Christmas probably about 8 years ago. And aren't my baby sisters just as cute as a bug's ear?!

This picture was just brought to my attention.  By my sister.  On Facebook.

When I first looked at it, I thought what the hell is bunched around my waist (there above my sister’s feet on my lap).  And then I realized…..it is my waist.  Then I thought, what was I seeing in the mirror?  I remember that outfit.  I thought it was cute.  And it’s not fashion police worthy, I guess.  But what I see in this picture is not what I was seeing in my mirror.

I don’t want to sound like I think I was some kind of hideous monster just because I was fat.  I don’t think that.  I don’t think I was any less valuable of a person because I was fat or that I am more valuable now because I’m not.  But I just realize now how distorted my view of my physical appearance was then.  I knew I was over weight.  I’m not a moron.  It was plainly obvious and I didn’t deny it.  And yet, I didn’t really see it.

For a long time after I lost the weight, I still felt like this person walking around in different skin.  But now, I’ve been feeling so much more distant from this person.  The skin I’m in fits me now, I don’t feel out of place.  I don’t feel the need to tell everyone “I used to be fat” like I used to.  Sometimes it’s hard to remember what it was like.  I wish I’d kept better documentation of what I was thinking as I went through my weight loss process.

I didn’t really have a point or a message I wanted to share with this post.  I mostly wanted to share the picture.  I’ve been thinking I need to dive into my old photo albums (taken with real film cameras, GASP) and post some more pictures from the old me.

I really wanted to post an after from this past Christmas – I’m a big fan of symmetry.  I scoured Facebook for one someone might have taken at Christmas, but does Facebook come through for skinny Erica??  Not so much.  Fat Erica is the only one getting the Christmas Facebook love.  So I found one of me riding the bull from a couple weeks ago.  It’s totally the same, duh (to quote Charlie Sheen).  And it cracks my shit up that I went from the above to the below.  Irony is my very favorite thing in life.  Remember to laugh today, my lovlies.

I need a caption so it has a nice little frame around it like the other one. Like I said...symmetry.

I have mentioned before that there is no “light at the end of the tunnel” with regard to weight loss.  So, here I am, back in the tunnel.  Not too far back in, just a smidge, a scoche (I have no idea how that’s spelled, but looks good enough to me), really.

I have been blissfully maintaining my weight through exercise and eating what seems reasonable for the past two and a half years.  No calorie counting.  No keeping track of calories expended in workouts.

Before I got separated in the fall of 2009, I was the weight I am now.  I was content and didn’t feel like I needed to lose any more.  When I got separated and started losing because of the stress.  I was worried.  I didn’t want to look gross.  People were starting to accuse me of being anorexic – which makes me giggle real good now.  Anyone who’s seen me near a pan of brownies can tell you with confidence that I don’t have any problem with food intake.  I definitely didn’t want to get too thin.  But, I lost about eight pounds, putting me at 140.  Which at 5′8″, that is a perfectly reasonable weight.  Eventually I got used to it and 140 became my new normal.  My stomach was just that little bit flatter and I liked it.

Well, I am back to the weight I was before I got separated and suddenly, I’m not as content with it as I thought.  I got used to and really liked how my clothes fit.  Who knew eight pounds would make such a difference?  Oh and talk about difference….it’s eight lousy pounds, but, DUDE, my boobs are SO MUCH BIGGER than they were at 140.  I absolutely admit to copping a feel any time I’m naked.  They are just do much fuller and fantastically squishy.  I figure I gotta get my gropes in while I still have them.  Because as much as I like my fuller boobies, I really dislike the back fat hanging over my jeans.  Like…a lot.  So, boobies need to go.

I’ve seen it coming for a while.  I’ve been pretty fast and loose with the food intake since the summer.  Nachos, candy bars, chocolate chip waffles…..I’m sorry for the momentary silence, I was having a climactic moment basking in the memories.  But I was very active over the summer with volleyball and doing a lot of walking around Chicago.  Aaaaannnd it appears that I need a guy to dump me every now and then.  It’s not a recommended method, but not eating for a week will surely help deal with an extra pound or two.  So, Aaron, Matt, thanks bunches.  Really.  You’re the bomb.

I came out of the summer just fine, still 140.  And then…Halloween.  Why does no one count Halloween as the start of all the holiday eating madness??  I credit it with the most potential for damage in my world.  Candy bars are nothing short of divine.  They are absolutely irresistible to me.  Hershey bars being my hands-down favorite.  Case in point….My kids get off the bus after their Halloween party at school.  I greet them with a smile and ask them how it was expecting all kinds of joyful description.  Instead, they all have their heads hanging down, looking pitiful.  They say, “We all got full size Hershey bars, but we don’t wanna give them to you!”.  Um, okay, you little presumptuous turds, I would never take your party candy bar.  Maybe a square or two…definitely not more than half…maybe.

