Losing It

I was one of those skinny kids in high school. They almost didn’t let me give blood my sophomore year because they were afraid I’d pass out. The friend’s friend flirting with me at the park asked me to sit in his lap, then asked me to get up because my backside was “too bony.” I had trouble buying jeans that would stay up on my nonexistent hips. High school boys wouldn’t even look at me or my equally gracile friends, only the curvy girls got attention and I had about as many curves as I-75, I-5, I-10, or any of those interstates that runs from coast end to end of this country with only an occasional wobble around a hill.

Of course, I was constantly in motion, too. I ran to class, ran during gym class, danced during dance class, rode a bike to and from school, or later took busses that meant long hikes in the California heat. Summer was worse. To get anywhere meant Lawrence-of-Arabia crossings of endless scorched brown fields, or the sidewalks built next to them, in 115 degree heat. For years I arrived everywhere absolutely sodden and smelling of sweat, asphalt and remnants of whatever perfume I’d bothered to spray on that day. Between my mother and the school lunches at the cafeteria, I ate nutritiously, though I remember being hungry all the time.
Of course, now I have a car, a lunch budget and a baby and I’ve hit numbers on the bathroom scale that I have never seen before. Then I lost all my pregnancy weight, true, but the shape was still eggish. Then the scale started to creep up again. It’s true that I now have a rack Pamela Anderson would be proud of (I’ve been waiting 25 years for this!), unfortunately it came with Jabba the Hutt’s belly. My response was an immediate “Oh, hell, no!!!”

But even the wise know there’s no easy way through weight loss. Ask anyone at celebrity fit club or on that Discovery Health special on the Brentwood hospital for the morbidly obese. Especially because I’m nursing and also because I’d like to staunch the slow creep upward of five pounds a year that began when I landed in the barbecue, Brunswick stew, fried chicken, too-hot-to-walk South, I have to do this the right way: diet and exercise. And I don’t mean “diet” as in eating less for two weeks to get into that killer dress. I mean diet as in eating extraordinarily healthily and then moving my happy ass around a lot more than I have.
I’m no doctor and I’m no dietician, nor do I have the discipline of my colleague, the inimitable Dr. B who lives on Luna bars and black coffee and does crunches while she watches her evening TV. But they told us in fifth grade what it takes: get off the couch, go for a run, do not pass go, do not pass out and do not think that eating grapefruit or only meat for three weeks will save you. Pull up that bowl of Cheerios, put on those jogging shoes, and remember what your Mama taught you about eatin’ your vegetables.

If it’s this simple, though, why don’t we all look like Venus or Serena Williams? We all know that we feel great after moving around even a little and that (thank you Morgan Spurlock) a month of fast food makes you feel like crap and ruins your health. I’ve got my theories about this – mind I’m not professional, just the usual new Mama trying to shed a few pounds.

1) Time: It takes me an hour and a half a day to dress, do my hour of exercise, shower and groom up afterward. Most women work at least 8 hours a day and take care of children, house, home, and all social engagements in the other 8. Who has an extra hour and a half to two hours a day on this kind of self-indulgence?

2) Fast Food: If your schedule is that above, you’re eating quickly, including prepared and fast foods. Even if you can find a reasonably priced salad bar, you can’t eat it in the car while picking up and dropping off kids, groceries or the Wallgreen’s run. So you eat burgers and fries, knowing you shouldn’t but that if you don’t eat, you’ll turn into something that makes Joseph Mengele seem like a kindergarten teacher.

3) Exercise hurts: when you first begin especially. My feet haven’t been right since I started my hour-a-day power walk, but the pinching waistbands of my old clothes hurt even more so I’m doing it. Of course, the summer humidity means a girl has to be ready to sweat. I wear sunglasses and a hat so no-one recognizes me on the street. I look like that wet washcloth on the kitchen sink that needs to be thrown into the wash or buried.

4) We forget: Endorphines are great, make you feel a little high all day, aid in concentration and make you forget your aching bones. Yet, like the dumb thing we said Saturday night after too much Sangria, we forget this.

5) Sitting on the couch/restaurant booth/bar stool is more fun. Don’t kid yourself. In California, there are special Yoga classes that take place in hot rooms for an extreme workout. Only the most devoted to fitness go. Step outside your front door in the Georgia summer and it’s like turning your shower on high, closing the door and windows, turning off the fan and then trying to do aerobics in the resulting sauna. The good news is that you drop pounds quickly, the bad news is that it’s damned unpleasant.

6) Water: We’d rather drink anything – diet coke, Crystal Lite, lemonade, bourbon, even Zima for Pete’s sake, but we don’t like to drink water. For some reason, it takes even intelligent people dire torture by exercise or a bad hangover to purposefully drink water and it’s the best thing you can do for your body if you’re trying to get more fit. That way when you’re so hot and sticky that you feel like you’re actually melting the fat through your skin and are covered in the resulting residue, you at least have a refreshed inside. A friend of mine lost huge amounts of weight drinking two gallons of water a day, no lie. The body stops retaining extra water and can flush the toxins that might add to further bodily injury.

7) Crunches suck: Both the sit ups and the foods that crunch are good ideas. Now, I know potato chips crunch but don’t get sassy with me, you know what I mean. Salads, whole grain cereals and breads, food that has a lot of fiber also cleans all that gook that collects in your inside from that Checkers or Krystal run at two am on a Sunday morning. If you want to see something really nasty, take a look at those photos of folks who have done a colon cleansing and cleared the tar out of their guts. Without proper fiber that stuff continues to collect til you’re not so much sporting a lot of fat, but just continuously full of shit. Ick. Eat your wheaties!

Well, I’ll stop there, but you get my drift. That doesn’t mean that when we lost our cat, Fish, that I didn’t buy an extra pack of Oreos that didn’t even make it into the cookie jar. It does mean that I made an extra large salad on Saturday and have been moawing on that instead of the chips someone left. I eat Luna bars for breakfast and have been trying to make sure that half of whatever I throw down my gullet is either green or crunches (and yes, Funyans ARE cheating).

It’s either that or I have to go back to the “What to Expect When you’re Expecting” diet and I swore I’d never do that, so wish me luck, cause Mama needs a new pair of jeans.