"I hate reading magazines where the actresses are saying, 'Broccoli and fish, broccoli and fish.' You liars. You bulimic liars."

1. Learn your weaknesses when it comes to food
2. Make working out easy
3. Change your mindset
4. Realize the deck is stacked WAY against you
5. Lift weights

you have to realize that society has stacked the deck against you. It's helpful to look at the issue as if you're at war with the world. Everything in our society is designed to make you fat--that's the truth. Major companies don't care about you or your health, they care about your money. When I walk through the airport I look at the stores in the terminal as a bunch of drug dealers trying to get your hooked, because that's the truth. Fast food companies are trying to screw you, entertainment companies want you sitting in your chair consuming their entertainment for hours while you eat their sponsors food. It's a war and you are out-gunned--big time. You have to walk like the master in Kung Fu and not let these folks impact you. Our whole society is designed to get you fat and you have to optout of it.

I haven't worn a sleeveless shirt in about 15 years. Seriously. Up until a month or so again I didn't own one. A little over a month ago I bought a sleeveless shell to wear under the shirt I was wearing to my brother's wedding. On the way home from the wedding (outdoor, afternoon wedding in Kentucky in the summer, go figure I was hot) I stripped off the overshirt and let the breeze tickle my bare arms. Taking only a small amount of dramatic license I'll say it was a revelation. It felt so good to have bare arms. So good. But my arms are so flabby I said, I could never have bare arms in public. A few weeks later I went to Avenue and tried on a dress that I loved. Love, loved, loved it. Loved the way it looked on me too. But again I said my arms are so flabby. I could never wear this dress, with my bare arms in public. So I didn't buy it. I regret that now.

I don't know exactly where this small burst of self-confidence has come from. But this shirt was handed down to me and I decided I really liked it and I wanted to wear it. I put it on and cringed at the way my bare arms look. I made a muscle and looked at my nice bicep and saw all the flab that hangs from where my tricep muscles supposedly live. I thought long and hard about taking the shirt off but I didn't. I wore it out to breakfast this morning with some friends. No one pointed and laughing, small children didn't run away in horror and fear, no one stared at the blindingly white, flabby portion of my arm and after a few minutes my self-consciousness went away.

I can't describe how great of a feeling this is. This is what people in the program that shan't be named refer to as a non-scale victory. This must sound so silly to people who don't have flabby arms or who have never been morbidly obese. Don't care though. It's a big deal for me because I'm working through some of my own internal "fear of fat issues." I mean is there a head in a box somewhere that comes out to declare that women's arms are too flabby to be in seen in public because my god people think of the children! I'm pretty sure no such thing exists so I feel secure in saying that no arms are too flabby to be seen in public. You know why? Because arms are arms! Fat, muscular, thin, flabby, doesn't matter they're all arms. My arms are not too flabby to be seen in public, they're just fine. Just fine I say. And today I really believe that. Ask me next week and we'll see if I still believe it.

During this first year of my healthy lifestyle I've lost 141 pounds, become mostly vegetarian, and learned an insane amount about food, nutrition, exercise and how my body relates and reacts to all three. In this paragraph allow me dramatic license to say that it's been an incredibly rewarding experience to learn about healthy eating and living a healthy lifestyle and just how damn good both of those things feel. I feel good almost all the time. Seriously. If I'm not sick or having cramps (TMI? I can't decide) then I probably feel pretty good on any given day. When I don't eat right or I thoroughly overeat I pay for it. I feel sluggish and bloated and just generally yucky. I avoid the yucky as much as I possibly can.

Interestingly enough though I had a bought of the yucky over my birthday weekend. For my birthday and B's birthday my mom likes to take us out for a fancy dinner. This year was no exception. For a couple weeks before my birthday I scoured the online menus of lots of fancy restaurants here in town. Louisville has a great dining scene so naturally I found a lot of insanely delicious sounding dishes that a year and two months ago I would have been salivating over. I didn't walk away from my menu perusing with visions of tastiness in my head though. Instead I was lamenting the fact that gourmet/fancy vegetarian cooking doesn't really have a place here, save Asian restaurants. We're a Southern town that loves its pork, its steak, its chicken and even its frog legs. I can't fault anyone for loving those things, they just aren't for me much anymore. When I want things like steak or fried fish or some kind of pork I don't typically want it at a fancy restaurant. Instead I want it someplace where it's going to be prepared in comforting and familiar ways. So what I should have done was explained to my mom that while I appreciate her springing for fancy dinners let's instead hit a favorite burger spot or load up on insanely good pub grub at The Irish Rover. If I'm going to eat beef 5 times a year I'll take the backyard barbecue burger over the beef tenderloin with prosciutto, Parmesan and asparagus almost every time.