It’s hibernation time here in the midwest.  Food intake up.  Active calorie expenditure…down.  I am not a cold weather girl.  I go to the gym, but that’s it.  No more walking hither and tither.  No more Wednesday night beach volleyball.  The pounds crept on and now it’s time to take them off.  I’m not feeling guilty or like I’ve failed.  No need for drama.  It’s not that much weight.  I just need to take it off….again.

I dusted off my calorie counting software, went back to my very strict no-eating-after-eight policy and started keeping track of my calories burned during workouts.  I started this about two and a half weeks ago.  The first week was exactly the opposite of fabulous.  I was hungry and whiny and my head hurt and I was extraordinarily unpleasant to be around.  I wasn’t sure I could do it again.  Maybe the first time was a fluke.  Maybe it was my one shot at will-power.  It wasn’t.  I’m doing it.  It took me about three days to get used to it.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be eating some nachos dipped in chocolate syrup right now.  But I can resist and not be completely miserable doing it.

I’ve lost a couple of pounds.  And I’m sure I can lose the rest.  But mostly I just want some queso and Pepsi.

I don’t make resolutions.  Well, I did once.  I said I was going to call my Grandma Glady more.  I totally failed after one month.  Resolutions are dumb.  I’m sticking my tongue out at resolutions.  I figure, if you need to do something important for yourself, why wouldn’t you just decide to do it when it needs doing??  Why are you waiting for the first day of January??  Dumb.

I try to be slightly less firmly planted in my own judgments and at least seem like I leave room for other people’s opinions.  But I’m sick and cranky and my tummy is making horrible noises.  So I’m not gonna tack on the “but if you make them and they work for you, then you go on with your bad self”.  I’m just gonna say they’re dumb and be done with it.

BUT! if I did make resolutions, I guess I would make one regarding my less than stellar upkeep of this blog….  I might cry if people keep yelling at me.  I don’t like to cry.  I’m going to do better.  But NOT because it’s a new year.  So there.

I have two topics that I was thinking of that I’d like to post about, but I can’t decide which one because my head hurts.  I don’t get sick.  I haven’t been sick in YEARS.  Not even a cold.  Now, I’ve had a cold and this whatever-this-is in the past few weeks.  I’d rather just sit here and whine about how I don’t like being sick.  And maybe be mean to the person I’m pretty sure made me sick.  Oh, I would like that.  It makes me smile just a little bit of an evil smile, I gotta say.  But that wouldn’t be nice.  And I try to be a nice person.  I really do and I didn’t even have to make a resolution about that.

I think I have to start with this topic because it will be a foundation for the next topic.  I have been thinking about this one off and on for a while, but kept forgetting to post.  So I have a HUGE scientific finding right here.  It will answer all the world’s obesity problems.  I’m going to be showered in praise and (hopefully) money.  I am going to tell you why people are fat.  No really, every single person who’s fat, it’s the same reason.  And I’m going to tell it to you.

People are fat because they’re not ready to not be fat.

Some of you are reading that and thinking I’m all deep ‘n shit and some of you are thinking I’m an idiotic ass.  It’s all good.

And I’m not talking about people are 10-20 pounds over their “skinny” size.  I’m talking about people who truly have a weight problem.  If you’re 10-20 pounds overweight, you’re not fat.  You might feel or think you’re fat, but you’re not.  You just need to stop with the chips and the slightly too-big portions and hit the gym a little.  If you truly have a weight problem, you have to be ready to lose weight.  And not ready like you went to the grocery store and bought all the right stuff and bought yourself a new scale.  I mean ready like you are in mental space to make this very enormous change in your life.

People are very often fat because of other circumstances in their lives.  Low self-esteem and self-worth.  Their family role is to be the emotional garbage can for everyone else so they treat their body like one.  Marital problems and a body that makes the person feel unattractive is a convenient buffer to use as an excuse or to push the other person away.  The list goes on and on and everyone’s reason is unique to them.

Changing your relationship with food means that every other relationship in your life is going to be impacted.  I talked about how fun that is here.  And like I said, I wasn’t really aware of what that was going to mean for my life.  But for whatever reason, I was ready to tackle it.  My subconscious was ready to let me do it.

I talk about this readiness with Gretchen 1 all the time.  We talk about how much it sucks that you can’t make yourself be there.  Even if you’ve lost weight before, you can’t always get yourself back in that space.  Sometimes it feels like you have no control over it.  You’re ready or you’re not.

