I’ve gotten a ridiculous amount of compliments on the photo I’ve started using for my icon on Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m not an ugly person, but I’m not a serious contender for Miss America either, so getting this much attention over my photo is kinda weird. You’d think I’d bathed in buttermilk and hired a stylist or something, but all I really did was hire my friend Kyle Hepp, who’s a professional photographer, to take my picture. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to thank her and pimp her services.

Kyle is a girl (with a boy’s name, yes, she knows) who I met through our blogs. She is a US expatriate who lives in Chile for most of the year with her husband, Seba, who she met there during school. When I heard she’d be in Nashville last summer, I decided to trek down I-65 to meet her. I hired her to do a photo shoot too for several reasons.

1. I needed new promotional images of myself because everyone thought my hair was much shorter than it really was. My old photo pictured me the shortest haircut I’ve ever had, so every time I met an Internet-person or a friend who hadn’t seen me in person for awhile, they’d ask me when my hair had gotten so long. It was annoying.
2. I was getting ready to leave Indiana and I wanted to give my mom some professional photos of myself as a gift
3. I did not tell Kyle this at the time, but I wanted to get an author photo for my upcoming book, Chocolate & Vicodin. I thought this would be a lot of pressure though, so I kept quiet on that.
4. Just because! Photo shoots can be fun :)

So, we met in downtown Nashville and roamed up and down the streets and along the waterfront scoping for good shots. I did not understand half of the technical things Kyle and Seba were doing with their portable flashes and other gadgets. Also, Kyle would speak in English and Seba would reply in Spanish, which was like listening to one half of a telephone conversation. I mostly just turned to the left and turned to the right and moved my shoulders a little this way and laid in the grass with a million chiggers. I got nine bug bites while taking the photo below, but it was totally worth it:

I got a great selection of photos to use and put six of them in a frame for my mom. I gave it to her the night before I drove off with the Budget truck leading the way. As I predicted, she started to cry when she unwrapped the gift. So there you go. Kyle Hepp: She’ll make your mommy cry. You can quote me on that.

I was very happy with the photos, particularly because I loved them despite not loving my weight these days. I’m not crying myself to sleep over my headache weight, but I would have preferred to be fifty pounds thinner while the photo lens was trained on me. The weight did not matter, though, because Kyle brought out my best features and made me look great. It can be unnerving being in front of a camera, but I was able to chill out and relax like we were just tourists who happened to hang out on window ledges.

So, thanks Kyle! You can visit Kyle’s site, Kyle Hepp Photography to see more of her portfolio.

Yeah, that’s me on page 3 of the search results. Go figure! It makes me curious as to what other phrases make my image turn up. I’m hoping for “voluptuous babe.” (ETA: This is really real, not an April Fool’s joke.)

In other news, congratulations to Alexandra from Pennsylvania who won the Weight Watchers POINTS Pedometer. There were 200 entries and if I’d known the pedometer was that popular, I probably would have auctioned it off instead. (Mama’s got to pay for kitty litter.) My ignorance is your gain! Or (weight) loss, hopefully, I suppose.

Then I lost about 200 pounds and I totally understand where they were coming from. I present exhibits A, B, and C.

These three photos were all taken on the same day, which is odd because it looks like I gained 10 pounds and then lost it again before noon. I ran a half-marathon that day, but running 13.1 miles does NOT burn 35,000 calories, nor could the lasagna I had for lunch make me that much fatter.

In the first photo, I’m striking the “skinny pose.” I have one foot placed in front of the other. I’m turning at the waist, but rotating my shoulders towards the camera. I’m jutting my chin out slightly. I read how to do this online and at first I felt silly and awkward arranging my limbs and torso like this, but then I noticed it actually works so I do it often. If you watch starlets on the red carpet, they use these tricks too. I’m also wearing a dark color on the bottom and a light color on the top to balance my bottom-heavy pear shape. All in all, I look pretty thin.

About 2 minutes earlier, the second photo was taken right after I finished my race. I eagerly downloaded it from the official race site online and was crestfallen when I saw it and immediately thought, “I look so fat in that photo!” I don’t know if it’s the angle or the lighting or post-race bloat that evaporated 120 seconds later, but I think I look fat in that photo. Which sucks, because it’s supposed to be my proud, victory photo and I don’t feel particularly victorious when looking at it.

Then, there is photo number 3, taken a couple hours later at my book release party. My face looks the thinnest in this photo to me and I’m rather satisfied with my size. Maybe the dark lighting helps? :) I’m sure some of you will comment that I look great in all these photos (or that I look like a bean bag chair if you’re a hater), but it doesn’t really matter what you think, it’s what I think.

It seems odd that all these photos were taken within hours of each other and yet I look so different in all of them. I know my face and my body better than anyone else, so I’m probably the most critical of my appearance, noticing the smallest variations. It’s amazing how different I can appear, not because of my size, but because of the way my body is turned or whether I’m wearing makeup or whether someone turned on the overhead light.

I might not be the best judge though. There are times when I don’t think I look particularly good or bad in a photo and other people compliment me on it. For instance, I got several compliments on my Jamba Juice photo, but when I saw it I thought it was far too dark and that I looked a little bit irked. I would caption this photo with a thought bubble saying, “Have you taken the photo yet? I want to pick up my orange dream machine!”

The worst was when I was still morbidly obese and I’d look at a photo in horror and someone would say, “What a great picture! It looks just like you!” Geez, really? That’s awful. Not only would I feel bad about an ugly photo, I would feel bad that I evidently looked like an ugly photo all the time.

Photos confound me. I like living in a technologically advanced society, but if I’d been born in the 1700′s without running water or electricity, at least I wouldn’t have to deal with the head game that digital imagery now provides on a daily basis. Am I fat? Am I thin? Who knows?

Somewhere all those skinny girls I never understood are laughing.