(Happily Ever) After

It’s here at last.

Or rather, I am here at last. After fifty-six weeks of logging my meals, attending WW meetings and bagging up endless stacks of fat clothes for the AmVets, I have reached my goal. Effective immediately, my diet is over. I am now an "After".

And just in time. With eight weeks to go before the wedding, I’m sure to face little wisps of stress here and there (HA!), and so I’m glad that this piece of my life is finished. Yes, I’ll have to figure out how to keep the scale at a standstill as I prepare for a monumental (positive!) stressor, complete with annoying details, long to-do lists, alterations to plans, alterations to clothing, and alterations to guest lists that simply will not sit still. No biggie, though. In my new, slim, maintenance-mode body, this will be a…what? Piece of cake?

Well, okay, clearly not cake: not for the Fat Lady on Maintenance. It’s more like a big bowl of sugar-free jello. Hmm, somehow not as satisfying. Nor as convincing.

But I have my amazing fiancé to help me, along with his colossal parents, and my DS, who, by the way, is walking around the house announcing that he’s getting married, too. Well, why not? Aren’t we all marrying each other? It isn’t just Howard and I, after all. It’s all of us. On October 13, we create the legal component of what the last year has created already: a family. A unit, to have and to hold from that day forward.

But more I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-a-fairytale later. For now, I need to roll around some more about making my goal.

Somehow in the good luck that continues to follow me everywhere, I managed to produce an insurance pound. My goal weight is 147, and this morning, the scale pointed exactly at 146. The new digital scale did me one better, announcing 145.60. This is the end of my period, and I’m sure some of that is my body behaving in typical fashion, not only meeting the goal (finally!), but doing so with an extra little slammer at the end. I don’t expect to keep the insurance pound, and frankly, I don’t mind. I’m at goal. I made it.

This morning at WW, the meeting was titled, “Talk about what works, laugh about what doesn’t.” So please humor me a little retrospective.

I have learned that while I consider myself to be a thin person, that the Fat Lady lives on. The Big Broad lies just on the other side of my junior-sized wardrobe, sprawled across a two-person lounge chair, her stomach grumbling, and demanding a return to the Good Old Days. I have bested her, but she’s crafty and smart and it will be a long time before my habits hold the majority in my House of Commons. Maybe someday I’ll find a way to make peace with her, but for now it’s all out war, and she’s the mouthy, cantankerous rival who gets the last word in everything. Luckily for me, she no longer gets the last bite.

I have learned that eating a little bit of the forbidden foods yields disaster. We had a substitute leader this morning that nailed the way I feel about red-light treats. She said, “I can’t have one if there is more. If I do, everything that’s left becomes mine.” Amen.

It could be that some day I can go to a cocktail party and have ‘just a little bit’ of things, or I can weave treats into my program and not see them show up immediately on the scales. But I don’t think so. My fatness was not a temporary insanity. It is symptom of something long-term and deeply rooted in the crevices of my soul. I have problems with food, and when I am in need, it is my comfort and my foil. I have to shun red-light foods as an alcoholic shuns drink, and reap rewards and celebrations in other ways.

I don’t know what those rewards will be, or how it will change my life. I do know it will make me stand out forever. But I’d rather be a freak who fits into her junior clothes than an overweight, unhappy person who can eat whatever is put in front of her. There is no middle ground for me, no compromise. I eat as I exercise as I work, and as I live—head on. I’ve learned that when I forget that fact, I am reminded at once with tighter clothes and a heavy stomach.

I gain or lose weight in direct proportion to what I eat. I always have. At one point, when DS was 2, I was exercising an hour a day and burning 800 calories on the elliptical, and my weight remained stubbornly at 213. I didn’t get it: had birth and motherhood changed my metabolism so much that I couldn't lose anything? Was the ongoing breastfeeding standing in the way of normal clothes and healthy living?

I learned the hard way that it wasn’t any of those things—it was just me, eating to be fat. When I went back to work and had to give up my daytime gym trips, I gained 15 pounds in a month. Direct proportion. I know it. I accept it. I will use it to my advantage. Nothing bad in my mouth means nothing bad at the scale.

So, okay, there was no laughing here about what doesn’t work. I’m not sure that I’m ready for that. I’m a little post-traumatic stress right now, where I worry that even the proximity of fatty foods will make me gain. I hold on to my goal weight in these first hours, and it feels as precious and fragile as I do. Laughter comes later, at my first ‘thiniversary’, maybe, or in shared war stories with others on the journey.

I can see the whole trail now; all its hills and curves, every rut, and all the tears that muddied the path. I clutch this imaginary trophy tighter than any tangible reward I’ve ever earned. Because I did this. Me. My sweat and my discipline brought me here. They’ll keep me here, too, every moment and every day, one meal at a time.

I’m so glad this happened before the wedding. It exhilarates me to know that I’m beginning this new life completely removed from that old person. I can shed all the baggage of that woman, and leave it behind in the pounds that are no longer. It’s just one more thing I can pin to this event, one more way that this becomes a pinnacle of my life, and a point of unmatched happiness.

Now that I’m here, at fighting weight, it’s time to start shedding the rest of the unwanted saddle bags in my life. It’s time to purge, and to rid my house of all things bad and belligerent from Those Years. It’s a clearance, and Everything Must Go! Everything will go, too, you’ll see. I know I can do it, now. If I can yank these pounds off of me, then the rest will be easy.

Stay tuned. It’s going to get interesting.

A th S(inging at Last)