There is a part of me that wishes I could lose 50 pounds before the FitBloggin’ conference in two weeks. I can’t deny that. I’m not as thin as I used to be, but I’m not as fat as I used to be either. I could get into all the reasons for that, blah, blah, blah, excuses, defensiveness, marshmallows. But that’s not really important. What’s important is that I’m going anyway.

One of the things I learned from my weight loss is that your body isn’t holding you back in all the ways you think it is. Most of the problems you had before you lose weight will still be there after you lose weight unless you do work on your inner self as well as your outer self. And while the fat me from 6 years ago (dear me, has it been 6 years?) probably would have been too self-conscious to attend a conference all about health and fitness, the less-fat-but-still-undeniably-fat me of today shall not only be attending, but presenting too. ( I should really start putting together my presentation, shouldn’t I?)

It’s not your fat that holds you back, it’s you. And I’m not going to hold myself back, because I’d really like to see all my friends who will be attending. Shauna is flying in from Scotland! Roni is running the whole darn thing and raising a newborn! I’ll get to meet Rebecca in person after working on her web sites for months! And all these lovely people will be there too, some who I do know and many who I don’t.

So, yes, I will be there. And there will be more of me there than there would have been two or three years ago. If you’re going to be fat at FitBloggin’ too, don’t worry. I’ve got your back, and I’ve got your back fat too. See you there!

It’s kind of fun to check my PO box because I never know what will be in there. Sometimes it’s a bait and tackle catalog addressed to the previous owner. Sometimes it’s a nice letter from a reader. And sometimes its an ad for a retouching service that promises that you’ll “look great in your summer pics,” though by “great” they mean “less like Porky the Pig.”

I’ve blurred out the company’s name because I’m not sure what to think about their service. I don’t want to promote them or unfairly bash their name. My first reaction was to be insulted by the implication that I needed to be retouched. Then I read the text on the back of the card which says, “Our new xxxx service is just what Half of Me Blog fans need to look great in their summer pictures!” Oh, so I don’t need to be retouched, it’s you guys, who are evidently too fat to appear in your own summer vacation photos.

But before I get up on my high horse and lead the cavalry to raid this evil domain, I have to knock myself out of the saddle because I myself am guilty of retouching a photo I thought I looked fat in. (Except it was an autumn photo and I didn’t have to pay anybody to do it for me, so it’s totally different situation. Totally.)

I believe everyone has a right to like their body, no matter what size it is. However, I also know what it’s like to see a photo of yourself and dislike what the pixel sensors pick up. I wish people didn’t dislike those images so much that they felt the need to tell a lie with a picture. But of course, I was one of those people, wasn’t I?

In their defense, they also provide typical retouching services such as red-eye reduction and acne removal. The slimming service looks like a new product. What do you guys think? Is this service a force of good or evil or somewhere in between?

First, right after I moved to Indianapolis, I was waiting in a line wrapped around a movie theater to get tickets for Star Wars – The Phantom Menace before we all found out the prequels were going to suck. The guy in front of me turned around and said, “Didn’t I go to high school with you?” Of course he hadn’t, because he wasn’t from Kentucky. The second event, was two or three years later when I was living fat and alone in my college apartment. I stopped at a liquor store to buy pina colada stuff when the counter boy asked me, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” But he didn’t.

During both of these incidents, I wasn’t so much amazed that someone thought they knew me. What I really wanted to say was, “Wow. There’s someone else as fat as me in this city? Who also looks like me? How completely bizarre.” Because seriously, how many super morbidly obese doppelgangers can you have?

I have never met this overweight “twin” of mine, but now I wonder if she too lost weight and banks at the same place I do.

Seeing covers like that makes me glad that I’ve essentially checked out of pop culture over the past few years. I’m really picky about what TV shows I watch, and even then I don’t watch commercials. I don’t read fashion and beauty magazines that tell me I’ll be inferior unless I buy certain products. It’s been really great for my mental health. A lot of who you are depends on who and what you surround yourself with. If you want to achieve a goal, you need to hang out with people who support that goal. I want to run a mini-marathon, so I’ve been hanging out with runners in my training program every weekend. If you want to feel good about your body, you need to surround yourself with media that supports that. Thus, me and pop culture have essentially gone our separate ways and it’s been good.

But I still read the news, and I recently read that Lisa Marie Presley is suing a British newspaper for making fun of her weight. Personally, I think this is a bad move. I had no idea anyone had called Lisa Marie fat until she filed a lawsuit. I suspect a lot of people didn’t know the tabloids had called her fat. So, if she found the tabloid story to be embarrassing, she just magnified that embarrassment tenfold.