Sometimes it can happen more like it did for me where I wasn’t really aware of the magnitude of the impact being overweight had on my life and my head and just start losing weight and let the chips fall where they may.  And trust me, there will be chips and they will be falling.  But, if you’re one of the people who keep trying and failing to lose, or lose and gain it all back, you might want to take a more introspective route.  Something is preventing you from being able to be successful.

If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.  If you have made several attempts to lose weight and it keeps failing, maybe you need to change it up.  Look inside and brainstorm about what might be keeping you from allowing yourself to be that healthy person you know you can be.  We’re all jacked in the head in some way, shape or form.  It’s not always obvious what it really is.  Maybe you need to…gasp!….see a therapist.  See one for a month or two.  See what you can stir up.  Yes, it costs money, but so does that gym membership you don’t use.  So do all those clothes you keep buying and growing out of.

No amount of superficial preparation will force your head into the place it needs to be.  Buying new workout clothes won’t make it happen.  Filling your fridge with vegetables won’t make it happen.  Nothing is going to make it happen except you.

So, the conversation goes something like this….

Curious Person: “Why do you go to a trainer?”

Me:  “Well, blah, blah, blah, blah (insert 5 minutes of very informative blah).”

Curious Person:  “But WHY do you go to a trainer?”

This post may just be more “blah”.  I explain and I explain and maybe people just can’t get it if they’ve never seen a trainer – a trainer that fits well for them and knows what they are doing, more specifically.  Greg The Trainer and I were discussing this very idea and he agreed that people just don’t get it.  I’ve been training with him for over three years.  I first started with him at my gym and now he’s awesomely doing his own thing (check out his still-being-constructed website here).  This past year, with all the craziness in my life, I wasn’t able to see him, but I recently started back up.  And although I knew I wanted to train with him again so badly, even I had forgotten just how good it is to have him work me out.  It is absolutely, utterly, completely different than working out on my own.

And now I’m sitting here at a loss for how to explain.  I feel like I could drone on for pages and pages or I could say almost nothing.  Either way, I likely still won’t get my point across…..which I guess is kinda my point, huh?

Part of my inability to focus might be BECAUSE I’M STARVING.  Sweet Jesus.  I want nothing more than to walk into my kitchen right now and eat some bread with butter, maybe some waffles, how ’bout some mac ‘n cheese, ooooh, or some chicken wings smothered with all of the above.  You may remember that I talked about the physical pain involved in learning to eat less here.  Well, I have been eating like an asshole for the past year.  Now I have 10 extra pounds to show for it.  And now I have to pay the price and be back in that little ball of big baby whiner pants, moaning about how very super duper extra uber hungry I am.  No.  Seriously.  I might die.

I also explained here how there really is no light at the end of the tunnel.  There really isn’t.  As I’m sitting here gritting my teeth and considering a timelock for my fridge, I can attest to this fact.   I did great.  I lost weight, got “skinny”.  I was able to maintain for quite some time without using the calorie counting software I started with or really worrying much at all about what I was eating.  And then I got a little footloose and fancy free with it all.  It was fine for a while, a year in fact.  But eventually, it catches up with you.  And now it has.  So I basically have to start over.  Not in terms of the amount of weight I have to lose, but in terms of getting myself back in that place, that “zone”.  I have to get my stomach used to eating a smaller amount of food again – I’m doing 1600 calories per day right now.  I got very lax with my “no food after 8pm” rule.  Gotta get back on that horse.  And I don’t like it.  Not one little bit.  It’s miserable and yucky and just downright offensive to that part of me that REALLY WANTS A GOD DAMNED MILKY WAY RIGHT NOW.  Please understand, I say this all the time, but it’s so very important.  Losing weight isn’t supposed to be painless or effortless.  If it was, no one would be fat.  If what you’re doing with your new “resolution” to lose weight is easy, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

So now that I’ve spent so much time whining, I will have to go the very short route on the training.  I took advantage of the photographic stylings of Greg The Trainer a couple weeks ago and it’s a shame to let the pictures go to waste.  I see Greg because he does a way better job making me work out than I do.  He comes up with exercises that incorporate so many components – strength, stability, flexibility.  There’s never a simple bicep curl.  Instead, it’s an exercise that takes the same amount of time as a bicep curl, but it’s strengthening my abs, biceps and helping my balance.  He’s also constantly watching my form.  I would have no idea of the correct form if he weren’t showing me.  When you do a bicep curl, are you moving your upper body back and forth? Swinging your arms?  I’m not.  Because Greg The Trainer has taught me the proper form so that I get maximum benefit for my efforts.

I had him take some pictures so you could see the kind of stuff I do.  I work out with him in a little gym called The PIT.  It’s not a traditional gym as you can see from some of the pictures.  While I’m doing my exercises, I ask him how they translate into the equipment I have at my gym so that I can do the exercises on my own.

