IN 33 EASY STEPS!
by Sam Cooper
Start with the small things. Noticing them that is, the small things—although small may be the absolute wrong word. The tabulation of jean-size increase over the last few years, the way you get winded when you go up the stairs in your own house. The pain in your feet after not-that-intense bouts of walking that implies some really hardcore podiatric load-bearing. The fact that you’ve always claimed to have an incredibly healthy and well-adjusted body image and contentedness with you own appearance, to which claims people have always said that is great to hear and really meant it you think, but still you can hardly stand to look at yourself in the mirror when you get out of the shower.
Catch sidewise glances of yourself reflected in the glass panes of windows and doors as you walk throughout your life (especially effective if you find yourself on a college campus, which is why collegiate references will be utilized henceforth) invariably surrounded by trim, lithe, fit, and smiling persons of similar age, whose slight frames seem suddenly effortlessly graceful and breathtaking, whose easy gait and pencil shadows give you a feeling like your guts dropping into your knees, and next to whom in the reflections of many crowded-around buildings’ glass surfaces you suddenly feel stiff and jerky and so fucking fat.
Decide to Make A Change and feel brief well-being-type fuzziness as you feel you have already won the battle somehow.
Quietly buy a scale from an online vendor. Select an expensive shipping option, as you are starting to feel this whole weight thing to be approaching crisis status. The scale will be cheap and plastic with a digital display that sometimes wildly varies in its numerical judgments so that for the rest of your losing-weight journey you’re never quite certain about the accuracy of its measurements of your heft.
Weigh yourself for the first time on aforementioned scale. When you see the number winking up at you step off the scale and weigh yourself again. Step off and take the batteries out of the thing, put them back in, rezero it, step back on. Realize that yes, that is correct. Want to cry but don’t, and notice that you aren’t really surprised.
(Repeat weighing on a daily level, skipping only those days when the task seems just too unbearable [after Thanksgiving, Christmas, Your Birthday, etc.].)
Start the Change You Are Making by eating less/better and continue throughout (possibly, probably for the rest of your life). This is easier said than done, but fairly non-difficult when you really take note of how much you were eating before, and what you were eating before, and how disgusting those quantities/qualities truly are. This step is immeasurably aided by taking an Elements of Nutrition class to fulfill your Life Sciences requirement to get your degree at the college that is so infuriatingly filled with handsome thin people. This class will make you hate food because it (food) is, within the context of the material, suddenly so damn biological, and the final project will require you to log every single solid or liquid you consume in a week as a caloric entity, and will give you some helpful pointers on how/what to eat, and as a bonus will provide extra encouragement when you look around your discussion section and notice while sitting in your uncomfortably small wooden desk that you are by far the fattest person in the room.
Sometime during this whole process begin to exercise spottily, jogging or biking late at night when no one can see you and all your jiggling and bloodred cheeks and explosive breath. Mention this exercise to friends casually, like its something that just spontaneously happened all on its own, hinting at the fact that you are, in fact, despite all appearances, Health Conscious.
(Repeat above step [spottily].)
Start shedding poundage, but don’t feel too proud of yourself because you are still, where the BMI is concerned (as you calculate in your NFSC100 workbook), borderline Class II Obese.
Continue on with your normal existence. Struggle through classes, fixate on love interests and then move on, engage in hobbies and activities. Watch your life pass by.
When weight loss isn’t going as fast as you want it to, remember the word endomorphic from 8th grade Health class and remember that you are (i.e. endomorphic), and realize that you will never be as skinny as you want to be. The best you know you can ever hope for is chubby.
Have an emotional/mental breakdown that is completely unrelated to any kind of weight issues. Essentially stop eating sometimes because the thought of choosing to be willingly part of any process that prolongs living is physically sickening, and also because sometimes you are so wrapped up in indulging in self-loathing and -pity and general feelings of being on the edge and going insane, and making dead-of-night tearful calls to friends who in no way deserve all the shit you are laying down at their telephonically connected metaphoric feet, and considering the possibility that you are in no way the person anyone (not even yourself) thought/thinks you are and maybe even not, by way of definition you can only experience and not really relate, a person at all in the traditional way of thinking, to remember to eat. Your only consolation during this time is that during the daily weighings you somehow have not abandoned through all the internal turmoil you discover how much mass can actually be disposed of as an effect of breakdown anorexia. Start to get cozy with the nauseous pang of stomach emptiness, masochistically relish the lightheadedness that accompanies serious low-calorie intake as a kind of high.