After the articles came out, she got on MySpace and said, “I have had to show my cards and announce under the gun and under vicious personal attack that I am in fact pregnant.” Second mistake – never let them see you sweat. She’s clearly pissed. While she has every right to be mad for being publicly ridiculed, I think it’s better to never let people know they’ve hurt you even if you’re bleeding profusely out of your severed arms like the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “It’s just a flesh wound!” And why did she have to show her cards? It’s no fun being made fun of, but if she wanted to keep quiet, that was an option, a tougher option perhaps, but still an option. While she talks about being under the gun, no one was actually going to shoot her if she didn’t talk about her baby bump.

In her law suit, she alleges that the story was “slanderous and degrading.” I haven’t read the tabloid article, so it’s possible that I’m talking out of my ass here. I have no doubt that the tabloids were cruel, because that’s what tabloids do, but there’s no law against being mean. Mostly it makes me sad to think that calling someone fat is considered slanderous and degrading. I certainly prefer being thin to being fat, but I was not a bad person because I was morbidly obese. If someone called me fat, they could certainly hurl it as an insult, but ultimately it was true and in a perfect world there would be no reason to consider the word “fat” to be slander.

I understand why Lisa Marie was hurt by a mean article that made fun of the way her body is changing in ways she can’t completely control. She might be sensitive to the issue because her father, Elvis Presley, had an obesity problem later in life. I don’t know. It sucks that the tabloids taunted her, but her reaction to the mockery doesn’t make me any happier.

Now where can I find a checkout lane without any magazine racks?

The “Change Oil Soon” light in my head is still flashing, causing my nerves to light up a headache in my skull although nothing is actually wrong with me. I have not been able to reset the fuse for the past 19 days. Yes, I have had a headache for literally 19 days. 24/7. Non-stop. Not 19 headaches over 19 days, just one, long, never-ending symphony of pain. It feels like too much pressure in my head, like I’m trying to stick 3 gallons of brain into 2 gallons of skill. It’s mostly focused in the front of my face, sometimes directly behind my nose, other times as a low hum around my forehead and sinuses. During the first few days I had the hope that I would go to bed and it would be gone in the morning. Now I just go to bed and hope it will be less painful in the morning.

I’ve tried acetaminophen (Tylenol), ibuprofen (Advil), aspirin (uh, Aspirin), naproxen (Aleve), sumatriptan (Imitrex), a shot of ketorlac tromethamine (Toradol) in my hip, fexofenadine HCl and pseudoephedrine HCl (Allegra-D) in case it was my sinuses, and azithromycin (an antibiotic) in case it was an infection. A cat scan of my sinuses confirms it’s not sinusitis, which bummed me out because I was really rooting for a fungal infection. Instead, I just have a mysterious headache of unknown origin. I have started keeping a headache diary. You can tell this is starting to get really serious because starting today, I have given up caffeine.

I have given up caffeine!

I’ve been weaning myself off of it slowly so I don’t get a withdrawal headache on top of my other headache. Yesterday I only had one can of soda. I have been forced to drink water. Water! Boring, tasteless, flavorless, water. I’m really sad to say that I think it’s helping. Yesterday it felt like my head was only stuck in a vise instead of being crushed in a car compactor. The unfortunate side affect is that I also felt like taking a nap at my desk at one o’clock in the afternoon.

I don’t want to whine about my headache at work, but it is making it more difficult to function. One of the headache sites I’ve been reading said it’s like driving through life with the parking brake on. It makes everything harder. It’s an invisible pain too, so I don’t get credit for working through it. I wish I were at least bleeding at my desk so people could appreciate what I’m dealing with. See! I’m in pain and I’m coming to work anyway! I’m not a slacker! I’m a tough chick. Boo-yah! Instead, whenever I mention it, I feel like a whiner complaining about my poor little headache. Who wants to listen to someone moan about their pain? That’s as interesting as listening to that weird dream your friend had. I also hate being both the girl on a diet who does not want to eat pizza or go out for burritos AND being the girl complaining about her headache. Why don’t I start knitting everyone socks and baking cookies to complete the female stereotypes?

Oddly, exercise is one of the few things that helps. When I’m running on the treadmill, the discomfort of exerting my body drones out the pain coming from my head. It’s like how one dripping faucet can drive you mad, but the sound of a thunderstorm is soothing. Or it’s like how one person speaking in a room is distracting, but the indistinct murmur of a crowd is easily tuned out.