I was trying to remember if I’ve written about this before and I’m too lazy to go through the posts and check.

So, what is it that you’ll have to get used to?  Well, a hell of a lot, but specifically I’m referring to throwing away a whole lot of food.

This was a recent scenario at my house.  I am a totally kick ass mom (I dare you to dispute that!).  And in order to uphold my kick-ass-ness, I decided to make my children hot cinnamon rolls for breakfast for no other reason than because I thought they’d like it and be surprised that they weren’t dragging their own breakfast out of the cupboards while I yell from my bed for them not to make a mess – yeah, I’m awesome like that.

These little thankless turds have always liked cinnamon rolls.  I mean, what’s not to love??  Nothing, that’s what.  But, I put them on the table waiting to bask in their joy and adoration.  And what do I get?   “I don’t like cinnamon rolls…WAAHHHHHH!” (whine, whine, cry, cry).  So now I have eight cinnamon rolls.  Delightfully warm and gooey cinnamon rolls.  I had planned on eating two.  I ate three (remember I’m maintaining now, not losing so I don’t have to be as rigid).  What do I do with the other five?  I’m the only person here who likes them.  Only one place for them to go.  Perfectly good.  In the garbage.

I have never, ever, not once in my life, been a person who can do moderation when it comes to delicious foods that I love and adore with all my heart.  People who can do that are somewhere on Satan’s family tree.  I’m just sayin’.  I can’t have brownies in the house and eat one a day and leave the rest to sit and taunt me from the counter.  Nope.  Those brownies make me their bitch and I am forced to inhale them as fast as my sloppy mouth can chew.

I had to start throwing food away.  Birthday cake?  Blow out your candles, eat your one piece on your birthday.  Next day, in the garbage.  Now, I try not to be totally wasteful.  If it’s possible to give it away and make all those delightfully scrumptious calories someone else’s problem, hell yeah, I do.  But my neighbor regularly threatens to beat my ass if I bring over one more piece of cake.  So giving it away isn’t always possible.

I have never been okay with wasting food.  But the alternative is for me to eat it.  I know my limits.  I am not going to become someone who can just have that stuff around and not eat it.  Even stuff I don’t like very much.  If it’s there, and I’m jonesing for a fix, of course I’m going to eat it.  I’ve mentioned this point before, go with where you’re at.  You can’t change everything about your personality.  This is something that just isn’t going to be different in me.  I could criticize myself and try to force myself and fail, or just do what I know will work.  When I have a moment of strength and look at that yummy goodness and can toss it in the trash, I do it.

You’ve already purchased the food.  You’ve already made the food.  Whether you eat every last bit of it or not won’t change that.  But eating every last bit of it may change the amount of flab hanging off your ass.  Better taking up space in a garbage bag than in your already too-tight jeans.

I know.  Stop yelling at me.  I never post.

But today I am in need of catharsis, so, here I am.

I have been thinking about this topic almost since I began this blog.  The topic of relationships.  But the toll of my weight-loss on my relationships, my discovery of the importance of my relationship with food, the impact of my weight-loss on the relationship with myself….it was all just starting to sink in – and by sink in I mean blow up with a magnitude never before seen in my life.

I was able to make more sense of it all after a conversation with my therapist.  He is overweight and will sometimes ask me questions about my weight-loss purely out of curiosity for himself.  We were having one such conversation about buffets.  I had said that there are so many things that you just have to change your thinking about.  For instance, you really have to stop that mindset of walking into a buffet and needing to get “your money’s worth”.  That’s whole post in itself, but afterward he just said “Wow, you really have changed your relationship with food.  That’s a huge relationship you’ve had for your entire life.  No wonder your other relationships have had to change.”

It go me to thinking…thinking real hard.  This past fall nearly every relationship I had…scratch that…EVERY relationship I had, was examined in a whole new light.  My relationship with food was obviously the first.  I had to change it to make the changes I have.  But with that, it forced changes everywhere else.  I wasn’t prepared for that, and neither was anyone else.  But this relationship with food is probably the longest standing, most intimate relationship I’ve had in my life.  It stands to reason that changing that relationship into a healthier, more productive one, would force my other relationships to go under the same scrutiny.  What came out on the other end was not always easy.

I got divorced.  I ended friendships with people I realized were not good for me.  I had friendships ended with me because those people couldn’t understand the person I am now.  And I have had friendships deepen to a level I hadn’t realized they could and sometimes those friendships were from unlikely sources.  And the gratitude I have in my heart for those amazing people can never truly be expressed in my lifetime.

My relationship with myself was so clouded by all that fat.  I couldn’t find myself through it.  Now, I am reintroducing myself to life.  I am embracing parts of myself I’d ignored; finding new parts I never knew were lurking.  I am living my life on purpose.  Every day.  Some days that means I am very, very sad.  Some days that means I am insanely happy.

