Put Some Cheese on That Shhhh… Why Weight Loss is Super Hard and Not Fun

Did you hear about the woman who one day decided that she wanted to lose weight? Do you remember how they said she was able to immediately stop eating fast food, worked out everyday, religiously completed her nightly crunch/squat routine, drank nothing but water, kept only unsalted nuts and berries in her desk drawer as snacks, and lost 50 pounds all by the time she was scheduled to fit into her maid of honor dress 6 months later? Yeah, me neither.

That’s because she’s not real. No one has succeeded in losing the weight they wanted and getting healthy on their first try. If your best friend from high school told you that she was able to do it, that she easily gave up french fries and Fritos by sheer willpower alone and by golly, “You can too!”, she is trying to make you feel bad about yourself, and those extra twenty pounds you need to lose. She probably just ate a cheeseburger in her car and will never let you find out.

You’ve seen me try to lose weight myself a few times. I put my business out there in the “My 183 is not your 183” series, and look- I’m still there. I was crazy enough to try the Insanity workout, and I still can’t touch my toes. I have attempted the “I’ma-start-on-Monday-workout-so-therefore-I-can-now-eat-cheese-fries” diet about 10,352 times, and that hasn’t panned out either. I’m here to confess to you a huge “secret”: losing weight is hard, no matter who you are. It’s even harder when you  are 45% high fructose corn syrup. Mere human beings are no match for 24-hour fast food establishments (why isn’t Publix open at 5 in the morning???), 99-cent menus, cheesy carbohydrates, and college meal plans. Despite a world of evidence in front of you that eating crap will make you feel like, well, crap, it is quite difficult to pry yourself away from all the baked goods of the world and realize that you really should eat more fruits and vegetables. So the next time you feel annoyed when one of your friends post  on the Facebook that they’re working out, or checking-in to 24-Hour Fitness, give ’em a break- they are trying to get it together.

So for my next trick, I’m going to go try public shame. Everything else hasn’t worked, so why not show everybody how much I weigh and humiliate myself into finally getting it together? So yes, the picture at the top is me on the scale. I took the picture early in the morning, after I went to the bathroom, hoping I could eliminate at LEAST 3 pounds of water. Unfortunately, that plan failed. Initially, I was afraid for everyone to see the numbers on the scale (1-8-3.5!), but then looking at the photograph, I realized that I was more frightened of theHulk-size shadow that was lingering on the wall in front of me. If you thought that was horrific, I barely noticed the slight protrusion of what can only be my belly creeping into the lower, right-hand corner of this atrocious self-portrait. Needless to say, I’ve been crying for the last fifteen minutes.

Yes, I am 183.5 pounds. I could say that I’m not ashamed, that I love myself just the way I am, and so should society. But that’s a bunch of nonsense. No five-foot woman should be 183 pounds, and I refuse to accept some sort of “big and beautiful” status and try to make it look cute. I’m bigger than your skinny boyfriend and your huge dog. I try running up the stairs and I want to pass out. I’m starting to wear stretch pants ALL THE TIME. Someone actually touched my belly the other day and said “Expecting?”, and I wanted to smack the crap out of them. It is for this very reason that something has got to change.

So I will be chronicling my journey with a weekly scale photo until I reach my goal. In a perfect world, I would like to get back down to my 7th grade size, but I’ll settle for the much more realistic time when I was kinda secret-hot in high school (it was a secret from everyone). I promise not to lie to you guys, and will post the photographic evidence on a weekly basis, until I’m at my happy place, even though I really don’t know where that is. I guess a place where I no longer plug my nose to eat veggies and get excited about devouring a fruit plate is ideal.

So you need to be nice me and patient during my struggle. Actually, scratch that. Don’t be nice to me. Feel free to yell at me. Smack fries out of my hand. Tell me to stop being lazy. Ask if I went to the gym yet. Make me go fill up my water bottle. I even encourage you to follow me to my car when I claim to be going out to lunch. Don’t sell me chocolate at work or ask me if I want to buy Girl Scout cookies. Because I will. And I will eat them all. Especially if you are hustling Thin Mints. I’ve been known to eat a whole sleeve of them. See where I’m going with this?  I clearly have some serious issues…

And maybe my weight loss will actually be enjoyable, and dare I say FUN at some point. But not right now. As long as broccoli still taste like it does and I can easily put cheese on everything, I will still cling to the fact that weight loss is not all rainbows and unicorns once you get in the zone. Eff the zone.

-KEEP IT A HOT MESS