A Sturdily Built Woman and a Murder of Crows

I have a murder of crows in my backyard.  Better than a congress of apes, I guess, although we have learned where that leads. But nearly as noisy. (And don't you just love collective nouns?  See the book of the same name, i.e. A Murder... )Five or six of the big guys (the crows, not apes) convene on my birdbath and a bowl-style feeder every morning to plan the day.  Another five or six squirrels gather below in a circle for their breakfast club. It is too early in the year for my groundhog to appear, presumably still napping for another few weeks.

But, undeniably, the new year is fully underway, and resolutions, if you made them, may already have begun to slip. I am still slogging along with last year's, actually made on my personal new year, my birthday a couple of weeks before Julian's (Don't remember the Julian calender?Oh, sure you do.)   Lose 100 pounds.  And I have come 70 pounds of the way before bogging down in points and pounds that refused to move on along. My trainer, who always says "you have to switch it up" once the body gets too comfortable with a particular routine, pointed me to a nutritionist, and yes, boys and girls, it is a whole new world.

 Now, I am not counting Weight Watcher points, which can lead you down stale nutritional paths.  Now, it is old fashioned calories, carbs and protein grams, and it seems to be working. More work, more specific, but, as Mark the Nutritionist says, think of it this way: "When you are in your twenties, you can use any gas at the pump and not show the effects unless you use way too much and it spills all over the parking lot and your cell phone sparks and it catches fire and burns the whole place down in a big explosion that you can see three counties away. " Actually, he didn't say all of that.  He stopped at "any gas" and I filled in the rest.  But, continuing more faithfully with what Mark said, "but when you are more mature ( I interject: pretty damn old) you are more like a Ferrari that needs high test gas to run properly."

Mark did of those biometric tests where your (by that I mean I) stand on a scale and then a print out rolls out,  telling you everything from your metabolism rate, bone density, fat ratio and so forth.

I won't bore you with the details, although the result was interesting to me, say the least.  Just showed me how many misconceptions you can have about your own body. For one thing, I probably need to lose only 20 pounds more, because I have pretty good muscles  (thank you, Trainer and heredity) which make up part of what those weight charts (thank you Army and Insurance stats.) classify as fat weight. And speaking of fat, the "fat of death," visceral fat that lurks around the organs waiting to kill you - well, mine is pretty scarce. So that gut I am working off at the gym?  Blubber, sitting on top of what must be killer abs just waiting to spring forth and show themselves.

Unfortunately, blubber means three 400 calorie meals a day or a 1200 a day limit, if I want it to go anywhere reasonably soon. And I won't even get into when to eat carbs and what kind, let alone the protein story.  Let's just say I have learned a lot in the last couple of weeks.

The most interesting piece of self-misinformation to me: In my childhood, let's say elementary school years, I was a fairly skinny kid. Photos of me in a tutu and ballet slippers, and knobby knees and boney arms, confirm this. "Fine boned," my mother called it, and fine boned is what I believed. That is, until my print-out gave me a body type classification : sturdily built.  "Sturdily built?" Why didn't it say "good peasant stock?" Need someone to pull a plow? You got 'er!  In three words, I love it. I think it is hilarious that all these years, so many after those pitiful black and white eight by tens, I saw myself as a loving mother saw me, and not with the eyes of reality.

The power of a parent, I guess.