After a month or so of Bottom, rebuild your life and start to function as a human being again. By this time you will have flunked several classes, including NFSC100, which is okay; it was a terrible class anyway. Begin to eat normally again (or at least more normally), and expect your confused body to hold dearly onto whatever it’s fed; you will gain and temporarily keep a few pounds. They will disappear soon enough.
Take heart that summer (which is now upon you) and all the sweat and heat it implies is the friendliest season to weight loss (unverified by any hard facts but you feel, intuit that it this is true).
Begin the first sexual relationship you’ve had in an embarrassingly large number of years with a person of smallish proportions and twiggy build, so that lying next to her or him, trying to bat down the thunder of your own heart as you ineffectually attempt to initiate intercourse, you feel comparatively cetacean. So that during the actual coital act (when it is eventually initiated by your elfin partner) you can’t get out of your head horrible images of slipping somehow, crushing the avian her or him to death under your humongosity and ending up being involved in the most mortifying criminal investigation/legal proceedings/media circus imaginable, the inability to remove said images from cerebellum thus adversely affecting your already worred-about-on-a-dysfunctionally-paranoid-level performance. Nurture related-but-separate worries about not your own accidental physical lethality but instead more run-of-the-mill attractiveness, which honestly you find a tragically laughable concept (you being corporeally attractive in any way), even though by this point you’ve lost 30-some lbs. without much effort or attention and are back to high school weight (which isn’t exactly anything to brag about).
Buy some new jeans because you now have lost enough to do so. Again, don’t get too puffed-up because the new size is still objectively gargantuan.
Mutually split romantic ways with the person you have been in a sexual relationship with, after only having sex twice. Be unable to decide whether this small number is a good (saved you from more instances to obsessively, masochistically scrutinize for months and months to come) or bad (did not allow you to prove yourself as anything other than a creature of hilarious erotic ineptitude) thing.
Continue all steps above that warranted repeating and proceed to lose more weight. Start to take comments about said thinning down in stride by acting humble and shy and actually surprised about the whole affair, so that the image you project is someone slimming down by the will of some force beyond his or her control, effortlessly, nonchalantly and somehow actually nonplussed at someone noticing and commenting upon something so effortless and beyond personal control or accountability. Swell with interior pride anyway. Prepare for this situation’s repetition.
Let months pass.
Allow yourself to enjoy Thanksgiving and Christmas as unfettered hedonistic extravaganzas. Hate yourself for this allowance when you gain 5 and 10 lbs after each, respectively.
Realize while working off holiday fat that your weight will indeed fluctuate, and you can Accept that up to a certain point.
Mark the one-year anniversary of Trying To Lose Weight. You have lost 50-some lbs.
Let months pass. Watch the little digital display on your cheap plastic scale flash lower and lower values
Struggle with depression all throughout and beyond, topically pertinent only because this may or may not affect your eating/exercise/will power. If you are lucky, comfort foods (the really lipid-heavy, addictive ones) will only seem unutterably sad and reminiscent of times past and better-seeming, and you will steer clear. You may not be lucky.
Buy new jeans and feel slightly proud of it because these new ones aren’t so objectively gargantuan as the couple of rounds of jeans bought before.
Spring Break brings a beach house, booze, snack foods, and a huge St. Patrick’s Day Meal. See above step re: Thanksgiving, and all the attached numerical and emotional baggage.
Hit your first plateau around the end of spring, but don’t despair too much because you have kept your year-old NFSC100 workbook and you can calculate your BMI and find yourself not Obese Class II or even Class I, but in fact only Overweight (albeit at the high end of Overweight, only about .2 Index points away from Class I Obese).
A month into summer take a serious interest in jogging. Buy some expensive and futuristic, seemingly lighter-than-air running shoes with reflective silver trimming that flashes in the sunlight (you exercise in the daytime now) with every up and down pump of each foot.
Watch your weight resume downward motion, noting that this movement is slower than before, but still in no means any kind of bad thing.
Start wearing clothes you haven’t been able to squeeze into for years. Buy new, smaller clothes. Start to think about realistically pursuing romantic opportunities without too many associations of impossibility and fear. Buy yet more new jeans, and a new belt (you have been drilling holes into your belts so far with a pocket knife). Enjoy physical activity and the fact that you don’t automatically get winded at its occasion. Notice that your fixation on the dimensions and geometry of your reflection is no longer motivated by fatal fascination or self-hatred, but rather curiosity and—dare you admit it?—pride.
At the end of the summer reach 70 lbs. lost.
Want to lose at least 30 lbs. more.
