A couple years later I woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to scoop my gallbladder out with a spoon. The surgeon did it with a scalpel and a tiny camera instead, and I was only 24. Then my knees started to hurt when I climbed up the stairs. By this point I’d also lost track of how many cavities I’d had filled, caused by too much Mountain Dew and too little dental floss.

A friend my age told me over dinner she is fighting acid reflux disease and takes medication for a slight thyroid imbalance. Another friend was just diagnosed with pernicious anemia and has to get shots of B12. We are not old. We are in out late 20’s and early 30’s.

No one told me my body was going to break down so fast. No one warned me that after 21 years I’d start needing repairs. I cannot trade myself in for a newer model. So if you are young and your body is working, enjoy it for me. It won’t be long until you’ll need a fix-up and wish you’d invested in more dental floss as a child.

1) The winter. I should move to the equator where there are no seasons and I can sit outside and sweat all my weight off. The days here have gotten shorter and it’s so much harder to convince myself to work out in the morning when I can’t find my dumbbells without turning on a light switch. Dear Australians, please give me back the sun. I miss it. I miss going out on the trail too or taking my bike for a ride. Never mind that my back tire is flat and my bike is 13 years old and I need to pony up some cash for a new one before I can go riding. I just miss exercising outdoors. Which leads me to…

2) Workout burnout. I need to spice up my workout routine. I’m getting tired of the same old weights and Pilates and running regimen. I need something new, like when I tried TurboKick and tennis. However, those classes were both a bit of a drive away. I need to find something closer that I find interesting and isn’t too terribly expensive. I should really do that, oh yes I should, instead of just writing about it.

3) Life changes. No, not the change of life. I’m still kind of young for that. Back in November I started a contract job at a new work place. I go to lunch with co-workers now, so there’s a new eating schedule and new eating temptations. It’s also a shorter walk from the parking lot, though I still take the stairs to the top floor of a building. I walk around more during the day, but it’s in fancy shoes instead of sneakers, and OH MY GOD my bunions have been hurting. I’ve been handling all that rather well actually. I still haven’t purchased anything from the Starbucks on campus, I’ve gotten sushi and salads at the cafeteria, and I’ve turned down lots of cookies, but it’s still been an adjustment. In mid-January I start a full-time job elsewhere that I’m rather excited about, but yet again it will be a life change and who knows how many cookies they keep in the building? But I’ll get to wear sneakers, so at least my feet will be happy.

4) The holidays. The holidays haven’t been the cause of my problems, but they certainly didn’t help either. I don’t regret eating it up during those times, but it probably would have been better for my weight if Christmas was held in April this year.

5) Too much free time. Okay, that’s not something you typically complain about, but I had a week and a half off for the holidays and it’s been very bad for my eating. I need structure. I need to be away from the kitchen or else bad things end up in my mouth. I saw a news program recently that said people who retire need to find something to do or else they’ll go senile and die earlier. For some reason I always find the idea of hanging around doing nothing to be appealing, but in reality it just makes me go crazy.

6) The evenings. If we’re holding Christmas in April, we should also find a way to go straight from the afternoon to the night time, totally circumventing the evenings. I do fine during the work day, but when I come home I’ll eat too much because I’m bored or lonely or depressed.

All of this adds up to little progress in the weight loss department and a general malaise on my part. I think I’ve probably gained 5 pounds back, though it’s hard to tell since my weight fluctuates several pounds during the week naturally. I don’t want to regain any weight, but I’m finding it harder to stick to the healthy eating and exercise regimen that has gotten me this far. This weight loss thing, it is hard, eh? I don’t want to give up either. I’d just like to live in a universe where couch sitting was high cardio and ice cream was diet food. But I also think it’s important to cop to the fact that I’m starting to have problems right now. If I don’t catch it early I’m just going to gain back 20 more pounds. It could be far worse anyway. At least I still am exercising and eating reasonably well, if a little too much. All my clothes still fit. I just never appreciated how great my groove was until my wheels slid out of it.

I’m glad I’m running the Indianapolis mini-marathon in May and that I signed up for a training program, otherwise I might be facing serious trouble here. But I know I’m going to be running a lot in the next couple months and hopefully I’ll make some friends in my training program and hopefully the sun will come back from whatever hole it’s been hiding in and I will get my oom-pah back. I may be out of the groove, but the only way to get back in the groove is by wearing it down again.

Sometimes I get comments from people who think I have it all figured out or think I know the magical secrets of the universe or something. I’d just like to tell you that, no, that’s not true, you must be reading someone else’s blog. I am far from perfect. Sometimes I wish it was all over and done with, but I also know that’s a lie. You’re never really done. You don’t just get thin and stop. You have to keep earning a healthy body every day. Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down. I’m sort of down right now, but at least I know it and I’m trying to get back up again. Hopefully picking myself up will increase my lower body strength.

