Friday, March 31, 2006

Heightened expectations, if only from myself Well, there's nothing like being totally outed by a writer you admire to get your knickers in a twist about your lame-ass frequency-of-posting issues.  It's not bad enough that Mieke sends me threatening emails if I disappear for so long, but now the lovely Fussy has linked to me, and the pressure, shall we say, is on.  I couldn't  have anything duller to post about tonight, because I've been sitting here reading "Women's Health," which is actually a much better magazine than so many others of its ilk--dare I come right out and say I think it's good--because I have a story I want to pitch them and I'm trying to decide if it's a decent fit or not.  I find pitching to be an incredibly difficult thing, perhaps because I am more afraid of someone saying "yes" than of the more likely "no."  Again, the "yes" creates pressure.  Even when I worked in television--where pitching is like breathing--I did everything I could to avoid it. (It's good to have eager people who work for you, who are happy to have center stage, and who will therefore do the parts of your job that make you want to crawl under your desk.) But I digress.  It's not the magazine that's dull; rather, it's me--the cover story (and this is not the reason I bought it, though it dovetails nicely with my current life) is "Your Perfect Weight--Get There, Stay There!" (their exclamation point, not mine.)  We (well, those four loyal readers and me) all know that I am struggling to take off the weight from the last baby, not to mention the weight I never lost after the first baby. Now, the good news is, I've lost about fifteen pounds in the last two months.  My friend Julie asked me how, and I said, honestly, "I don't eat that much."  It's true, I don't, and this is a feat for me.  Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows how much I adore food.  I love shopping for it, preparing it, and eating it.  I love feeding other people.  I said, quite sincerely to a group of new friends the other night that nothing--well, almost nothing--makes me happier than cooking dinner for a group of appreciative and hungry friends.  I think food's pretty (most of it, anyway), and it smells good. What more do you need?  Well, I suppose, you could want for something to read--and there are many cookbooks that are just about as good as anything ever written, poetry or prose.  If you don't believe me, just get your hands on anything M.F.K. Fisher or Elizabeth David, or, for that matter, Julia Child, ever wrote. But, the good folks at Women's Health have confirmed that really, I have another 22 or 23 pounds to lose to get to my "perfect" weight.  The good news, if there is any, is that the magazine and I, and the nutritionist I worked with at the beginning of this last pregnancy (before I bailed on bothering to follow any kind of plan--at the end, I just got on the scale backwards at the Ob/Gyn's office, so as not to see the accusing, ever-increasing numbers) all agree on what that number is.  And I think I can get there, slow and steady and all that.  But it is boring.  Boring to talk about, boring to think about.  Because for me, the key to losing weight is taking all the joy out of food.  Make your daily intake so rote, so numbingly uninteresting that you don't think about it any more as a source of pleasure.  As I read that, it seems so sad, and yet, as I live it, day in and day out for the last two months, it doesn't bother me all that much. I "cheat" quite a bit, actually; if I eat out, I eat things I enjoy, within reason. And when I cook for friends, I cook things that are healthful, but I drink the wine and eat the dessert and don't get all jumpy about it.  And, though I have yet to buy new jeans, my old jeans fit perfectly when I put them on right after washing, and, if I don't put on a belt, they're bagging around my (smaller) ass by the middle of the day.  It's amazing how uplifting a baggy ass can be.  I remember, back before I got pregnant with Dido, when I was in the very best shape of my adult life (the time in high school when I was running cross country doesn't count, because I was in high school. NO adult woman should compare herself to her self in high school.  Just don't go there.)  I loved it. I was really strong, because I worked out all the time. I will never, until my children leave home, have that much time to exercise (unless they start running marathons and I start biking behind them to make sure they hydrate properly.) It's interesting that I really started working on my writing again just as I started to work on losing weight, and that as much as I am not thinking about food, I am thinking, constantly, about words and stories.  Maybe, like Mark Strand, I am eating the words...and maybe, just maybe, I'll do a better job here.  I make no promises.   12:32:45 AM     comment [] trackback []