Upon finishing the last of many, many pieces of birthday cake I've enjoyed over the past week, I realized something. I love, enjoy and appreciate food even more now that I'm moderating my intake of it. Then I thought, "Huh, that's ironic," but now I'm wondering if it is. I mean, it IS ironic given how very much we demonize food and worship dieting in our culture. (Dieting often seems like the most direct route to hating food.) On the other hand, to say it's normal is to play into the notion that dieting gives you total clarity about food and eating. (The truth is that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.)
Ah, food and fat politics... it's the metaphorical worm eating it's tail, no pun or irony intended.
To call what I'm doing "dieting" is a gross overstatement, thankfully. This week I elected to chow the fuck down for my birthday, and I have some added poundage to show for it. It didn't upset me to see the number on the scale go up and up and up a little bit each day because eating a boatload of super yummy Indian food on my birthday and then a big plateful of Mexican cheesiness and naughty ballpark food over the weekend, not to mention plus or minus seven pieces of various birthday cakeage in seven days time, gave me profound joy. I can also trust that the number will go back down once I reinstate moderation and put in a little effort. No need to panic or start hating myself because I indulged and was able to see a direct consequence to my weight because of it. (FYI, there have been plenty of times over the past five months when I have panicked about the number on the scale. The benefit of experience and perspective is, as always, most beneficial.)
Speaking of numbers on a scale, when I returned from vacation at my parents house (as mentioned in the previous post) I was finally able to weigh in and found myself almost 23 lbs down from my starting point last November. Shiver me timbers, it freaked me out and blew my mind. I actually ended up having an anxiety attack partially because of it. Too much change at once doesn't work well for me, and I will always worry that the change isn't sustainable if it happens quickly.
On a related note, up until that point I didn't have too much awareness of how differently my clothes were fitting. It wasn't a day later that I put a favorite shirt on, looked in the mirror and thought, "WHAT is the deal with this shirt?" It was like the universe turned upside down and I had no idea what I was even looking at. As I have so many times in the past I wanted to blame it on the laundry process, that surely something somewhere got fucked up and my shirt was washed in the wrong temperature or was put in the dryer when it's meant to be line dried, so on and so forth. But, no. It's just too big on my body now to be flattering in any way. This pisses me off on a number of levels, the least of which is the amount of dough I dropped on that particular shirt, thinking it would be a solid investment and would reside in my closet for many years looking spiffy and cute. Moreso it irks me because I have to work (play) hard to even find things that I think look spiffy and cute on me, and, well, another one bites the dust.
And another one gone,
And another one gone,
Another one bites the dust!
I never in a million years thought I'd be complaining about my clothes being too loose or having to go shopping for stuff in a smaller size. The thing is, I don't want to be blowing money on interim sizes if I keep losing weight so I'm holding out until it's no longer fathomable for me to wear what I currently have in my closet. Also, the vain part of me wants to really and truly experience what it's like to walk into a clothing store and get the smaller size. Right now I'm kinda-sorta-mostly into a size smaller and it's irksome to try to fit things correctly. I have a feeling, however, that I'll always walk into a store and struggle to fit into clothes correctly, whether they be too big or too small. Given that part of the reason I want to lose weight is have greater access to cute clothing, that is irony on a stick.
