A Dumbbell In A Home Gym

When "Have A Neat Summer" Just Won't Do.

Okay, so the Week of Avoiding Harry Potter Spoilage is over. I'm finished with "Deathly Hallows." Man, can you believe Harry killed Hermione and Ron and ran off with Snape? I totally didn't see that one coming.

But I laughed and cried and am very sorry the series is over. 2007 is really turning into the year of endings: "The Sopranos," "Harry Potter," my company's time in DC; I almost hate to ask what's next.

Last weekend, my mother, who's been cleaning out her house in preparation for a move, came over with all my old school yearbooks in tow. I went to the same private school from fifth grade to twelfth grade, so I had a pretty big pile to examine.

In the 1983 yearbook, here's what one of my classmates thought to scrawl for her "farewell" message to me:

"Hi Nicole! Just a reminder -- you'd be a knockout if you lost a few pounds!"

Nice, huh? "Have a great summer, fatass!"

The funny thing is that this girl really wasn't a terrible person. She carpooled with me. We had sleepovers and stuff. She was my friend. And I vaguely remember that her mother was pretty awful; I know my own mom was utterly appalled by that woman, though I don't recall the specific offenses. My classmate probably repeated what she'd been hearing about herself for years.

It's weird, though. What on earth would possess someone to write that?

Okay, I'm being too nice. This was my initial reaction upon reading that after all this time:

"What kind of a weird-ass pathetic total LOSER would you have to be to write something like that in someone's GODDAMN YEARBOOK? Idiot."

Ahem.

And this was from ninth grade, which means that I wasn't even all that fat yet; I didn't really blow up into Lane Bryant territory until my junior year. Which just goes to prove my bitter theory that endlessly nagging people about being overweight tends to bring on the exact opposite of what the nagger hopes to achieve.

And now that I think about it, this wasn't the only time this girl dropped hints -- always carefully framed so that they weren't direct insults and I couldn't call her on them -- that I wasn't quite as pretty as I thought I was and maybe I should stop being so stuck up. Weird. I liked her, and I thought she liked me, but if my memory serves, she sure did have Issues with my looks.

And I *was* pretty back then (so there!), but I sure as heck didn't think so at the time. Maybe if my friend had known about all the shit I was getting from my family about my weight and how no man would ever want me as long as I was fat, she might have cut me a break.

I don't know. And it doesn't matter now. But man, I hated high school. I sure wasn't sorry to see that come to an end.

No Change.

So I'm going to bite the bullet and call it: No change in my weight for October. I'm still at 164.5.

On the one hand I'm disappointed. On the other hand, I'm relieved that things haven't started heading in the wrong direction. October was just an insanely busy month, and my eating and exercise routines were both blown sky-high.

I really wanted a new progress picture for this month, but when my husband took a few shots of me yesterday I realized that the workout pants I was wearing make me look really fat. D'oh. Comfortable, they are. Flattering, they're really really not. I'll have a new photo soon, I promise. The black jeans I just started fitting into should make for a nice picture, I think.

Anyhow. On to Progress Prompts:

"List 3 likes and 3 dislikes about losing weight."

This is harder than you might think it would be.

Likes (what, only three?):

1. Clothing: Having a reasonable expectation that I can walk into most stores and find clothes in my size. Having a much wider variety of outfits to choose from.

2. Fitness: Not wanting to slit my wrists if I'm confronted with a steep staircase or an out-of-order escalator. Being perfectly amenable to parking well away from our destination. Being able to walk around shopping malls, museums, or zoos without wanting to keel over from fatigue and pain after an hour at most.

3. "Going In." If we go to a restaurant and are given a table that's situated between two other tables, I'm no longer terribly phobic about being the one to squeeze through the gap between tables to the other seat. When I was at my heaviest, my husband was always the one who had to "go in" (and still is if the space between tables is especially narrow). My favorite Thai place near my office used to give me fits because they'd frequently give me one of these tables; I'd just sit on the aisle with my back to everyone. I must have been an outlaw in a previous life because I really don't like sitting with my back to a room, but I didn't dare risk going in; I had nightmare visions of my huge ass sending tableware, water glasses, food, drinks, and everything else at my table and the neighbor's table crashing to the floor.