Last night I came home and wanted to curl up on the couch and marinate in the pain, but I think it’s better not to indulge it. I need to take care of myself and ease up, but I can’t use it as an excuse to do nothing. So, despite the pain, despite the long workday, despite the urge to go to bed, I went to the gym and ran for 50 minutes like my training schedule told me to. If any one of you thinks you have an excuse not to exercise, just remember that I drove to the Y at eight o’clock at night and ran 4.25 miles with a 19-day headache. How good is your excuse now, huh?

I’m still working with my doctor on this and hopefully I will find some magic pills that make the pain go away. It’s not a debilitating pain, just a constant, annoying, background pain that brings me down to 70%. But I don’t want to live life at 70%. I want to live it at 110%. It worries me because there are things I need to do and I’m not sure if I’ll be physically able to do them with this pain. I’m too tired to do the things I love, like blogging. I can’t keep up with my email when my head wants to implode. Right now I’m just hoping I can make it through the week. Then maybe I’ll make it through the month. And hopefully the month after that. Because lately, I have been feeling completely miserable.

And I have the world’s largest whitehead on my lip.

PS – No comments on this one because typically when I complain about a problem, people try to fix it for me. I don’t want you to try to solve my problems. I want you to pat me on the back and say, “There, there, now. It will be okay.” I’ll imagine you doing this.

“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.

It’s hard to sort through old memories. I can’t simply search for everything tagged “food” or “binging” and get an alphabetized list of results from my brain. My memories are usually triggered by events in my current life that remind me of things that happened back then. Someone mentions a self-serve ice cream machine and I suddenly remember that I went back for seconds and thirds at the Sizzler. I read a story about someone going out for pizza to celebrate, and suddenly I remember all my trips to Mr. Gatti’s. Analysis of my old memories takes time because I have to wait for triggers, take note of the memories, and eventually accumulate enough to look for patterns.

Even when I get all the memories together, I think self-analysis is shaky at best. People like to explain things, come up for reasons why things happen, but I don’t know if there always is a reason. There’s an ancient folktale that says the reason the sun rises and sets is because a dragon pulls a flaming chariot across the sky. While that would be pretty cool and sounds perfectly plausible if you don’t know that dragons are fictional, it doesn’t mean it’s true. Was I an emotional eater? Or do I just have to say I was one because that’s what everyone expects of a fat girl?

However, that doesn’t mean certain things aren’t true either, even if there’s always a level of uncertainty in the analysis of memories. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about how I used to eat and how I got so fat and why I didn’t do anything about it and basically I’ve come to one conclusion:

I was a lazy fat person who ate too much.

I gave fat girls a bad name. That’s why it’s so hard to admit. I’ve read blogs by people who count every calorie and track every step with their pedometers and they still don’t lose weight. I’ve read blogs by people who’ve tried every diet published and unpublished and are still fat. I really feel for these people and I think they’re examples of why the world is terribly unfair indeed, but I have to admit – I was not one of those people.

I watched 40 hours of television a week. I saw the last piece of pie in the fridge that was saved for my brother and I ate it anyway. I drove to my graphic design class that was only half a mile away from my dorm because I didn’t want to walk. I made a batch of brownies and I wanted to eat it all myself. I never went on a diet.

There were reasons for this, ranging from general ignorance to my environment to the difficulty of behavior modification to broken exercise equipment and my sprained ankle. But when it comes down to it, I used to eat like a maniac and I didn’t move much. This is probably something that was so obvious to everyone else that I am the last person to realize it. I weighed almost 400 pounds. Of course I ate too much!

I suppose I have always known this. I just feel bad admitting it because it is so stereotypical and it is so clichéd and it is exactly what you would think of a fat person. I hate being predictable and ordinary. I hate that people discriminate against the obese and call them couch potatoes who eat too many cookies. It’s not true of all fat people, and there are some thin people who do the exact same thing. However, it was true for me. I used to know the titles of all the episodes of The X-Files and I loved eating an entire stack of Girl Scout Cookies. It was me! The fat girl! I stole your brownies and, mmmmm, they were good!

I hate admitting it because then my weight loss gives an opening to fat-haters to say, “See! Just stop eating like a pig and do some walking and you too can be thin. Stupid fat people!” It sounds so easy. But it’s not that easy. I would not have spent over a decade of my life overweight if it was easy. Even when you know what your problem is, that doesn’t automatically fix it. Knowing you are schizophrenic does not make you stop hearing voices. Maintaining a life of healthy eating and exercise is very, very hard.

