After 31 years of concentration on this matter and countless diets, exercises, prayers, head trips, counseling, self help books etc... I have finally realized that weight loss is not a creative writing assignment. It is not a character issue. It is a math problem. Less food and more exercise equals less weight. That's it. I wonder if anyone else knows this. I have written on this subject in every journal I have ever kept, maybe even on every page. I have been obsessed since I was 10. This topic has been my constant theme through thick and thin. Funny that at 41, with $1,500 on the table it suddenly makes sense (and cents hopefully) to not have too much else on the table. No right brain required. Losing weight is actually a very simple thing to do if you want to.
It's the want to that causes all the trouble. Right now I want to. I suspect someday I will not want to again. Now I do. Don't get me wrong, I have wanted to be thin and in shape since I was 10. I just don't want to always do what it takes to be that. I used to. In fact I did it all the time. It sucked. I starved and sweated to be increasingly oggled by idiots whom I had no boundaries to ignore. No big mystery about why I stopped doing that. I never stopped wanting that (in shapeness not oggling). For a while I didn't know what "that" meant and never realized I was already "that". I was quite certain in fact, that I was NOT that. ("That" being the opposite of fat and probably pretty close to "all that" if you are having trouble following me through the "that").
I did not know what I was. I knew what I needed to be (something else) and I knew that whatever I was, was not enough. In this case I was not less enough. I was too much and too much was not ok enough. I mistook OK enough for thin enough. I was never destined to be "OK" enough. Even if the mysaganists I was listening to in the opera world (no longer a place to be ok being fat just when I came along) who were responsible for judging "that" externally were to deem me so, the mysoganist judging "that" internally had already concluded that I was not worthy of ever wearing that title no matter what I did (and yes, for those of you playing along at home, this is another person trapped inside my body with me).
The good news is that I have lowered the bar. In addition to lowering the candy bar, I have lowered what in shape means. I don't care what the professionals think of the shape I am in. I am not striving for the "after" picture I have seen on infomercials. I am striving for the "before" picture. I want to look like a lumpy but strong version of a 40ish Jill who will probably look like most women's "before" picture. I don't want to be in a bikini on the beach, I just don't want the place where my last baby lived to make a bikini unnecessary (as in covering anything worth oggling). (Ok, that was probably something no one wants to think about and most people would omit, but I think it is funny so I will let you think of me looking like that and then I will quickly tell you that I exaggerate so you think I don't really look like that... until you do some math and count the number of kids I have [4], times my age [41], divided by X for the number of total pounds I have to lose, minus the [25] pounds I want to lose by Christmas over the sum of the people you have seen in their "before" pictures, plus pie (lots and lots of pie) and realize that it probably is not too much of an exaggeration after all and therefore you will make a note to yourself to avert your eyes if you ever see me on a nude beach unless of course you are uncomfortable on nude beaches and will find it refreshing to see someone with enough modesty to wear a belly over their privates).
Basically, I want to weigh less than a linebacker. I want to lose enough weight to be a little over weight. I want to wear the clothes I wore a kid or two ago that I thought were huge and be able to buy other people's fat clothes at a consignment shop in the 2 weeks those women are at their goal weight before they have to go back out and buy that same size and color again when their 2 weeks are up. I want to be the ONLY woman I know who does not do that because like her husband, her weight is a pretty constant thing and not something she has to obsess over to maintain. I'll let you know when I get there. I'll let you know how I get there. I will probably let you know how I got here too, just for fun. This is fun already, isn't it?! (Anything that has the word "privates" in it is fun, isn't it?) .
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