So I like "Going In." Weird that this gets the most coverage of my three likes, eh?

Dislikes:

1. Blowing through the cute clothes I like and have been delighted to be able to buy is a bit of a bummer, although that hasn't been as much of an issue lately as my weight loss has slowed down. I've been schlepping around in some of last fall's heavier tops and sweaters even though they're way too big and unflattering now. I can't afford to replace everything, and I figure that sweaters are supposed to be kinda big anyhow.

2. I'll admit it: Sometimes it pisses me the hell off that I can't just eat the way I used to, even though I know that the physical and emotional price I paid for doing that was way too high and I feel so much better now. There are days when I miss the mindlessness, when I wish I could walk into a place and stuff myself to bursting on whatever I wanted to without thinking of the consequences for my body. Sometimes I still have trouble with the whole "This is realio-trulio for the rest of your life" thing.

3. As I've said before, sometimes I still get twitchy about feeling so visible again. I know this is likely an "Oh, poor you" kind of problem, but male attention really throws me for a loop. Some strange little man kept trying to start conversations with me at a coffee shop in Hartford last week, and I ended up getting so flustered and annoyed that I just gathered up my things and swept out of there. Aside from the whole "Hello -- married!" factor, all I'd wanted that morning was a nice, peaceful breakfast with coffee, a bagel, and the paper. (Peaceful meals tend to be a rarity at Skate Americas.) And I didn't get it.

So there you have it. Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't trade my problems now for the problems I had in 2004, but yes -- the weight loss does have some aspects that can be less than supershinywonderful.

Ass Issues.

This week has sucked. I suck. I'm stressed. I'm PMSing. I'm not exercising enough. I'm eating too much.

Feh. I've just got to wait until the wave passes and my mojo comes back, but I hate the days when I can suddenly imagine the mojo being gone for good.

Sometimes I think I'm scared of success. I thought I'd have a nice big juicy loss for the end of the month, and now I'm not so sure that's gonna happen. I sure as hell don't deserve one with the way I've been slacking the last few days. Dammit.

This too shall pass ... this too shall pass ...

Anyhow, thanks again to everyone for the kind comments on the last entry.

I feel like I have to speak up about the whole "junk in the trunk" issue. It's not that I think big rear ends and broad hips are automatically unattractive or bad or anything like that ... it's just complicated.

I have ass issues. I was taught from an early age that I had a big butt and that big butts were ugly. As a teenager, I crammed myself into sprayed-on size 14 Gloria Vanderbilts while my skinny cousins were slinking around in their size 4s and telling me my ass was too fat for designer jeans. As I got older there were plenty of men who found my ass perfectly nice the way it was, but it's always the negative stuff that takes up permanent residence in my head.

I've gotten over all that to a certain degree, and while I really don't mind being curvy I sometimes wish that my ass were a little more proportional to the rest of me. I'm grumpy because I ordered a dress for our anniversary in October and if it weren't for my hip measurements, I could have gotten a much smaller size. My hips and my butt make dress buying in particular a real adventure.

I'm not going to bitch about it too much because at this point I'm just grateful that my butt is small enough to fit into one subway seat with a little room to spare. Perfection isn't something I'm going to lose sleep over; I can live with good enough.

But I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to fit into a pair of jeans with a single-digit size.

Baby's Got (Less) Back.

So you might remember that last year, I kept dropping hints about an old picture of me that I found so disturbing and traumatic that I refused to post it even though I was posting other "before" photos from the same batch.

Almost a year later, I think I've finally made peace with it enough to put it up for public consumption:

I don't think my husband intended any symbolism by photographing me staring into a crypt, even if I looked like I was only a few more pizzas away from joining its occupant.

You might think I was about to say "And THAT was when I knew I needed to go on a diet!" but you'd be wrong. I know I saw this shortly after he took it and I definitely had a brief "Holy shit -- I'm grotesque!" moment when I looked at it, but then I just stopped thinking about it. I put it right out of my head. On some level I didn't believe that was really me. Sure, it might be a version of me. But it wasn't the real me. It was just a bad picture. A bad angle. It didn't mean a thing.

