Ugh. I feel bad even talking about this, given that I have a friend in EDA. But it’s weighing on my mind (oh gawd accidental pun) and so I wanted to blather some about summer’s weight loss and exercise plan, derailed then salvaged in the worst way possible. Please be forewarned.
An old improv friend/student of mine just got married. She studied nutrition in undergrad, and her hubby runs a fitness blog. Their wedding pictures were stunning–nay, chiseled–and I felt the great and terrible envy of “I want to look like that.” I’d also signed up for my hometown gym for the summer, and I’d just started getting into a good groove of classes and workouts when the first round of teeth stuff hit (the month of abcess leading up to the root canal). I gained a bunch of weight on the antibiotics, as I had to take them with food, which meant force-feeding myself an extra meal a day I did not want. I stopped going to the gym entirely, partly due to the mouth pain, and partly to let my body heal.
Then the wisdom teeth came out, and I was on a liquid diet for two weeks. Yo-yoed a bit in the third week, but then had a chipmunk relapse. Woke up with a swollen face and ended up back at the doctor’s office yesterday getting a pus-filled socket popped. Now I’m back off alcohol, caffeine and solid foods, in the hope of giving my mouth a leg up on healing.
The upshot? I’m down to 112, from a high of 128. And I really want to keep that number on the scale, even though I know numbers on the scale don’t matter, even though I lost weight in the least healthy way possible–by enforced starvation. It was a genuinely miserable few weeks. I don’t LIKE not eating.
The question becomes, how important is this to me, really? I’m going to start back up at the gym in IL (barring future health issues…if the infected pocket doesn’t heal, I may need another surgery). I’d like to start eating healthily instead of meagerly. I’m about to be back in Chi-town with a gorgeous boy eager to go on shishi dates, a gorgeous boy who actually eats and has found my whole prolonged illness gastronomically trying. And he wants to cook for me and with me, so it’s an opportunity to change both our habits for the better.
We’ll see. I know weight shouldn’t matter, but I do want to be healthy, inasmuch as that’s possible within the constraints of my sedentary desk life. I keep entertaining veganism and dietary supplements, and I have friends who swear by them (including the aforementioned newlywed), but I also like my parents’ more low-key pescatarianism. So many paths, and I have no idea where to begin, especially given that I’m a picky eater on a shoestring budget with miserable health patterns.
Moral: Feeding self is hard, I say. And weight is fraught.
GirlWonders 