Tag Archives: writing

by

NEW DAY 168: Fuckin’ nuts

It’s easy to notice certain behavioral changes during weight loss. At some point in the last 5 months, I started wearing dresses to accentuate curves instead of to disguise my whole body as an amorphous blob (and fooling nobody). I’ve become more comfortable putting my hair up in public and exposing the neck I suddenly have, which sometimes even sports a necklace. I now invite people to walk places with me in the absence of fear I’ll be panting for breath beside them the whole time, mortified. I no longer deflect positive remarks on my progress, and instead fully embraced my brother, along with his beaming exclamation when he saw me on Thanksgiving for the first time since early August. He’d had that look in his eye from the moment he saw me walk in that screamed I noticed!, and he couldn’t wait to tell me with full eye contact before he hugged me: “[Sister]! You’re so little!”

Other changes are harder to catch in action. Paradoxically, the biggest behavioral change I’ve made during my New Days is the one that completely failed to register until just a few hours ago: I’m no longer an emotional eater.

This is beyond monumental. It enters the realm of straining credulity.

Without going into a whole thing, I’ll state simply that the past month or so has been stressful, exciting, anxiety inducing, fun, sad, healing, deeply frustrating, and tiring. In short, it’s been taxing on the more-extreme ends of multiple points of my emotional range. I’ve felt it all. It’s shown up as tension in my arms and shoulders, a shorter fuse, and heightened restlessness, all exacerbated by insufficient sleep rooted in the intensity of how life is right now. How it has not shown up is in destructive behavior.

I cope by using my lunch break for a tour on the walking pad at my desk. I cope by venting my feelings in writing. I cope by commiserating with people in my support network. I cope by singing loudly while taking scalding-hot showers. I cope by running faster, or longer, or both.

I do not cope by consuming unhealthy things. (Anymore.) I don’t even have that impulse. (Anymore.)

When this realization struck me today, I froze in place. It had not occurred to me how much must have changed not only for that fundamental habit to have fallen out of my coping repertoire, but for me to have not even noticed that it had.

As if it’s not the biggest of deals.
As if it’s always been this way.
As if it was just that easy.

It is.
It hasn’t.
It was.

But here I am, reconstructed from the inside out. Because 168 days ago, I made a choice that created a chain reaction of subsequent choices that led to a change in me at the cellular level. In that tentative moment on that June day, without grasping the magnitude of what that one choice was setting in motion, I changed my life.

I am not the sad, broken, grayscale person I was for the first half of 2025. I am the centered, recovering, technicolor person on my way to becoming the happy, integrated, vibrant person I want to be.

Strength is a slow burn. You’re strong when you act on any choice you make, but it’s not until you one day realize how far you’ve come that you understand your strength now is only because of your strength then.

Anyone can make a choice: Stop eating the sugar. Train for the half marathon. Throw your hat in the ring for the opportunity. It’s every choice you make after that first one that will either honor that initial strength or not. That’s how you rebuild. That’s how you renew. That’s how you reclaim.

That’s how “never” becomes “maybe some day”, and “some day” becomes NOW.

Fuckin’ nuts.

by

NEW DAY 125: Body armor

We have this idea that armor makes you stronger. It means you’re constantly ready for battle, and you sure don’t intend to lose. Suiting up with impenetrable metals to block attacks from deadly weapons sure does sound like a power move.

Or does it?

I’m not so sure.

True toughness requires vulnerability. True strength means not yielding to and masking your weaknesses. True power demands the risk of losing it.

Loading up with body armor isn’t a show of force. It’s a projection of fear. I know because I’ve done it all my life: I’ve worn my extra weight like a protective layer to prevent anyone from getting close enough to hurt me.

The problem with this approach — and the inherent irony in it — is that being heavy does precisely nothing to shield anyone from hurt. It only invites a different kind of externally inflicted pain, and the internally inflicted kind, too.

Loneliness.
Conspicuousness.
Mockery.
Rejection.
Othering.
Embarrassment.
Ostracization.
Discomfort.
Shame.
Isolation.
Regret.
Self-disgust.

That’s great insight to have in retrospect. Cruelly, having no consciousness of it until it’s damn near too late is perhaps the most painful consequence imaginable.

Now that I’m in the process of removing a lifetime of body armor, exposing myself to the potential for the type of pain I’ve hidden myself from since before I was old enough to recognize what I was doing feels like a scary move. But what is it they say about true courage? It’s feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Not just to prove your dominion over fear — but to prove something even deeper, even bigger, and even more meaningful to yourself.

