My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

Today is my 28th birthday.  That seems both really old and really familiar, due to my habit of saying I'm older than I am for a couple of months before my birthday makes it so.  Anyway, whether I'm old, young, or a 'spring chicken', as my BF calls me when I lament our age difference every year on his birthday (he just turned 25), I'm definitely exhausted.  The past couple of months have been manic: I started a new position at work, at essentially the exact same time that book publicity began in earnest, which meant interviews and photo shoots* and writing and tweeting and generally being much more involved in the world than usual, and on top of that came personal dramas and Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping and the general year-end pressures we all face every year around this time.   Suffice it to say, my body and my heart and especially my brain are all knackered. So all I want for my birthday is a break, and for once in my life I'm doing my bes...

Many many apologies for my protracted silence...I seem to be extending a lot of those lately: to readers of my baking blog ; to my Twitter followers; to my long-suffering agent and even longer-suffering publicist; to friends and family; even to my personal, handwritten journal (yes, I know that's a silly, romantic thing for a memoir-writer and blogger to have, but I am nothing if not romantic about handwritten things).  Seriously, I just had to 'update' my journal – yes, as if it were a person who's been at the edge of her seat waiting for news – after a whole year of nothing.  If that doesn't tell you how busy/distracted I've been, nothing else will get it across. In the time since I last posted, a lot has happened, but the most important things are that I finished editing/proofing the book (which is now available for pre-order – ZOMG) and that I started a new job (at the same company), which is much more involved and the beginning of which also happened to...

I just had a little breakdown over my body, the kind that's bad enough to make me cry, but not bad enough to completely incapacitate me.  And when I got up, wiped off my face, and set about bustling to take my mind off my thunder thighs, I realized it had been a pretty long time since I'd cried over my size. I don't mean that I've been particularly happy with my body lately – on the contrary, I've been far too inactive, physically, and far too lax about snacking and such, and as a result I've been feeling a bit like a blob.  But I've been too busy to dwell on it, really.  I'm working a lot , and thinking about the book process, and trying to be more social and spend more time with my boyfriend (we had a period of not seeing each other much and it was hard on our relationship), and I just haven't had time to indulge my negative thoughts much.  I mean, I've had them, a lot of them, but then something else has come up and I've had to re-focus....

I stopped using the calorie counter when we left for our vacation in Italy (Bologna, Umbria , Arezzo , and Cinque Terre ), figuring I didn't want to ruin the delicious food I was planning on stuffing my face with, and relying on the fact that I always lose weight on vacation (my theory is that I'm too busy walking around to snack). And we were really active on vacay , especially when scrambling up and down mountains to nude beaches in Cinque Terre , so I really wasn't too worried about all the gelato and pasta I was consuming (YUM). But I was planning on getting back into the counting when I came back to London... That was the plan , anyway. But then we only had 2 days before we moved into the new flat, after which life was (still is) a blur of unpacking, buying secondhand furniture, and entertaining the friends who so wonderfully came to visit me but whom I so unwittingly told the first week of September would be fine ( gah ). So long story short, I'm still not c...

Happy July everybody! I can’t believe the time has gone by so fast. I feel like I just got back from London, when in reality we’re coming up on a year since I left. Yeesh. And if all goes well I should be heading back that way in just under three weeks; fingers crossed that the British government gives me a visa… But you don’t read this blog to learn about my personal and locational life! That’s what this blog is for. This blog is for all my many ugly and my few pleasant thoughts about my body, so here goes. As you may know, July 1st marks the 12th week of my ‘new’ calorie-counting, gym-going regimen. As you also may know, this regimen, although it follows all logical and mathematical guidelines (I have a resting metabolic rate of around 2700 calories a day, so I eat about 1700 calories a day and work out at least 3 times a week), did me no good at first. In fact, I gained three pounds the first week and spent the next 6 trying desperately to get back to breaking even. And now...