Unscheduled Maintenance

I no longer worry about maintenance.

I don’t worry about it, because I’m pretty much in it. My weight inches downward, but to such a degree that I can only measure it by keeping the shutter open on my scale. I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen movie: things are happening, but the plot never advances, and I don’t get any of the jokes.

Back in the days when I was Always Thin, any time that a pound or two crept up, I would simply cut out half the butter on my mashed potatoes for a week, and it would go away. Man, I really miss the teen years sometimes. I long for those years, when losing weight was a matter of deciding to, and then doing it, without any real suffering on my part.

Anyway, the reduced butter often turned into No Extra Bread at Dinner, which led to half an hour of dancing in my bedroom to ‘tone things up’. Then summer would come, or basketball season would begin, and I’d notice that through no real effort, my weight would drop. I would lose 3 or 4 pounds a month, eating pretty much how I wanted and exercising when I felt like it.

To be fair, my exercise at the time involved 3 hours of intense basketball practice and/or jazzercise in my high school PE class, or maybe riding my zero-speed bike an hour in the Ohio hills to the gym, working out with weights until I collapsed, and then riding back home. I could still down the occasional hot fudge sundae on Saturday evenings, or share a pancake ‘breakfast’ with my drummer boyfriend at 3am following a gig, and my weight would remain low . Even when I got my period, my weight remained level, and continued that sneaky little drop.

One particularly beautiful memory I have is of going with my mother to some ‘women’s weight loss center’ when I was 17. It was one of those places that still had that jackhammer-like rubber band that shook the cellulite around on your hips. It was evening, I was wearing a heavy cowl-neck sweater, (designer!) jeans, and my shoes, which were probably a leather/wood clog of some kind. I tipped the scales at 144 pounds and I freaked out. That 150 pound marker loomed at me. I think I went home that night, vowed to ‘get back into shape’ and didn’t eat for a week.

Okay, so maybe the teen years weren’t so great. Or, they were, but I was just stupid. Or maybe I’m stupid now, because I’m all giddy that I might end up somewhere on the North end of that 150-pound mark. It might be time to revisit my goal weight.

Putting the Crazy Girl’s Goal Weight aside for the moment, I do think I’m pretty much settling in to where my body will stop losing and ‘maintain’ a weight unless I do something drastic, like exercise (saints alive, don't do THAT!). Until the end of February, I was losing about 3 pounds per week, or about 10 pounds a month. Then I had a couple of Flat Weeks and my overall loss went to 2.72 pounds a week, and I lost only 9 pounds for February. Small, simple; nearly imperceptible. But suddenly I wasn’t down a full size every 2 or 3 weeks, and the jeans in my closet were staying in the ‘wearable’ category longer.

Now March is here, and I have a real shot of being Bikini Ready for the first time since the 80s (the Octopus notwithstanding). My weight still declines, but more at a creep. I’ve lost 5 pounds since Feb 23, including the “big” 1.50 pound loss last week, and that was post-period, so I think I lost that 1.0 pound that I’d gained the week before. My weight chart is starting to flatten out. I knew it was coming, I’m proud to be at the end, but still, it is hard to stay motivated when the scale appears stuck just above the 160 mark.

And what’s the end, anyway? I was aiming for 149.0, but then I got a look at myself in the mirror last week, and I thought that if I slowed or stopped in the next few pounds, I’d be okay with that. And then Howard mentioned something about how I still might have 20 pounds to lose. Judging from my comments and my frame and my Teen Years weight, he’s probably right. But how in the world am I going to shave off 20 pounds in half-pound increments?

Goody. Again, I won’t have to worry about maintenance, but this time it’s because I’ll never get there.

Working the math, I see why this is going so slowly. At 161.0 pounds, I figured out that I am burning about 9 calories per pound. So to maintain this weight, I need to consume approximately 1,450 calories per day. To lose even 1 skinny pound a week, I have to cut out 500 calories per day. That means I could only eat 950. That’s a little lower than where I am right now, and so, predictably, I am losing about 0.80 pounds per week.

I can’t consider dropping far enough to lose 2 pounds per day, though some days, I really, really want to. That would be a daily intake maximum of 450—closer to where I was in the autumn when my hair was exiting my scalp. So no, that won’t work. Looks like I’m on the 1-pound paddy wagon. At least until I get into the 150s and I skip backward to the Half-Pound Tessy Caboose.

Get the hats and horns!

On the up side, I had a guard put on my engagement ring, because I've lost so much weight since January that it was spinning around on my finger and threatened to sail off the next time I gestured. I don't know what size ring I am, but everything in my jewelry box is too big, including the pretty little size 6 ring that Howard bought me in college.

That really is an International Coffee moment. I think my hands are among my best features, and so it was pretty great to see my ring get so loose on my hand that I could wear it on my index finger (and made a whole Euro-look for myself in the process). But it belongs on my ring finger, and that’s where it is now, and I didn’t even have to thread any yarn through it. Thank God for that, too, since I definitely do not miss that about the Teen Years.

And I went Spring Break shopping yesterday and found a pair of shorts in a size 8 that were properly comfortable, but loose enough that I thought I’d grabbed a 10. That was awesome. I am solidly a size 8 now in everything, and in some places, I’m leaning toward a 6. I should be easily into a size 2 “long” stretch jean once I make it into the mid-150s.

Maybe maintenance means something other than weighing the same (or nearly!) every day. Maybe it means a stasis in a process—a steadying of method that is more like calm than entropy. If that’s the case, then I’ve been in maintenance for a while now. I’ve been eating well and looking good, and feeling great for weeks. I’ve been below 200 pounds long enough that I can’t even believe I was up that high, never mind the 51 pounds beyond it where I once roosted. And the perfume I bought in October to celebrate that milestone is nearly empty.

I’m in this for the haul it has become, as well as the sweat it takes to stay here. Why wouldn’t I be? I’m already in maintenance, and so far, I seem pretty good at it.

A the S(neaking down the Scales)