I’m discovering a whole other person beneath the physical, emotional, and psychological layers through my weight loss mission. This is a veritable existential excavation that was not the intended goal of prioritizing my health, but it’s by far the most important one. I’m giving myself something no one else can give me: another chance at living the life I want, the way I want, as the person I want to be.

True fortitude, it turns out, is learning to live without the armor. It in itself is hard work that not everyone is cut out to handle without some grit.

I’m learning this lesson more profoundly every day — one pound at a time.

by

NEW DAY 119: It’s all write

Sometimes when I have nothing to say, I end up saying the most.

I generally prefer to keep the parameters of this blog limited to weight loss, weight management, and physical fitness, with the occasional foray into related areas like mental health that directly connect to the experiences I have along my path. I’ll (perhaps annoyingly) refer, in vague terms, to parts of my personal life that have an impact on these things, simply because they inform my thoughts and/or feelings around a given topic — but without straying too far from the crux of Life Can’t Weight or revealing too much about myself. And to be completely honest, that can be really hard at times.

One lesson I have (re)learned this year for the gazillionth time is how absolutely essential it is for me to keep a good balance of systems in place that help in my overall picture of self care. Wellbeing is about the delicate, interconnected components of life and how they affect us as humans existing in our time and place. Precious little is within our control when you stop to think about it; how we manage our immediate environment is in many cases the extent of it for a given person.

My special combination that keeps me feeling in check is quality nourishment, meaningful socialization, productivity (through professional or personal work), creative output, physical activity, reflection-based expression, and sufficient sleep. When any of those things is absent or underrepresented for too long, the whole system breaks down. Lately, managing my physical health has been so overrepresented that it has dominated my schedule and, consequently, my thoughts. Although each day is still different, the routine and my thinking are more or less the same.

The effect this has is that it makes me less inclined to write here or anywhere else, and particularly when I have too much time between therapy sessions, my reflection-based expression time suffers. Because I’m not operationalizing that release valve, my sleep suffers. With less energy from a rest deficit, I have no interest in creative pursuits. Without a proper channel for my creative drive — on top of the lacking energy and sorted-out emotions — I feel ill-equipped to socialize; I’m less patient, more taciturn, and in the mindset that I’m poor company and should spare other people from that type of interaction.

You can see where this is going. One by one, the dominoes fall, and the whole structure topples. And that’s the state in which I currently find myself. I’m writing here right now because I have nothing to say — and that says it all.

There are so many thoughts constantly racing through my mind, it would stand to reason that I could simply grab a hold of one of them and use it as a writing topic, or a real-life conversation starter, or even an opportunity for creative expression. Instead, what happens is I fall through every mental trap door that leads to some tangential thought that spirals into something else entirely, and I get stuck in an endless web of overthinking that allows zero peace. The only time my brain is quiet is when I’m doing a challenging workout that requires my full focus. As much as that sucks when I’m not pushing myself through intense exercise, it’s such a gift that I can count on that time to convert the ceaseless frenetic nonsense into a physically healthy endeavor while also expelling it from myself, even if only for a brief period.

The story of this year has been just get through this. First, it was just get through this bad news. But before that could happen, it became just get through this loss. Concurrently for part of that, it was just get through this sickness and just get through this financial drought.
Just get through this uncertainty.
Just get through this horrendous job market.
Just get through this emotional pain.
Just get through this physical pain.
Just get through this relationship strain.
Just get through this boring book.
Just get through this unpleasant conversation.
Just get through this adjustment period.
Just get through this self-doubt.
Just get through this waiting for a response.
Just get through this waiting for an initiation.
Just get through this 75 Hard challenge.
Just get through this day.
Just get through this night.
Just get through this sentence.

Until what?

When does it get better? When is it enjoyable and not just an impediment on the way to something that is? More importantly, how do I activate enjoyment instead of just getting through waiting for it to happen?

There aren’t answers to these questions. As with many things, the only way out is through. I can decide one thing: whether to keep going or not. For now, I choose to keep going.

When I’m out of survival mode and my brain space frees up again, I can commit seriously to reclaiming my agency beyond that flimsy choice.

I have to just get through this first.

by

NEW DAY 52: Vacation (all I ever wanted)

I got home yesterday from 2 weeks of traveling. I saw new places with familiar faces, spent a lot of time outdoors, and truly got away from things that I needed an escape from. I am back feeling recharged and still committed to healthy living. I actually missed the gym while I was away — and I continued to have no interest in tasty treats. The scale rewarded my consistency with a 4-lb loss.

