Trimming the Fat

In the last month or so, I've lost a good amount of weight. I don't know how much, because I don't own a scale. More on that later.

All I know is that the new jeans that I bought in April and called "aspirational" are now all saggy in the ass and I'm wondering with a mixture of irritation and glee if I am going to have to get another pair in a smaller size.

People have asked me how I did it, and my answer is usually simplistic and frustrating to them: I ate less.

Recent studies have come out stating that eating less has more impact on weight loss than exercising. I'm sure next month another new study will come out showing exactly the opposite to be true, but eating less has worked for me so far.

This can be irritating to the "I get up at 5 am and get on the treadmill for an hour" and "I go to the gym religiously after work" crowd, who never seem to lose the poochy spots on their thighs or the basketball they carry in their shirtfronts. So sue me. Through some spin of the genetic roulette wheel, eating less works for me. If I decided to suddenly start working out fanatically, like I did in my 20's, I'd have that scary mountain range of muscles on my back once again and a pair of truly terrifying thighs like I got from doing squats on the Smith machine. I'd be able to do pullups with a 25-pound plate strapped around my waist like I did back then. But that's not me anymore. Maybe later.

Everyone wants to know the "how," but what no one ever asks me is the "why." Why did I start to lose weight?

It started out, frankly, as plain old heartbroken disordered eating. My heart was broken, and I lost my appetite. Simple as that. Some people get a hole in their heart and start assault-eating to try and fill it. Me? I got the hole in my heart and I just let stuff drain out.

But a funny thing happened along the way. I started listening to my body, and eating when it told me to eat, and not eating when it wasn't hungry. I would actually ask myself, "Am I hungry?" "Yeah, a little bit." "Okay." Anne Lamott writes about this much better than I ever will in her essay "Hunger," in "Traveling Mercies."

Doing this "eat when you're hungry, drink when you're thirsty" routine is nothing new to me. I learned it on the bike, when NOT paying attention to such bodily signals can result in the energy crash known as "bonking," which can leave you standing at the bottom of Closter Dock Road shoveling Gu down your gullet and washing it down with undiluted Gatorade just so you have enough juice to get up the hill and back to the GW Bridge, where a subway ride home awaits.

So I re-taught myself to eat when I was hungry and drink when I was thirsty.

I was also aware that in the midst of hating myself for not being pretty enough, smart enough, clever enough, sexy enough, *something* enough for the man I had fallen in love with to love me back -- see, it was all *my* fault, I thought, that I wasn't *enough* enough -- I needed to be very, very gentle and loving to my actual physical self.

So instead of indulging every thwarted child whim of my taste-buds, I was careful to put things into my body that were kind to it. I always ate breakfast anyway, so that wasn't an issue for me. I began stopping at the fruit cart every morning on my way into the office, so there was always fresh fruit and a bag of carrots on my desk. I would nosh on these throughout the day. I became less dependent on the big sandwich at lunch, and thus, less dependent on grazing at the bowl of M&M's that resides on every reception desk in the company at 3 in the afternoon. At first I would have to physically avert my eyes from that bowl of M&M's as I walked past it on my way to a meeting. Now I don't have to do that, and sometimes I'll even have a piece of candy or two. But I'm not standing there gossiping with the receptionist anymore while I pick out a dozen or more of the blue peanut ones. I just don't get that urge anymore.

None of this feels like denial, or deprivation. It feels like nourishment.

I realize that carrying a few extra pounds was my protection, a layer between me and the world. Not that I ever stopped looking at myself with cold germanic eyes, thinking, "GOD, you are disgusting and must be terminated," but I also never did anything that was nice to my body, like eat a piece of fruit or a vegetable more than every now and then. As long as I had that little layer of chub between me and the world, I was protected and safe.

Then, the Awful Thing happened to me, and something, some wise little voice, told me, "Stay naked. Get nakeder."

So I have tried to stay naked. Gotten nakeder, too. Remember Jane Doe? She died. She *had* to die.
See, someone who thought he was meeting Jane actually met Aileen, and Aileen is a real live woman, not some manipulatable sexbot avatar from the internet. I think having me turn out to be more real than some velveteen rabbit may have been a shock to his system. Wouldn't you turn tail and run if one of YOUR imaginary playthings suddenly came to life? "I want my Cherry 2000!" sez he.

So yeah, it's been a process of maybe learning to be loving towards myself, from the outside-in, which for most people is backwards, but I've never been one to do things the way everyone else does.

This morning as I was getting changed, I stood in front of the mirror and admired myself, naked. It's been ages since I've done that. I stood and looked at how my body has all the good inny-outy curves, and how my legs are well-muscled and powerful, and yes, I should probably do about a hundred thousand situps before I put on a bikini but I won't, since most of the 25-year-olds on the beach are fatter than I am, and my boobs are a little smaller than they were two months ago, but they are still more than handfuls and that's for a guy with big hands, and I liked what I was seeing there. A woman's body. A womanly body.

Oh, and why I don't own a scale? Because I have one of those bodies that carries a lot of density -- it looks smaller than it weighs. I think it has something to do with muscle weighing more than fat. Let's put it this way: when I was a gym rat and wearing size 2 and size 4 clothing, I weighed 135 pounds. The guess-yer-weight guy at Great Adventure guessed 110 and I won the prize. So I don't put any trust in the number on the scale.

My clothes fit, I look great, and my knees don't hurt anymore. That's enough for me.