I wanted to write all that down because in the flurry of everything that’s been going on in my life lately, I haven’t been as self-analytical as I have been in the past, which might be part of the reason I’m having problems. I haven’t had the time to write the in-depth blog entries that helped me work through so many of my issues in the past. I’ve been writing more to entertain my audience than for myself, which is probably bad for both of us. Blogging and thinking have a lot of overlap for me. A lot of times I’ll be figuring out things as I write an entry and realize, “Oh, that’s what’s going on, isn’t it?” I’m more out of touch with myself than I have been in the past and that’s going to start showing up in my body if I don’t do something about it.

I don’t think the problem is even so much the eating and exercise in itself. Lately I feel like there’s something missing from life. I’m not really sure what it is or how to fill it in exactly, but I know I need to figure it out. I need to become more involved in the community and be more social or take piano lessons or something. I need to find something in my life to direct my energies towards and the weight loss and exercise will fall in after that. I have to keep growing and learning. Someone emailed me last week and said “I have a lot of junk in my life to clean out and my weight is just one of them.” I think that’s so true. Once you clean out the junk in your life, many times the weight-loss and improved health will follow.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the specific plans I’ve made to get my groove back.I suppose it’s a new year’s resolution, though honestly the timing is just a coincidence.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked, confused.

“You’re so jiggly,” she said. It had never occurred to me that a thin person might not know what rolls of belly flab felt like. I didn’t like being poked. I hadn’t given her permission to feel me up. But I understand her curiosity now. I didn’t know what a thin person’s body felt like either. The closest I’d come to feeling up a six-pack was when I’d grab a Mountain Dew from the fridge.

I still haven’t felt up six-pack abs, but I’m sometimes surprised by how firm my body is becoming. When I but my hands on my sides I can feel solid muscle beneath my thin layer of fat. If I squeeze my thighs, there is extra skin and adipose tissue, but I also feel the ungiving firmness of muscle. My scale says I’m about 30% fat now, which means 70% of me is bone and muscle and water, and you can definitely feel it.

It’s different, but in a good way. I like to imagine I have amazing abs underneath what remains of my belly flab. I know my bones are stronger and denser from lifting weights. And I may have batwings of arm flesh, but I have curvy biceps too. I’ll even let you feel them if you want to. But no poking.

Why don’t you look at cute kitties and puppies instead?

In other amazing body news, I’ve noticed that I can squat all the way down to the floor and then stand back up without grasping for the kitchen counter. After I’ve been sitting on the floor stretching, I can bend my knees, put my arm on the floor and fling my back up into a standing position. And when I’m sitting on the couch watching TV, I can curl my legs up in front of me and lay sideways against the arm and a pillow very comfortably without a huge belly getting in the way. All very basic maneuvers and all movements I have not been able to complete since the 90’s. I can even cross my legs and hook my leg behind my ankle without having to lean severely to the left. Every time I bend my body in these new and fascinating ways I feel so grateful and amazed and think, “This is totally awesome.” You’d think that feeling would wear off after awhile, but no. This ain’t morphine. I haven’t built up a tolerance yet. Half the reason I do Pilates is because I am continually amazed that I can lay on the ground and bend my legs at a 45 degree angle from my body. It’s completely mind-blowing.

I think I’m going to try a drop-in yoga class during lunch next week just to see what other pretzel maneuvers I am capable of and have not yet discovered. Maybe soon I’ll discover I can open a can of tuna with my untrimmed toenails. I’m pretty sure I can’t bend my legs behind my head, but I do feel head over heels in love with my body these days, bony ass and all.

(This is totally disgusting to read, isn’t it? You all hate me, right? There are so many women out there who hate their bodies, so on behalf of the few women who love their bods, I feel like I’ve got to represent. My body rocks! So my skin may sag a little. If I wanted to, my arms and thighs leave plenty to bitch about, but why focus on the negative? As Ani DiFranco said, “It looks a little rough, but it runs good anyway.”)

When people only have a small amount of weight to lose, say 10 or 20 pounds, they aren’t typically as serious about changing their lifestyle as I had to be. They see weight-loss as a short-term project, like repainting a room, whereas I had to rebuild my house from the frame up. So, they may dedicate a lot of their energy into the task right away, lose some weight, but after a couple months they’re back to ordering pizza for lunch.

