May 2007 Archives
At this point I've lost 115 pounds. Otherwise known as a small person. The pants I bought yesterday are the same size pants I was wearing my freshman year in college. These pants are not small by any means of course but I was quite happy my freshman year in college both in general and with myself. I wasn't obsessed with any feelings of hatred toward my body and was comfortable at my size. So it's odd to be this size again and yet feel so different. I feel good in my skin but I'm acutely aware that I'm still much larger than I want to be at this point in my life, at least 65 pounds larger. When I was this size before my eating habits and lifestyle were bad to say the least. I exercised never, ate horribly, and consumed a great deal of alcohol. Before having a cocktail with dinner last Sunday I can't recall having an alcoholic drink since Christmas.
We're eating out right now much, much more than we normally do because we're trying to hit our favorite Indianapolis restaurants (all 2 of them) as much as possible before we leave town. The move is less than two weeks away and I'm really stressed with all the details but I'm keeping my eating in check and exercise a lot. Our new house is a half mile walk from a park with 6 miles of hiking trails, a nature preserve with 3 miles of walking trails and 9 public clay tennis courts. We're 1.25 miles walking distance to the farmer's market and .75 miles walk to the coffee shop I almost lived in during college. We're really, really excited to get settled in and have a really, really fantastic active lifestyle and life down there.
When I changed my lifestyle I naturally expected to lose weight, be healthier and be more physically able. All of those things have happened, continue to happen and will hopefully be happening long into the future. I didn't think about all the details included in losing a significant amount of weight though and some of them are surprising. One of those details is that I suddenly seemed to have lost a shoe size. For my entire adult life I've worn men's shoes over women's shoes in probably a 3 to 1 ration. I mention that just to explain that my default shoe size is 9.5 Men's. For as long as I've been buying my own shoes my shoe size has been 9.5. Except now it's not. I went to buy some new running/walking shoes a couple weeks ago and found that the 9.5 I tried on was much too big and that the 9 was a much better fit. I'd noticed that my current running shoes were loose but just attributed it to generally stretching aging. I just pulled out my Birkenstock sandals and found that they are now considerably too large for my foot. I expected to have to buy all new clothes, I'm just surprised that apparently I have to buy all new shoes too.
