My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

When I told my brother I was counting calories, a vulnerable admission of defeat, he reacted just as I should have expected: he rolled his eyes, sighed as if he was exhausted by my weight struggles, and told me “don’t be mom!   Just be balanced.”   As if it were that easy.   I made the mistake, at first, of trying to explain that after years of balance and reasonably steady weight, I was no longer stable and I felt the need to do something drastic to try to reign in my body; I gave up pretty quickly, after multiple interruptions and dismissals. It’s not that my brother is insensitive – he’s actually more sensitive than most dudes and most of my family, not that that’s saying much – but he doesn’t have a lot of patience for any kind of struggle to which he doesn’t relate.   Worse are the struggles he thinks he relates to, like weight.   A few years ago he felt he was getting ‘tubby’ and so he cut out junk food and cut back on carbs and started doi...

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...

A few weeks ago I downloaded a new app for my iPhone called Lose It. It’s a calorie counter, but it also incorporates exercise, and the best part is that it’s pretty non-judgmental, as these things go. It lets you choose your own goal, and how fast you want to lost the weight, and then it just calculates the numbers for you. For example, I told it my current weight (I don’t want to talk about it) and that I wanted to lose thirty pounds (yes, hopelessly idealistic) in six months (hey, you gotta have some realism). And it told me my calorie allowance was roughly 2,100 per day. Way higher than I expected! Which is the other thing about this app: it makes me feel good about my eating habits! I have it tracking my nutrients as well, and besides the fact that I eat about twice as much sodium as I’m supposed to (yeah, yeah, whatever. Salt is gooooood), I’m pretty on-target with everything else. And I’ve been coming in under my calorie count pretty much every day. Even Easter! And I...