Less to Love

Weekly weigh-in: 223.5
Loss: -1.5
Total loss: 68 lbs.
Emotion: Steady as she goes

Yesterday was an OMG day.

I had to meet with a group of folks that I haven’t seen since Spring, and had to spend the first twenty minutes or so detailing my “Summer of Loss”. After trotting out my pat answer (“I’m on a hunger strike until they get this health care business straightened out”), I was pressed into giving up my secrets. One young woman literally got out a pad and pen and was ready to jot down my secret recipe for success.

Was it eating nothing but Fuji apples for three months? Only eating while hanging upside down? Drinking six glasses of water with every meal? Only eat foods beginning with the letter “W”?

“Well,” I said. “I’ve been eating a lot less and exercising a lot more.”

The young woman capped her pen and put her pad away. “Oh,” she smiled in mock indignation. “I don’t want to hear that.”

Later in the day, I ran into a couple I know that I hadn’t seen in quite a few months. They went on and on and on about the weight loss.

“I can’t believe how good you look,” she told me, but quickly tacked on the standard qualifier: “You didn’t look bad before, but you look great now.”

Sorry, lady. You can lie all you want, but the camera never did. Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror back when I was at my heaviest, I could find angles that helped convince me that I looked kinda-sorta okay. I wore my shirts untucked a lot, thinking that it helped disguise the love handles. I wore the same couple of pairs of pants a lot, conveniently ignoring the fact that there were several other pairs in my closet that had gotten uncomfortably snug.

But then I’d see a snapshot, and that house of cards would come tumbling down.

This is what people see when they look at me, I thought, staring at the photograph. It took my breath away.

I remember picking up photographs that had been developed (remember when photographs were developed?) and tossing out pictures of myself that were particularly unflattering.

People lie; photographs rarely do.

I’m proud of this week. The compliments were over-the-top nice, but this week felt like something that I could sustain for a long time, a routine that I could live with. I took my daughter Pisa and a buddy to the fair in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. I took my family out for soup and sushi last night.

I ate slowly and with patience. I exercised intensely and with passion.

My muscles ached this week as I added lifting weights to the mix, but the rest of me?

The rest of me is feeling fine.