So I should have told my mom that I wanted to hit the burger place or the Rover but I didn't. I knew she really wanted a nice dinner out, as did B, so we went to a very popular old school place called Jack Fry's. There was literally one vegetarian entree. I can't recall there being a single vegetarian appetizer. So I had the above described beef tenderloin. It was good, very good, but I definitely wish that I had chosen to consume those calories elsewhere. I don't have any guilt over eating a beef based, decadent meal every once in a while, I just wish it had been a different one. The point of this story is that I knew I didn't want to go to this restaurant, I knew that I didn't want to eat that kind of meal but I did it anyway to make other people happier. What I knew but re-learned from this experience is that my eating habits and healthy lifestyle are incredibly important to me and I can't allow other people to dissuade me from the path I've chosen to be on. My mom would have been a bit disappointed had we gone to a more casual restaurant but she would have gotten over it and we still would have had a good time. It was my birthday and my caloric expenditure and I should have placed my wants in this situation first. That sounds selfish I know but taking care of yourself and making healthy choices everyday is a selfish endeavor, one that I think everyone should undertake.

Losing 141 pounds is probably the most selfish thing I've ever done. I did it just for me. I did it to make myself feel better, look better, give myself a better shot at aging healthily. It was and is all about me. I hope to lose another 40-60 pounds. I can't say for sure I'll reach that goal range and it's ok if I don't, but if I do those next 40-60 pounds will be just as selfish. I hope to maintain a healthy lifestyle including good eating and exercise for the rest of my life, this too will be completely selfish on my part. I like feeling good, I like looking good, I like moving my body. Maybe that selfishness should be the theme of my responses to questions like "how have you done/how do you do it/what should I do?" Maybe I should say "I love myself enough to know that I deserve a healthy body and I'm selfish enough to adhere to a lifestyle that helps me get one." I like that answer.

We used the gym at our apartment complex in Indianapolis so since we've been in Louisville we have been treadmill and elliptical machine-less. We have the machines we're going to buy picked out and the space all ready for them we've just not been to buy them yet. However a lack of exercise has not been a problem since we got here. Our house has two stories, sits on hill on a street with a hill, surrounded by other streets on a hill (seriously we're in a valley), has a ton of yard work to do (including mowing the hilly yard with a reel mower), our neighborhood has lots of stuff to walk to and we of course have our beloved new bikes.The routine has been to walk 2 or 3 miles each day with a 2 mile or so bike ride thrown in with lots of house work to do during the week. During the weekend those same 2 or 3 walking miles, same biking miles but lots and lots and lots of yard work. You know it's hot in Kentucky during the summer right? I've been sweating and working and working and sweating and loving lots of the minutes of it. Not every minute you understand, but lots of the minutes of it. My arms are quite sore today from mowing the yard yesterday. Quite sore.

So I'm confident that we'll continue our healthy eating (we're biking to the farmer's market tomorrow morning, yum) because that's what feels good to us and what we like to do and we'll continue exercising (walk, bike, treadmill, etc on the way) and even expand our physical activities (we're looking into some canoe/kayaking options, and both really want to try skiing/snowboarding this winter, and I may want to take up golf again, walking the course naturally). So even with size X right around the corner I think my weight is still going to go further down. I don't know how much further down it will go though. The BMI index says I've got a long, long way to go but I know there isn't much fat left on my hips. Seriously, my hip bones are close to jutting out at this point. If I get to a point where I have to exercise like a crazy person and starve just to lose more and more weight as opposed to just feeling good and healthy then that's the point where my weight is going to stay. Like I said above, the number can't be the thing. A healthy weight for me isn't necessarily a healthy weight for you. I hope that a healthy, comfortable weight is about 56 pounds from now but maybe it's 40 pounds from now or maybe even 60 pounds. I don't know but I know that I look good, I feel good and I'm strong and active. That's what's important. If I don't ever break that additional 56 pound mark but I look good, feel good and am strong, active and healthy then that's A-ok.

Did you catch that last part where I said I looked good? That's a self-confidence thing. My self-confidence was gone for the 4 years we lived in Indianapolis. We've gotten reacquainted here in Louisville and we find that we like each other very much. Here's the thing about me and Louisville. When I'm here I'm "The best, cutest, quietest most confident version of" myself. And I sometimes "wear lip gloss." Here the cute dyke at the cafe flirts with me and I flirt back a tiny bit before letting it be known that I'm completely taken. Here I go to the coffee shop by myself and hang out and chat with strangers. Here I'm joining a book club. After the Indianapolis book club fiasco (anyone remember that?) it's shocking that I'd be up for joining one ever again but here I don't have a single reservation about it. It meets next Sunday afternoon at a cool coffee house and the book is "This Is Not Chick Lit." Here I find it easy to connect with an artist I met online and tell her truthfully that she sounds cool and I hope B and I can be friends with her and her partner. She says she feels the same way. We're meeting for coffee in a hour at a cool lesbian coffee house. Here I find it easy to be honest and earnest about a documentary photography project I'm working on and not care if someone gets it or not, thinks I'm silly for doing it or not. It's my project, it's work I want to do and I'm doing it. Fin.

That's what I'm like here. That's who I am here. It is the real me. The me that's been buried. Buried under excess weight. Buried under Indianapolis' cold winters and frosty people. Buried under a layer of unhappiness I didn't really understand. Buried under low self esteem and extreme self doubt. This all sounds a bit melodramatic doesn't it? That's cool though because the real me is a bit melodramatic.If you've only known me during the Indianapolis years then we definitely need to get reacquainted.

Hello there, it's very nice to meet you. Enough about me. What do you think of me? Bwhaaa, I kid, I kid.

An Updated Look at Me