Why Losing Weight Is Not Like George Clooney

I decided to divide this blog into two parts because as I wrote it in my mind, it grew longer and longer until even I didn't want to read that much of my writing at one sitting

This has been a busy week (I count weeks from weigh in to weigh in, or Wednesday to Wednesday.)  I was fearing the worst, since I had that Margarita and strawberry shortcake on my son's birthday, and I am still expecting the other calories to drop when I get on the scale in the mornings. There was enough sugar in those strawberries and that shortcake to give a moose a diabetic coma, and I did attempt portion control, but you know how that is. And the Margarita was small, but the guacamole and chips that went with it weren't really all that small, even though they were heavenly, so I expected to pay.

If I am going to pay, it's down the road, I guess, because I have lost two more pounds and those two pounds crossed me over the great divide between just barely having lost half my intended weight and being on the path to having it all behind me, so to speak.  Of course it will never be over. This much weight, and at my age, writes my story for me.  Every day and every day....

A friend of my approximate age lamented her failure to lose as much as she had hoped after she did everything Weight Watchers asked of her.  In fact, a couple of times she gained. That's the hard sad truth of losing when you are dealing with something as complicated as the human body, complicated still further by age. Weight loss is not a descending line on a graph, although that's what the W.W. graph indicates.  It is more like the spiral used to explain learning.

 And it is learned. The body is learning how to use fewer calories, how to process exercise, how, in fact, to think differently. Would you be upset with yourself if you took up a new language, had to master grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and then couldn't immediately write  the story you want to tell?  I want to tell her she is writing her new story, in a new language, and it demands all of her skills,  so she can be proud even if she hasn't lost as quickly and easily as when she was twenty-five.  Who among us can do anything as quickly and easily as we did at twenty-five? And if we thought about it, we probably wouldn't want to, either.  Well, maybe we would, but that would make for a boring life.

We'd have to hang around with George Clooney and the other Peter Pans of the world, which would definitely be fun at first, but, as a legion of lovelies can attest, even that gets old, just like George.