We all have a relationship with food whether we’re fat or not.  For some of us it is a healthy, functional relationship and for others of us, it is woefully dysfunctional.   For those of you losing a large amount of weight like I did, I just really want you to know, it will take it’s toll.  Please look out for it.  Understand that the fallout will come.  You won’t just get smaller jeans and float through life on cotton candy clouds of sunshine.

I regret nothing.  This is not about saying it wasn’t worth it.  It’s just to say that there is a yin and yang to everything.  Something so exciting and positive is just bound to have an equally negative side to it’s consequences.  You can’t know what those consequences will be until they come.  But they will come.

There is a craze sweeping the child photography world.  We’re always on the cutting edge, us baby photogs.  Paparazzi should be following us around for the latest and greatest.  It’s great that Brittany buys $89 thongs, but is that helpful to me?  No.  What’s helpful to me is finding out about a $3 bottle of product that makes my life easier and just a hell of a lot more fun.  The conversations I have had regarding said product have been some of the funniest, pee-my-pants talks I have ever had in my life.

Our friend Des innocently (well, I’m not sure Des does anything innocently, but anyway) introduced us to a little known product called Magic Shave – it’s really named something like Magic Fragrant Cream Shave.  This product is designed for Black men to remove hair on their faces and heads.  The bottle even used to say something like “designed specifically for the black man”.  But for us kiddie photogs….it’s all about the pubes, baby.

Because I am who I am, let’s face it, there’s not much I won’t say, my friends and colleagues have been coming to me for the real deal on how to use this stuff.  I have given out so much instruction via phone, email and in person (fully clothed instruction in that case, no hands-on how-to) that I decided I should just post it here as a public service to all the ladies out there.

The best such instruction was for a friend in Michigan (Hi, June!!) over the phone.  She was sitting at the dinner table at her country club.  Yep, sitting overlooking the links with the likes of Muffy and Heathcliff eating their roast duck while I explicitly detailed how to remove the hair from her va-jay-jay.  The hilarity of my life sometimes does not escape me.  And I love it.

It’s not always easy to find in the stores, but it is cheap.  You know that if they marketed this stuff toward women, for this purpose, it would be at least twice as much.  Asshats.  They haven’t carried it at any Walmart I’ve checked – but who wants to shop at Walmart anyway.  They have it at Target which is just so much more fun!  I’ve also gotten it at my grocery store.  It’s in the shaving aisle by all the men’s stuff.

And it looks like this…..

Please keep in mind that I am a baby photographer, not a product photographer.  Thank you.  There are a couple of different kinds.  This one says it’s for the head.  The one I used to use was for the face, but I can never find that one anymore.  They work the same as far as I can tell.

The first time I bought it, I had to do everything I could to keep myself from shaking with laughter as I walked up to the acne-faced teenage boy at the checkout with an armload of a product labeling itself “designed specifically for the black man”.  I’m about as a white as it gets (as evidenced by my blinding belly in my previous post) and quite obviously not a man.

Now, here is the cover-my-ass portion of this conversation; Buy this stuff if you want to.  Use it if you want to.  Read the directions on the bottle for yourself.  Decide FOR YOURSELF how you want to proceed.  This worked for me, but I am not you.  I take no responsibility if you burn the skin off your ass (not that any one specific California child photographer may have done that or anything).

Once you have it, you probably should do the recommended test patch.  I am a person thoroughly missing the patience gene, but even I did that.  This is not an area you want to be throwing caution to the wind with.

Okay, so you’re ready to start.  First you need to get your spot set up.  It’s hard to walk around once it’s on because you will rub it off the crease in your leg and all that hair won’t come off.  So get all set up so you can put it on and stay sitting for the whole time.

I, personally, like to do it at the gym.  Why dirty my towels when I can use theirs?  I pull the handicapped chair into my shower stall and cover it with towels.  At home, I just put a towel down on my bed.  I also have a warm washcloth next to me so I can clean my hands off when I’m done.  My spot at home consists of this; plastic bag to put the washcloth on top of, washcloth, cell phone to check time, tv remotes, dry towels and, of course, the Magic.

The bottle tells you to use semi-damp towels, but I think dry ones are definitely better.  You need the friction to wipe the stuff off, if it’s wet, it slides a little too much.  Oh and they say you can use a spatula too.  That shit is useless.  Don’t even bother.  It’s a nightmare and you’ll never look at scraping the cookie dough off the sides of the mixing bowl the same way again.  So just skip it.

