Lose seven pounds in seven days!
It was a cover line I noticed on some housewife-oriented magazine that may or may not have been Good Housekeeping while I waited in line at Publix one day last week. It obviously wasn't the only cover line in front of me, but weight-centric person that I am, it's the only one I saw. My natural instinct is to scoff at those grandiose weight-loss claims, and I guess I did for about 1/27 of a second, but as soon as that initial semisecond of a scoff ceased, it was replaced by the thought that not only did I have no interest in losing seven pounds but that I didn't need to, and then that thought was replaced with the realization that for the first time ever in my life I'm happy with my weight and how I look.
And it was a crazy thing.
Before I go any further, let me clarify a little bit:
I've had moments, sure, fleeting moments, sometimes hours, even days, where I've been like Wow, I look skinny today or My butt really is very nice. I've also had discussions with myself and other people about weight acceptance and the idea that maybe I'm not as fat as I think, but no matter what I've thought in the short term or what I've said, I've never ever felt like my weight loss journey was done. There's this book that I read probably twenty-five years ago, Blood Sucking Fiends, and I remember the main character, when she gets turned into a vampire, freaks out a little bit when she realizes she'll be chubby for her entire afterlife because she'd perpetually been trying to lose five pounds when she was alive, and once she became a vampire, her weight was fixed, and I can't tell you how many times I've thought about that over the years, how well I can relate. I've always felt like I was this close, and again, I've felt like that even during the short periods when I was really thin, like in 2009 and 2015. I mean, I knew I was thin but weight and the idea of either losing more or keeping it off still ruled my life. I thought about every single thing I ate - will this make me gain a pound? Will one pound turn into two and then three? If I eat this, will I wake up fat? - even when I wasn't eating. It was not a fun way to live.
I'm fatter today than I was during those times (134-136 depending on the day (maybe 133 when I weigh myself in the morning if I had a lot of sex and little food the previous night) vs. 131-133 in the past), but the fear of getting fat or idea that I am no longer rules my life. After forty something years and a pandemic that gave me time to stop and restructure my life, I feel like I finally figured some weight-related/body-related/eating-related things out.
This is the point where you think I'm going to go on and on about those things, right? Well, people who read my blog, I'm actually not. You don't care about how I exercise or what I eat which is why a few paragraphs up on the page I said, Before I go any further.
This post isn't about my weight at all.
It's also not about that outing to Publix despite the fact that the next thing I'm going to tell you is about the cute guy I saw earlier at that same trip to the grocery store. My interest was piqued for about the same amount of time I scoffed at that weight-loss cover line, long enough for me to think, Ooh! Is that a cute guy? and then much like what was soon to come at the checkout counter about twenty minutes down the road, realize that I didn't care. For the first time in I-don't-know-how-many years, a cute guy in my vicinity didn't matter. Like, at all. I didn't want to walk faster to get a better look, I didn't want to pass him so he could smell my hair or appreciate how I looked from behind. All I wanted to do was buy hamburger buns so I could get home in time to make vegan turkey burgers before my boyfriend got home from work, and just like my lack of interest in weight loss caught me off guard, so did my lack of interest in anything to do with that guy.
I was just about to address you, people who read my blog, to say if anybody knows about my obsession with boys, surely it's you, but talk about an underplay. Anyone who's ever met me virtually or in real life knows about my obsession with boys. Just like with anything related to weight, anything that has to do with boys has always ruled my life, and I suppose you could say that's still the case since the reason I have no interest in boys is because of one specific boy, but regardless of how you look at it, talk about a departure from my norm. For the first time in probably forever, I want nothing else. No trying to convince him we should date or kiss other people like I did with my high school boyfriend and ex-husband both, no googling noyfriends from the past, no wishing our relationship could be this or could be that.
Welcome to boring, my Virgo joked when I told him how foreign this new life felt, and I have to admit, I had a little bit of an internal freakout. Drama and heartbreak and tumult have ruled my life for so long, boy related or not, I feel like I'm ill-equipped to exist in another norm, but a few minutes later when he started a fake fight with me for the rest of the night so I wouldn't feel bored and a couple days ago when he cleaned my glasses for me with the microfiber cloth he put in his center console specifically to keep them clean and then when later that night he took them out of my hand in my kitchen and cleaned them again for me because we got rained on and I hate when my glasses get wet, I realized I didn't want that other life. I'm, dare I say, satisfied? More than satisfied, actually, more than content. More than happy.
I'm home. That may not make sense to you, but that's what my Virgo is.
He's home.
And that conveniently brings me to the last thing I want to talk about which is my literal home, the one in which I live. That's another area where I've never been satisfied but again, thanks to a pandemic that forced me to stop and restructure my life, now I am. I've taken the time to do, if not every single thing I've always wanted to do, a lot of them, and now instead of anxiety and dissatisfaction, being here makes me feel at peace. To add to my list of firsts, for the first time in years and years, I'm not searching Zillow or Realtor for a new place to live, I'm not wishing I were someplace else, I'm not ruing the day I bought this house. Like with my weight and with my Virgo, I finally feel, well, at home, and look at that -
I've stumbled across a theme -
made another realization as I've rambled on.
For the first time in my life, I finally feel like I'm home.
