My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

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...

...is that they're related to the posted content, which is smart advertising and makes sense in terms of making money, for them and for me (well, to the extent that I'll make any), but given that the usual content of this blog is weight-related, I'm kind of squeamish about the type of ads that Adsense is attaching. I don't want to encourage people to follow fad diets or take pills to lose weight, or even to lose weight at all in most cases! But this blog is the one that gets the most traffic... Any thoughts? Do you guys hate the ads? Should I ax them or should I give them a try for a while?

So I’ve been doing a little room improvement, which has led to a lot of re-arrangement of bookshelves, which has in turn led to a lot of rediscovery of old journals / favorite postcards / art supplies. And photos. Lots and lots of photos. More specifically, I was surprised to remember that I went through a phase where I actually bothered to create photo albums and scrapbooks for trips in my life. I spent a good hour sitting on the floor, surrounded by bookshelf detritus, flipping through old albums, laughing and remembering the good times: the roadtrip my friends and I took in high school, the dress-up my friend Mark played freshman year of college, the trip my best friend and I took to Australia… but what struck me the most was the difference in how I looked then and now. And then, and then, and then… One album was made up of photos from my dad’s 50th birthday celebration in Italy. We were both pre-GB, and boy did it show. I had completely forgotten how huge I was, and more impo...

In a little over a month I’ll be heading to Miami for a weekend reunion with my college girlies. Sun, drinks with umbrellas, lounging on the beach… sounds great, right? Well, yes. And also no. While I’m psyched to be seeing my girls, I’m less than thrilled about the location. At first I thought this was due to my heart already having been set on meeting in saint louie, because who wouldn’t want to visit Miami? But recently I’ve realized that although I do want to visit Miami at some point, I’m worried about how it’ll affect me right now. Lemme ‘splain. As you all know, I’ve been pretty rough on my body recently. Surprisingly, I’m not always so down on myself, but ever since I came back from London I’ve had a tough time liking myself. Anyway, I joined a gym in January and I’ve been pretty good about going three times a week, and I have started to see some tightening up and such (although I’ve actually gained a couple pounds), but I still feel really vulnerable to attacks of the...

I made a new friend the other weekend, and yesterday he made me a surprising offer. I was thanking him for introducing me to a couple of new writers and inspiring me to write more frequently, and he suggested that, as repayment, I could model for him sometime (he’s an amateur photographer). Nude. Now, I don’t know what your reactions to this offer might be, but I almost stopped breathing. First of all, I haven’t known this man long, and he’s significantly older than I, and I’m not sure where our friendship stands on the gray line between ‘just friends’ and ‘awkward sexual attraction.’ But even disregarding my (and needless to say, my boyfriend’s) discomfort with the offer from a relationship standpoint, I was thrown by the revulsion I felt when I imagined standing naked in front of someone with a camera. I’ve been working on the self-image / photos standoff for years. When I was fat, I almost never let anyone take photos of me, which actually cultivated an interest in photography ...

I have a bone to pick with the medical community, although it's probably well hidden beneath layers of fat. Yes, I'm talking about the way that doctors and medical professionals deal with weight. A few months ago, I asked my friend if she liked her 'lady doctor,' because I needed to go in for my annual check-up and I don't have a doctor in SF. Her response was something along the lines of "yeah, I like her because she doesn't talk a lot. I mean, except to tell me to lose weight." At this point, she shrugged, as if this is par for the course. For the record, this friend, while not slender, weighs less than I do. So I went online to Yelp (otherwise known as the bible), and I chose a doctor who gets rave reviews. He's a man, unfortunately, but I figured I should just suck it up and give him a try. And I liked him, mostly. The only thing he did that bothered me was that he talked a little too much. Oh yeah, and that he kept slipping in comment...

Tonight, I lost it. I was supposed to go to a friend's house for dinner (and eat some very comforting Jewish food), and half an hour before I was due at the Caltrain station I made the mistake of getting dressed. Now, it's really cold right now in SF, so I had to put on tights. This doesn't usually concern me too much, but when I put on my go-to pink dress (the one I'm wearing in that photo in the earlier post, about how confident I was), it was tight. And not good tight. I looked disgusting. All of a sudden, when I looked in the mirror, all I could see was fat, rolling and spilling like a lidless latte in an SUV. And so I lost it. I went back to a mentality I do my best to avoid; I was furious, disgusted, and, worse, hopeless. I wanted to break the mirror. I actually wanted to scream, or throw things, or punch a wall. Another part of me just wanted to crawl into bed and give up. Mostly I just cried. The worst part was that I had to cancel on my friends. This...