Okay, spot ready?  Good.  Now, squirt a bunch in your hand and smear it up your crack.  That’s right, the valley of the brown star.  You may think you don’t have an issue with hair there, but trust me, sister, you do.  People keep telling me they don’t need it there and I keep telling them to do it anyway.  A couple hours later I get a shocked phone call.  How did they not know?  Why didn’t anyone tell them?  Oh! Em! Gee! There’s hair in my ass.  We are mammals, there’s hair almost everywhere.

If you are a dude reading this and feeling all disillusioned that I’m outing the hair in a woman’s crack.  Get over it.  We fart, we poop and we have hair growing in our crack.  Just be thankful I’m explaining to your lady how to get rid of it.

Okay, so you’ve given a smear to your crack.  Not the whole damn bottle now (let’s not forget that poor California photographer who shall remain nameless.  Hi, Ashley!!).  Now sit down, carefully so as not to rub it all off.  Get yourself spread-eagle and just start smearing it on.  Where you put it depends on what you want to take off.  If you want it all off, then put it everywhere.  The first time I tried it, I decided to go for the whole shebang which meant that some did get on my girly bits and it didn’t burn at all.  I think that’s the beauty of using a product made for a face.  So be careful with your own bits, but I have really sensitive skin and it was okay for me.

Now I like to have a bit of a landing strip so I just don’t put it on where I don’t want it.  Make sure it’s on thick enough to coat everything.  You don’t want it to dry out because it won’t work.  Oh and the “fragrant” part of the name does ring true.  It stinks.  It smells like perm solution.  But it’s not going to make you pass out or anything.

Maintain your spread-eagle position for nine minutes.  Then get your dry towel and start rubbing it off.  I take a long swipe going against the direction of the hair.  You need to apply some pressure so there’s enough friction to get the hair to rub off.  Get it all off with the towel and then jump in the shower.  Don’t try to rinse it off in the shower, it won’t work.  It needs the friction of the towel to come off.

Women have been known to receive gifts from their significant other after using this product.  One friend got diamonds (Hi, Pam!!).  DIAMONDS, people!  If you receive a lovely gift after my instruction, I would not turn away a box of thank you chocolates or an offer to shovel my driveway.  I’m just sayin’.

I had planned for the first sentence of this post to read something along the lines of, “One year ago today….”.  But, well, that would only be true if I had posted it on December 22, 2009.  I tried.  I did.  But then it got really long really fast and I got overwhelmed with how to cut it down some.  So I did what any wise person does, I ignored it.

But I’m back to triumph over this post.  So….One year ago today (if we pretend that today is December 22, 2009) I underwent one of the most horrendous experiences of my life.  It was horrendous, yet it was wonderful and life-changing and I would never go back.  One year ago today (again, keep your pretending hat on) I had a plastic surgery procedure referred to as a circumferential body lift.

This is the biggest cosmetic surgery you can have.  It is basically like a tummy tuck that goes all the way around your body.  They cut you all the way around, loosen the skin from your body (you’re rethinking having a snack while reading my blog, aren’t you?), pull it tight and cut off the excess then stitch you back up.  For my belly button, they cut the skin away from the outside of it and left the inner part of it in tact.  Then pulled the skin down and cut a hole to sew the new skin to the old belly button.  For those of you with the common misconception that a tummy tuck removes fat, it doesn’t.  That’s lipo and I didn’t have lipo.  A tummy tuck is for removing excess skin.  Because no matter how much working out you do, if your skin doesn’t have the elasticity to go back in place, ain’t nothin’ but surgery gonna take care of it.

I have had crappy skin in terms of elasticity since I was a pre-teen.  I remember having stretch marks on my hips when I was only eleven.  There was no doubt in my mind that between my heavy weight and three pregnancies with almost no time in between them, my skin was never going to recover.

I lost as much weight as I could and got to a maintenance point.  There is no point in getting a tummy tuck if you haven’t lost your weight.  If your skin sucks, it’s still gonna suck after the tuck.  If you have more weight to lose, the skin will be loose again once you do.  So it only makes sense to lose weight, then do your tuck.

I did my research, paid them my life savings and my first born and was ready for the knife.  And the fact that I paid someone, on purpose, to cut me in half can’t be ignored.  Knowing that you are going to undergo major surgery because you are asking for it; there is nothing wrong with you, you aren’t going to die if you don’t have it.  It messes with your head just a little bit.

I don’t actively worry about stresses in my life, typically.  I chose the surgery.  Yes it’s scary, there’s nothing I can do about it, don’t think about it.  That’s my process.  And for the most part, it usually works for me.  But in this instance, not so much.  I still didn’t actually think and worry about it, but my body decided that enough was enough.  By the time my surgery date rolled around, my back muscles were pinched so tight I could hardly walk and had to spend most of the day flat on my back with my knees elevated.