Strangely enough I find the picture far more distressing to look at now. Good god. Look what I did to myself. How on earth did I let things get that far out of hand? How did I stand it? It's bizarre to get smacked in the face with the extent of my own denial.

Back then I'd convinced myself I was destined to be that way. I thought I couldn't possibly ever get all the weight off without doing something really drastic. I quietly researched weight loss surgery on the Web, but even the descriptions of the surgeries and the aftermath made me want to curl up in a ball and weep. Or faint. And the restrictions on what I could eat afterward bothered me -- they sounded too drastic, even if I believed I'd have to do something drastic to get the weight off. In the end, surgery wasn't for me.

So that picture didn't directly inspire my efforts to start becoming healthier a couple of months later. But it probably did end up as one more little chip in the wall of denial I was hiding behind, along with the physical pain my size was causing me, my scary blood pressure, and my increasing inability to fit into subway seats and restaurant booths and the plus-size clothing in department stores.

When my weight loss first started becoming noticeable, my husband was most likely to comment on it if he saw me standing at the stove or somewhere else where I had my back to him, so I suspect this picture probably burned itself into his brain too. Can't blame him. He's got some bad "before" shots of his own, but nothing that even remotely compares to this one.

Happily, that was then. This is now (taken on Monday morning, in fact):

Baby's still got back. I've accepted that I'm always going to look better coming than going. (And I'm cheating a bit because you can't really see my upper arms in that shot.) But I'll take this one. It makes me believe that nothing is hopeless.

Fool For The Pool.

So tonight we did something I never dreamed we’d do: We went down to our community pool and got passes.

That means that within a couple of days, assuming the weather holds up, I will be appearing in public in a bathing suit.

Cue my best Cathy voice: AAAAAAAAACK!

I have not been in a bathing suit in public since the early 90s. My mother’s old condo development had a really stunning pool that was right on the Chesapeake Bay. But I started getting fat and increasingly disinclined to put on a bathing suit around other people, and then she moved out of there. And that was the end of it. I was invited to one pool party a few years ago, but while everyone else splashed around and had fun I sat very primly in my summer uniform of T-shirt and long skirt and claimed that I just hadn’t gotten around to finding my suit. Darn the luck.

I still have the bathing suit I wrote about in this entry from last August. It actually fits a lot better than it did back when I first tried it on; considering that there’s a good bit less of me to cover, I’m not surprised. I never did get a chance to wear it last year. It still looks pretty cute on me. It’s a nice enough suit, as bathing suits go.

And my husband only laughed at me once. While I was inspecting myself in the mirror I turned around, looked at my rear view, and sighed -- and he said I acted and sounded exactly like Elastigirl when she catches sight of her spandex-clad butt in “The Incredibles.”

“Well, I know exactly how she felt!” I barked.

But, y’know, it’s not all bad. Or maybe I just don’t care all that much anymore. I really like swimming. I really like horsing around in the pool. I’ve deprived myself of this for far too long. So I’m not perfect. Big honking whoop. Perfection’s overrated anyhow, and I deserve to have fun.

The pool is gorgeous; I got a good look at it tonight from the clubhouse. And it has several lanes marked off for lap swimming. I’m not sure how much I’ll do this for fitness; I’m thinking at this point it’s going to be more of an “I just want to be active and have fun, but if I happen to get in some actual exercise while I’m at it? That’s gravy!” kind of thing.

Mmmm ... gravy.

The Right To Bare Arms.

So I seem to be mired in the same "I know I need to exercise, but I don't wanna" funk that I've seen afflicting other bloggers lately. I worked around it with a couple of awesome bike rides this week (and broke 100 miles on my cyclometer tonight!), but the creeping lazies have definitely been an issue.

I don't feel like babbling on at length about that, though, so let's talk arms.

