I suffer every day, watching the cookie parades, smelling the oil-crusted delights, and wishing that I could somehow eat as I pleased and look as I want.

But no, that’s not really true anymore. That’s how it began, and I do still suffer. In fact, I’ll tell you that I positively loathe chocolate now. It is my sworn enemy. How many ways can one decorate cocoa with refined sugar? Those stupid petit fours are back, and this time, they have sliced Reese’s miniatures as hats. WTF?! I’ve taken to eating coffee grounds at my desk, because I don’t dare refill my mug. Who knows what Black Forest Troll lurks under the Splenda? Whatever it is, it’ll have to come down the hall to me-I ain’t going over that bridge.

Despite all that, though, I am eating the way I want to eat. Food fuels my body, and I’m so energized and spirited in this form that my temptation to stray slides further away from reality every day. Hang on, I want to tell the Bac'n Babe. Don’t look at the end point, and don’t even look at the start. Take it one meal at a time. Heck, take it one bite at a time. There’s no rush, and there’s no risk. But there’s all kinds of rewards as you go.

Like being labeled Skinny. No matter what the noun that follows.

PS-Bought a cashmere sweater at Ann Taylor the other day. I’ve never paid so much for one item of clothing in my life. But it looks pretty, it shows off my boobs, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be part of my permanent wardrobe. Details to follow.

A the L(unch Buster)