Surgery day came and I got there bright and early having white-knuckled the entire ride there asking myself what the hell I was thinking.  The nurses were chatting with me in an effort to keep me calm and I just kept thinking, drugs, drugs are good at keeping people calm.  How ’bout you hook my ass up with some of that?  Enough of this yammering, I need narcotics, of the opiate variety would probably do the trick.

Drugs came eventually and six hours later I had been sliced, diced and mummified in bandages and cinched up in what I referred to as my geriatric lingerie.  I wish I had a picture of that thing.  O. M. G. people.  It was made of that hospital grade white spandex-y stuff.  It was a sort of body suit that went from my calves up to just underneath my boobs.  It had a zipper from each thigh up to the boob.  AND it was crotchless.  Dude, why didn’t I save it so I could take a picture.  I lived in that thing for weeks and if I had to take it off, I was in serious pain.  I grew to love and adore my geriatric lingerie.

I also had some new personal accessories in the form of four lovely drainage tubes that wound themselves beneath the skin of my abdomen and came out near my groin to drain into a bulb for each tube.  Those bulbs were then pinned to the front of me so they could continuously fill with a variety of juicy bodily gunk.  It was real cute.  And you can be sure that I gave any kind of a shit about how cute I was with all the drugs I was on.

Most of the time for this particular surgery, you have to stay the night, but my doctor let me choose if I wanted to go home since I was young and healthy.  So home I went with my trusty catheter and bag of pee.  In order to go home though, I had to get dressed.  That just felt like an insurmountable obstacle.  The nursed helped me and I kept chanting to myself “Just do this and you get to go home.  Just do this and you get to go home.”  Getting into the car completely sucked.  Riding in the car completely sucked.  Getting out of the car completely sucked.

I walked at a 90 degree angle and that first night I had to have a person on either side of me to go anywhere.  The degree to which it sucked is simply beyond my ability to describe in words.  I might cry if I have to think too long about what it would have been like if I hadn’t been so heavily medicated – in fact, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit at the thought.

But, even with that, every day got noticeably better.  My first shower was so exciting and completely exhausting.  I still had those super cute tubes, but when you’re naked, there’s not a whole lot to pin them to.  So we crafted a little necklace for me to hook them to.  How rad is that?  A necklace of bodily fluids – me and Angelina, we’re like “this”.

I lived in a recliner for two weeks.  Every day I tried to do a little more, stand a little straighter, walk a little more, take a few less drugs (that was not my favorite part of the to-do list).  Things progressed well and I was confident that everything was going well.

At about week four, I started feeling really depressed.  Until that point, every day was a little better than the last.  But at week four, that kind of noticeable difference wasn’t happening anymore.  My mind was clear because I wasn’t on drugs, my body was feeling better, but definitely not 100%.  I wanted to be able to move around, get out more, do things, but I couldn’t.  It was really frustrating.  I would get tired easily and I still couldn’t stand up straight.  Apparently this is a very common phenomenon amongst patients of this type of surgery, but I didn’t read about that until after it was all over.  So now you know in case this is something you end up doing.

At week 5, I could stand up straight, YAY ME!  I decided to venture out to meet a friend for lunch.  The first thing she said when she saw me was “Aren’t you cute still all hunched over.”  Well, so much for standing up straight.  I was a little tempted to spit in her soda when she was in the bathroom.  But I didn’t….probably.

After that, things got a lot better.  My abs still felt like they were on fire if I ever did anything remotely strenuous.  My greatest fear in life was that I would sneeze.  The abdominal pain associated with a sneeze is indescribable.  But I got back to the gym for really light stuff and I went to Vegas at around week 7.

The swelling can last for quite some time.  Mine seemed to be all the way gone by around six months post surgery.  The scar, however, is not gone.  It is substantial.  Posting a picture of it is just a little too much sharing even for me considering how low it is.  But if you ever catch me in person, it really wouldn’t take much convincing for me to drop trou and show you.  The back scar is actually pretty light now, but the front one is still dark.  It really does look like I was cut in half and sewn back together.

Even after all that, and then some that I have cut out due to the ridiculous length of this post, it was the best thing I have ever done.  I am thrilled with my results.  I can’t imagine walking around with all of that skin hanging off of me for the rest of my life.  I feel like my hard work is finally visible.

So here is the before and an early after.  Sunglasses my be appropriate for viewing this virgin belly skin.  Never has it seen the sun.

And a more recent after taken in November.  This one a little easier on the eyes since I still had a little of my fading tan.  There are still stretch marks and my belly button scar….I will never have a 20 year old belly again.  But it’s all good as far as I’m concerned.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I used to be fat.  I was going to post it as a Facebook status update, but that tiny box just wouldn’t do this story justice.  So, blog post it is.