I’ve seen this happen on weight-loss blogs too. A newbie shows up and is really gung-ho and excited to lose weight, and they do. But after a couple months the posts start getting farther and farther apart, then they’ve deleted their Blogger account and someone else re-registers the name so they can start posting ads on it to trick old readers. It’s like the stages of a relationship. When you first meet someone new you’re so smitten and love everything about them and wish there were 30 hours in the day just so you could hang out with them more. You talk about them to everyone, just like you gab about your diet and exercise plans to anyone with ears.

But after a couple months the infatuation stage wears off and that’s when you see if the relationship is really going to last. I’m in the third year of this marriage with my body and I’ve settled into the comfortable part where I can fart in bed without being self-conscious. The chemical high of those first several months where I was losing 10-20 pounds a month was fantastic, but now I’m settling into a comfy familiarity with my body. I know what it can do and I’m cool with losing only half a pound a week (if it’s even that much these days).

When I read articles that say dieting doesn’t work or that people tend to gain back weight, I don’t think the problem is actually with diet and exercise. If you eat right and work-out you can lose weight and keep it off. I think the problem is that people aren’t dedicated to doing that for the rest of their lives. The problem isn’t with food or their ability to go for a run, it’s that people have a difficult time making any kind of lasting change in their lives. They stay in crappy relationships. They keep their soul-killing jobs.

I don’t think that will happen with me because I know this is forever, not just some fling, not a one night stand. For better or worse, I’m living in this body for the rest of my life, unless they develop a brain transplant. Which would probably be too expensive for me to afford anyway. So it’s me and my body for now until death and our relationship is better than it’s ever been. I hope we make it to our 100th anniversary.

People are more curious about the state of my skin than if I was the spokeswoman for Neutrogena. Yet it seems to be a taboo subject to bring up and if someone does ask they usually tack on the qualifier that I don’t have to talk about it if it’s too personal. I don’t consider it that personal of a question, any more so than if I were to come up and ask “How are your kidneys today? Still filtering waste products? Good to hear!” I’ve lost the weight more slowly than weight loss surgery patients do, so people are particularly interested to hear if I’m getting better results. Those patients usually end up getting plastic surgery to remove excess skin.

So yes, my skin is getting looser. Not as loose as a whore in Vegas, but about as loose as a drunken sorority girl who’s thinking of dancing on the coffee table because she totally loves that song the DJ is playing. Skin looseness is a weird phenomena that I suspect you have to see to understand. Go google some images if you want, because I’m not about to post any pictures of mine. I’m modest and have gone to great lengths never to have to shower in a group (hello, summer school gym class), so I’m not about to post pictures of my gut flab on the Internets for all eternity.

The analogy I’ve used in the past is to think of my body as its fattest as a ziplock bag filled with water. It’s squishy, but it’s firm. Now drain half the water without letting any air in. The bag is still squishy, but it flops around easily. That’s how the loose skin is. It’s not just skin either. Skin is only several millimeters thick at the most, like how it is on your eyelids or between your fingers. There is fat tissue attached beneath my extra skin.

The way the skin looks depends on how gravity is draping it. Standing up it all flows downward and doesn’t look that bad. My thighs are getting kind of saggy and that flab of gut known as the pannus is still there, though considerably smaller than it has ever been before. My upper arms look like someone cut the sleeve pattern for my skin about 4 sizes too big. I don’t really know if my breasts are saggy in comparison to other women’s. I have never had the opportunity to touch another woman’s boob and if presented with such an opportunity I would most likely turn it down. I think they look good, what remains of them.

The skin is most noticeable when I am in a plank position during my Pilates routine when I’m wearing only my sweat pants and a sports bra. The skin dangles down towards my mat like a hammock draped from my breastbone to my pubic bone. If I were actually able to do a full push up, I suspect it might touch the ground on the descent.

The weird thing is that so far the extra skin doesn’t bother me. Mostly I am just fascinated by it, not disgusted, as if I had developed a new ability like wiggling my earlobes. I’ve seen pictures of people who have much worse skin problems than I do. My skin is in incredibly good condition for someone who’s lost almost 200 pounds. I’m young, I’ve never smoked, and never tanned, so it’s retained a lot of elasticity. My doctor keeps telling me it will tighten up even more, but I don’t really believe her. I was never under any illusions that I would score the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition when this was all done. I had low expectations, so I’m not disappointed that I’m not going to be wearing a bikini to the pool with these wrinkly thighs.

I’m more concerned with function than form. My body can do so many cool things now. I can squat down and back up without grabbing wildly for the kitchen counter or the nearest coffee table to heave me back up. I can point my leg out straight from my body at a right angle. I can bend my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them easily. My body is awesome! I don’t mind the loose skin. I used to drive an Oldsmobile that had been dented by a dumb woman jabbering on her cell phone as she pulled out of a parking space. Her insurance company paid me $700 to get it repaired, but I just pocketed the money and kept driving the car. I thought the dent nicely distracted from the small rust stain developing near the gas tank. It still ran fine, so I didn’t see any need to spend the money on an aesthetic problem.