Wednesday night on the subway, I saw a woman in a sleeveless top with some seriously impressive -- almost to the point of intimidating -- arms. Whenever she grabbed a pole for balance, her biceps would pop right out in all their carefully-sculpted glory. I know that some people would disdain her arms as too muscular, too unfeminine. She probably gives the "Oooh mercy, you mustn't ever lift anything heavier than a two-pound dumbbell or else you'll get TOO BIG!" crew fits. (If you don't know why that's nonsense, please visit Stumptuous.) Not me. I was impressed. And -- dare I admit it? -- a little jealous.

It's now warm enough to be official arm-baring season in my area, so I see all kinds of arms on a daily basis. Long skinny arms. Pudgy flabby arms (every time I look in the mirror, alas).

I am experiencing a whole lot of ambivalence about this whole arm-baring thing, even now.

I was kind of struck by how my forearms looked in this photo from last Sunday. (I know it looks like I've been seized by a fit of cosmic angst in that picture, but in reality I was cracking up at an altercation between a grouchy pedestrian and a testosterone-riddled yahoo on a bike on the nearby path.) They look nice, I think.

If only their upper halves could catch up.

I've never had very nice upper arms; even back in the days when the rest of me was thin, my upper arms were always kind of soft and shapeless. In the past I have absolutely dreaded the onset of warmer weather for that reason -- there comes a point when you just can't hide in long sleeves anymore lest you suffocate from the heat and humidity.

And I've already seen the first sprinkling of "Eeeuuugh, people with fat arms shouldn't be allowed to wear sleeveless tops" posts on various blogs and forums. To that I say a hearty "Go to hell" -- when we really start hitting the summer humidity I'm going as short-sleeved as possible, and those who don't like it can feel free to look elsewhere. But I'll admit to gnashing my teeth at how hard it is to find short sleeved T-shirts and tops that still provide generous upper arm coverage.

Sigh. Accepting what I can't really change is annoying, isn't it? But what else can you do?

Bonfire of the Inanities.

So tonight I feel like getting all the vain, shallow stuff off my chest.

1. I'm not happy with the photo on my company ID badge. It was shot a couple of years ago when I was pushing maximum density. While there could be advantages to walking around with your own "Before" photo dangling from your neck every day ("You SURE you want that huge piece of birthday cake? Look down!"), I'm shallow. I'm tired of looking at Old Me; I want a photo where I have a visible neck. Is that so wrong? I actually pondered "losing" the old badge so I'd have to get my picture retaken. But there were a couple of flies in that particular jar of ointment: one, they charge you a not-insubstantial replacement fee, and two, I remembered that they keep copies of the badge photo. If you lose one badge, they just slap together a second one with the same picture.

Sigh. I guess I'll just have to live with it. I imagine that failing all else, we'll get new badges when our company moves headquarters next year.

2. As crummy as my ID badge photo is, my passport photo is so scary I'm surprised it doesn't turn people into stone. I just looked at it for the first time in a long time today. Hideous! I was 30, I was getting married, we were going to Ireland for our honeymoon, and I was running around DC like a kook trying to get everything together to renew my passport. My face looks like a blob of dough with two raisins stuck in it where my eyes should be. I didn't have on even a dab of makeup. And it was a really hot, humid day, so my hair was lank and flat and my face was shiny. Y'know, I was getting a picture that I was going to be stuck with for the next ten years -- would it have killed me to use a smidge of powder? What was I thinking?

My sole consolation is that I'll have the passport renewed again when I'm 40 -- and that if all goes according to plan I'll look a hell of a lot better than I did when I was 30. That's just neat.

3. A few months ago, I was asked to be a bridesmaid at a wedding taking place this October. Just to clear up any possible questions, I adore the bride-to-be and I was so touched to be asked that I misted up a little. But the thought of looking for and appearing in a bridesmaid's dress brought on enough angst for a week's worth of Cathy comics. "AAACK! I'm going to be the fattest woman in the bridal party! What if I lose a lot more weight after we get the dresses and I have to spend a fortune on alterations? What if I gain all the weight back before the wedding? What if the dresses are sleeveless and I still have my batwings? AAACK!" And so on.

I know I'm being silly. It's going to be fine. And nobody's going to be looking at me anyhow. However, it is an incentive to avoid going completely off the rails this year.