I went today to get a mani/pedi with my daughter and my mom (awwww, aren’t we cute).  I was thrilled when Tony The Mani/Pedi Dude came out from behind the curtain for me.  He’s awesome.  He does the best job and my manicure lasts forever.

My feet get done without incident – well, that’s a lie.  There is total incident, buckets of incident because I am thoroughly out of control when he starts working on the bottom of my feet.  I am so ticklish that I giggle out loud while I’ve got white knuckles on the arm rests which still doesn’t prevent me from squirming out of my seat.  No, I’m not at all humiliated that I’m a 33 year old woman who can’t manage to sit still for a service she’s paying someone to do to her.

Anyway, aside from that, feet are done; pretty with a sassy blood-red polish.  RAWR.

He starts working on my hands and peeks under his shirt sleeve to look at his shoulder.   He said “It hurts.”  I asked if he had a new tattoo.  To which he says, “No, my girl is leaving me so I burned her name off.”  Um, huh?  “I heated a knife to get her name off.”  Now, there is a language barrier so I’m not sure I’m understanding this properly.  So he lifts up his sleeve and shows me that, yes, I am understanding perfectly.

The girl’s name (which I didn’t even read because I was so shocked) is covered in an oozing burn.  He explains that he heated a knife and stuck the flat side of it against his skin because he thought this would take the tattoo off.  A scalding hot knife mashed AGAINST HIS VERY OWN SKIN.  He didn’t have it covered with anything and blood was soaking through to the sleeves of his white polo shirt.

He starts telling me that tattoos don’t hurt him “I don’t even feel it, doesn’t hurt me.”  I said, “I bet that hot knife hurt.”  To which he replies, “I cry.”  That’s it, “I cry.”  Then he tells me that his sister watched him do it and she cried.  Who the hell are these people?

I tell him he needs to put a band-aid on it.  And do you know what he tells me?  A band-aid WILL HURT.  Really??  The band-aid is the issuer of pain in this scenario?  When you thought about scalding hot steel against your skin, you thought, Super!  It’s a party!  But putting a band-aid over your now oozing, just-waiting-to-be-infected-with-some-green-pus-creating-bacteria is putting the wince on your face?

I tried to explain that if he got some neosporin, it would keep the band-aid from sticking to it.  I think that in his terror over that Bringer of Agony, the band-aid, he just couldn’t listen.  I started telling him it could get infected and he’d be sad when he has to get his arm chopped off that he didn’t listen to me.  I did see a flicker of panic when I said that, but the fear of the band-aid took over and he shut it down.

He finished up my manicure and sent me on my way.

Even if he has to get his arm amputated, my conscience is clear.  I did my best.

Yesterday during my workout I mentioned to Greg The Trainer that the night before I had been musing about the fact that, at one point in my life, I weighed 110 pounds heavier than I do right now.  ONE HUNDRED AND TEN POUNDS.  On this body.  Almost 50% of what  I weigh now.

I said that it made me think about those challenges they have on The Biggest Loser where the contestants have to wear a vest filled with weights to equal what they’d lost.  I couldn’t imagine having to carry around an additional 110 pounds.  It would crush me.  I don’t think I’d be able to move.

A frightening smile spread across Greg The Trainer’s face.  Damn me and my big mouth.  He started eying the weight rack.  I had visions of him trying to figure out a way to strap me up with every dumbbell in the joint – I absolutely wouldn’t put it past him.  Instead he came at me with two 30 pound weights.  Only 60 pounds.  Just over half of those 110 pounds.

I took one in each hand.  First he had me just walk around.  And I use the term “walk” loosely.  I sort of staggered in a drunken circle.  Then he had me step up and down on a small platform.  Not very high at all, but you’d think he’d asked me to run the Rocky steps.  I could hardly keep the weights in my hands.  Then he told me the exercise wasn’t just a fun little demonstration, it is good for shaping up my butt.  Wouldn’t you know, I was able to get up and down just a few more times.  I actually couldn’t hold the weights through more than a couple sets and had to switch to 20 pounds each – damn, I’m such a wuss!

It’s funny that stuff like this is still hitting me.  But, HOLY SHIT.  My body, at one point (and yes I was pregnant too) my body had to haul around ONE HUNDRED AND TEN more pounds than it does now.  I never really thought of the weight as actual, well, weight with, like, heavy poundage.  I don’t know how to explain it.  It was more like an abstract weight and it coming off changed how my clothes looked and how I looked, but the reality of what it takes to pick up 110 pounds – or what it doesn’t take in my case because there’s no way I could actually pick that up.

Well, that’s just a whole lot of heavy stuff.  I’m glad it’s off me.  I hope it doesn’t ever find it’s way back to me.