I think I’m very fortunate that I was able to get myself to stop doing these things and that when I did I lost weight. I do think it’s possible to be somewhat fat and fit, but I have to admit that when I started getting fit I started getting less fat as well. However, I don’t think it made me a “bad” person or someone worthy of scorn and disapproval even when I was stuffing my face with marshmallows and sitting around all day. I ate too much. I didn’t exercise. How is that anyone’s problem other than mine and my HMO? And my life wasn’t a 24-hour food orgy either. I did eat fruits and vegetables and I took my Flintstones vitamins.

So that’s why I’ve been writing about my old food habits lately. It’s because I’m finally accepting that I was cliché – a big, fat cliché. And while diet and exercise don’t seem to make everyone as thin as a stick of spaghetti, it did make me a lot thinner. I’d like to apologize to all the fat girls of the world who run 30 minutes a day and have never eaten an entire box of Papa Johns cheesesticks. I was dragging you down. Next time the pizza’s on me.

However, I decided the best way to prevent naked photos of myself from being plastered on the Internet was to never take naked photos of myself. Playboy, please stop offering me millions of dollars. I simply won’t do it, Hugh. So I kept my clothes on. I’m a modest person and have never felt completely comfortable being naked around other people. It’s not necessarily because I think I look bad or good, I just don’t think people should look without my permission, period. People who don’t have this level of modesty never understand us people who do. I could never quite explain to my high school friend the tiny explosion of shock I felt one evening in her bedroom when she changed her clothes in front of me. I’m glad she felt comfortable in her body, but wow, I didn’t need to see the T&A without a warning about the alphabetical onslaught.

For a college art class, we were required to attend two nights of figure drawing to sketch a nude model. One night the model was an obese woman who was fatter than I was at the time. I admired her bravery for taking off her clothes for a room full of strangers who might possibly find her body disgusting. But I also knew I’d never do the same no matter how many spare dollars attendees tossed into the entrance fee bucket. I’d rather spend a day working a counter at Starbucks for the same money. I know dancers and models lose this sense of modesty early out of necessity. You can’t be changing clothes in a dressing room full of people and be concerned about who sees your nipple rings. But I’m not a dancer or a model and I somehow have managed to go through 26 years of life without once having to use a communal shower. And I don’t even smell bad, I swear!

So I’m pretty sure I would have kept my clothes on, even if Mr. Spock had asked me to take them off for his “Full Bodied” photography project. No Vulcan mind meld could have changed my mind. However, I’m glad there are same fat women out there who were willing to toss off their t-shirts in the name of art. Fat people have bodies too (warning: link not safe for work). I’m sure there are some people who will snicker at the naked fat ladies. But I bet most people will just be fascinated, like I was about my own obese body, by how many different shapes the human form can take yet still be a human body. Boobs and butts and bellies come in so many different varieties, like all the different types of pears I can buy at the market.

I don’t recall seeing many fat people on the starship Enterprise, though the crew’s weight did seem to increase right along with the numbers following the movie titles. Maybe in the future there will be a cure for obesity. I’ll have to ask Mr. Spock about that.

If I run into someone who hasn’t seen me for a while, I always feel a bit disappointed if they don’t comment on my weight loss. There’s a bit of relief too since I don’t have to figure out how to tactfully talk about the subject, but I have worked really hard on this and it’s always nice to know someone has noticed. If someone told me I looked fatter than before I might lose control of my bowels right there, thus lightening my weight a little and hopefully making me look less fat. And if I actually had gained weight, I would expect everyone to just ignore it and not say anything even if they had to duct tape their mouths closed to do so.

It does seem contradictory on my part because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being fat. Fat grrls rawk and all that. But in all honesty I would still consider it an insult to say someone looks fatter than before. I wouldn’t consider it an insult to say someone looks tanner than before or taller than before, but fat still carries negative baggage in that area for me, despite my otherwise fat positive opinions. Perhaps I am too much a product of my culture to see it as otherwise. Unless we’re suddenly struck by a famine, I suspect I’ll always feel this way.

To celebrate I shall binge on chocolate creme eggs and Peeps, assuming they have not completely frozen in the trunk of my car. 32 degrees on Easter day?! Maybe the end is nigh and Jesus really is coming back today.