Will I ever get plastic surgery to remove the extra skin? I don’t know. I have read accounts by other people about their tummy tucks and it sounds like it’d be less painful to book a three month stay with the Spanish Inquisition in their Iron Maiden bedroom suite. The term “tummy tuck” makes it sound like a very simple procedure. You can easily tuck in hospital corners when you make your bed or tuck your shirt into your pants. Do not be fooled. You evidently spend the first two weeks lying on the couch in pain, eating painkillers like M&M’s. It’s at least another month or two before you’re walking around like anything approaching normal or you’re able to pick objects up off the floor. It can be up to 6 months before all the swelling comes down. You can’t really exercise for awhile, so I would be bound to lose some of the fitness and flexibility that I so value.

I think it will depend on whatever my body ends up looking like and how much that bothers me. If it annoys me enough to submit myself to the horrors of voluntary plastic surgery, I might do it. The cost of surgery would be a factor too. Right now I am leaning towards no. The only people who see me naked are me, my doctor, and any potential suitors. The skin doesn’t bother me, my doctor doesn’t seem concerned about it, and anyone who gets in my bedroom and decides they don’t like what they see is an asshole and deserves to be kicked to the curb anyway.

The funny thing is, the loose skin is fun to play with. It’s warm like bread dough and can be rolled around. It feels nice. There’s a line from the film Pulp Fiction that seems very appropriate, “It’s unfortunate what we find pleasing to the touch and pleasing to the eye is seldom the same.”

ETA: I wrote an entry a year later updating the status of my skin.

When I walk into the grocery store and see myself on the closed circuit security monitor hanging above the welcome mat, I know that average-sized girl in the black coat is me and I’m not surprised. I am surprised that I feel this way. Back when I started this journey, I was concerned a part of me would always think of myself as the fat girl.

I’ve read other weight-loss blogs where the authors have lost lots of weight and still have trouble thinking of themselves as a thin person. They are constantly surprised that they don’t have trouble fitting in chairs or cars. This weekend I attended a play and didn’t even think about the fact that I wasn’t spilling out of the seat or banging my knees into the head of the person in front of me, not until a larger man sat down two seats next to me and experienced all those problems. I feel very comfortable in my body and I believe my self-image pretty closely matches my actual image.

I have some guesses as to why this is. First, I’ve lost the weight slowly so my mind has had time to adjust to the changes. There were certainly days when I wanted to lose 3 or 4 pounds a week, but the slow and steady way worked pretty good for the tortoise and it seems to have worked pretty well for me. If I’d gone to bed weighing 372 and woken up weighing 186, not even Freud or Jung could have been able to help me with my body issues. Another advantage is that even though I was overweight and obese for most of my life, I was only morbidly obese for maybe 3 or 4 years. Perhaps if I’d spent a decade or more at over 300 pounds it would be more difficult to make this adjustment. But I’m not sure if my mind every fully accepted the fact that I weighed 372 back when I still did.

I also look in mirrors constantly. Last year the mirror in the ladies room at work went missing for two days and I nearly threw a tantrum in front of the paper towel dispenser. How was I supposed to check out how cute I am? Take a look in the toilet bowl reflection? My apartment’s dressing area has a huge mirror that I adore, though I might feel differently if a tornado were ever to blow through town. It’s positioned so I can see it when I’m cooking in the kitchen, so I frequently check out my ass while I’m sautéing chicken or chopping up red onion. Maybe I just like to check to make sure I’m still thin. I’m starting to feel compassion for Narcissus because it’s becoming quite clear how you could fall in love with your own reflection.

Lastly, exercising has made me very familiar with my body. I know what it’s capable of. I know I can run 3 miles. I know I can bend my leg up at a right angle to my body. I know I can squat and stand up without pushing off of the floor. Me and my body used to be estranged, like I was a brain squatting in a run down tenement, but now we’re best buddies working in synch. I know it very well and that includes knowing what size it is.

So, you can count me down as a total freak because not only am I comfortable in my body, I love my body too. I should probably check down below and make sure I’m still female. Such a state of existence doesn’t seem possible for a woman in today’s world. Just admitting that I love my body seems rather bold. It’s a bit frightening too because I don’t know if people will actually believe me or understand how I could love such an imperfect object. But you can see it’s true when you look at my smile in my fat pants photo. I wish I could tell everyone how to get here, but the location doesn’t seem to show up on Google maps. I guess you’ll have to find it yourself.