Part of my travels was with a friend I hadn’t seen in a decade. In the time since, she has become very outdoorsy and athletic: she’s an avid hiker, jogger, and rock climber. When I say she’s athletic, I mean she’s climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. Recently. (Yeah, that’s right, my people are freakin’ cool.) So uh, I did have some concerns about whether I’d be able to keep up with her while we were roaming around our leg of the trip. I’m not saying I was matching her pace, but I was matching her energy level, and I wasn’t all out of breath and incapable of doing the things we wanted to do because I was too overweight and out of shape. Of all the high points of my trip — which was made up of almost exclusively high points — this is the one I may be happiest about.

I took myself on a bucket-list trip to Australia back in October for my birthday. I had always wanted to make that trip, but hesitated not only because of the expense and the fact that it would be a solo trek, but perhaps most of all because I knew there would be things that my size and (lack of) fitness would preclude me from doing, which I would have wanted to do. Sure enough, there were activities I had to opt out of for those reasons. The things I did do, I found took a lot longer for me to do and required a lot more energy to do than they should have. It was perhaps the worst shape I’ve ever been in on a trip like that, which is regrettable. I’m still glad I went, but I can’t pretend I feel no disappointment from the overall experience. I look forward to going back on a redemption trip there at some future point.

Come Monday, my daily routine will be changing and I’ll have to figure out how to reconfigure my schedule to include exercise time. I’m beginning 75 Hard with the friend who knows about this blog (hi!) tomorrow on something of a whim (for me), so I’m really locking in some hardcore stuff to take shape over the next 2.5 months! It seems like fortuitous timing to sync with my return from vacation and pivot into a new chapter with the start of a new job on Monday. Someone remind me on day 23 that I did this to myself. 🙃

That about covers it for now, but I trust there will be a lot of content in the coming 75 days or so!

by

NEW DAY 15: It’s aliiiiiiiiiiive!

Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned. It has been **checks notes** 7 years (🤯) since my last post.

Every spring, I have to decide whether to renew the annual cost of owning this domain name. Every year since 2018, I have come very close to hitting cancel. It’s only out of sheer laziness that I haven’t. I finally figured that I’m paying for this thing — I might as well use it. There’s plenty to write, and if all goes well, there will be plenty more.

To say it’s been a strange ride since I last wrote in here would be a laughable understatement. To try to do any kind of meaningful actual update on those intervening years would be equally ridiculous. So I’m picking up here at this time code without concern for what was missed in the fast forward. The plot had its twists and turns, but the ending is still on its way and TBD by plenty of other factors.

What I will say about the time since February 2018 is that it can be characterized by a few choice words. The one rolling around in my mind right now is “almost.” I came close to realizing a lot of my priorities. Some of them, I did realize, only to see them crumble.

Frustrating. Sad. Wasteful.

In the past now.

This year has been particularly challenging, in a way that no year since 2018 has been — not even those pandemic years. I’ve been staggering through events in my personal life that have toppled the structure I had built atop what I believed to be a sturdy foundation, and which have left me questioning core pieces of my worldview. Everything about this time has been erratic. I’ve been emotionally volatile, my energy has been virtually non-existent from the simmering anger and sadness always coursing through me, I have been getting nowhere near enough socialization, my eating/sleeping/activity/bathing/general adulting habits have been all over the place; there has been no routine to speak of.

I’ve felt wronged, insulted, tarnished, judged, abandoned, unimportant, forgotten, betrayed, mistreated, and rejected.

I’ve felt stressed, alone, scared, confused, hurt, angry, stupid, hopeless, devastated, nervous, useless, mournful, and exhausted.

I thought more than once about giving up entirely.

I knew incorporating exercise into my life would make a difference. When I think of the time in my life when I was most emotionally, psychologically, and physically healthy, it was when I was disciplined around being physically active. The two-pronged problem standing in my way for months was a total lack of motivation alongside deep apathy.

Then one day — if you’ll forgive the facile, cryptic, and highly suspect jump cut (again) — everything in the space around me was suddenly batshit crazy. That’s coming from someone who was pretty sure she was the dictionary definition of crazy at this point, so to see that things around me had out-crazied me to the batshit level was… something. The abrupt intensity filled me with a new kind of restlessness that was frenetic, and HAD to be released before I exploded into a million pieces. And so I found myself back at the gym for the first time in years.

For the past two weeks, I have been sticking with my plans and commitments to self to prioritize my overall health.
I am running again.
I am preparing thoughtful meals for myself and not consuming meals from restaurants again.
I am managing my finances responsibly again.
I am writing to detangle my thoughts again.
I am making an effort to keep a social life again.
I am getting out of bed in the morning again.

I am trying again.

**deep breath**